Melody of Hope

“It is a simple story that was born out of a lot of reworks and rejections really,” laughs Oza,as he settles down under the famed ‘Wisdom Tree’ at the FTII campus. “When I sat down to discussing the idea with the rest of the team,we were all clear about one thing – that it had to relate a simple story. Na Jeeva is a tale of a woman who is waiting to hear back from a lover who is in a faraway land. When the letter finally arrives,due to a cruel twist of fate,she is unable to read it.”

The five-minute video was inspired by a story that Oza had read when he was researching on the apartheid problems of South Africa. “I happened to read about an incident where Nelson Mandela,who was then in prison and was not allowed to receive any letters from his wife,would keep hopefully looking at the prison warden,only to be turned down,” he says. One fine day when Mandela did receive a letter from his wife,it was censored to such an extent that he couldn’t read anything expect the line ‘Your’s truly’,and he could survive on that one thin line of hope. “That,in a nutshell,is the premise of my video too. The girl manages to read just the one word ‘Tumhara’ at the end of the letter that is smudged,and is content with it.”

All the hard work for the short film seems to have finally paid off. “On two occasions the entire set was torn down by a heavy storm that had hit the city last year in the last week of May. In spite of a minimalist budget,we were able to take it to all the places that it is going to today because of the well-wishers who acted and even sang for it. Whoever says that hardwork and hope doesn’t pay,needs to take a look at the video,” Oza says with a chuckle.