Bhargav Saikia to direct multi-lingual horror-fantasy feature film 'Bokshi'
(Sourced from PTI)
Filmmaker Bhargav Saikia on Friday announced that he will direct a multi-lingual horror-fantasy feature film titled Bokshi. Saikia, who had won accolades for his short film The Black Cat, based on a Ruskin Bond short story, told PTI that he will begin shooting the film this month in the picturesque locations across Darjeeling and Sikkim.
Saikia said the film has an intriguing tagline "A witch is born twice" which hints that the story revolves around witchcraft and the supernatural. "Bokshi is an eco-feminist coming-of-age drama set in the mystical wilderness of Northeast India. It's an unsettling take on the folk horror genre," he added. The film has been produced by Saikia's Lorien Motion Pictures and written by Harsh Vaibhav.
The film will have Mansi Multani and Prasanna Bisht in lead roles. Multani, whose previous credits include Pari, Kadakh, and the Netflix/BBC series A Suitable Boy, said, "Bokshi, through its palette of fantastical realism, represents this unknown for me as an actor and as a woman of this century." For Bisht, the film will mark her first leading role in a feature film.
"As I embark on this journey, I am deeply curious to feel my way through the discomfort and liberation that lies in the pulling apart of these structures of containment both within and without," Multani said. Bisht, on the other hand, will also be seen in the soon-to-be-released Voot Select web series Candy and Dedh Bigha Zameen, starring Pratik Gandhi.
Saikia's last work, the short film The Black Cat, starring Tom Alter and Shernaz Patel, received nominations at the 2018 Critics' Choice Short Film Awards presented by the Film Critics Guild of India. He made his foray into professional filmmaking by producing the critically acclaimed independent feature film Kaafiron Ki Namaaz. Saikia's directorial short film debut was Awakenings in 2015.
