Devi Aur Hero

 

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ABOUT THE FILM

Devi Aur Hero is Aditya Kripalani’s third feature film as Writer, Director & Producer which was completed in June 2019.

The film has Vinay Sharma (CRD, Tottaa Pataaka Item Maal (The Incessant Fear of Rape), Kabir Singh, Color Black) and Chitrangada Chakraborty (Tikli and Laxmi Bomb, Tottaa Pataaka Item Maal, Ahare Mon) in lead roles. 

The film has been making round in many national and international film festivals. In November 2019, the film has it’s world premiere at the 25th Kolkata International Film festival and won the award for Best Film in the NETPAC Category.  

SYNOPSIS

Kaali Ghosh, a young woman from rural Bengal has been made a sex slave in the bachelor’s pad of an industrialist’s son, in suburban Mumbai. Her abuse has led to blackouts everyday, where her mind goes blank and she lands up waking up in strange situations without any memory of how she got there.

A therapist, Vikrant Saraswat, seeks help himself for sex addiction. He is advised to get back to his practice and be watchful of his addiction, and to be aware of neither, thinking, not deciding, nor doing anything where his mind feels it’s slipping.

Kaali miraculously escapes her captor, and once she’s found her place in Mumbai, the first thing she does is to seek help for the blackouts. And where does she land up, but at the clinic of our sex addict therapist.
Are they both able to forge a relationship that frees them of their inner demons? Or do they both fail to find freedom?
Is she able to begin to understand that she has Dissociative Identity Disorder and must befriend and find peace with her various selves?
Is he able to be the therapist, the professional, the man he so wants to be, and help her, before succumbing to his own carnal side?
This story of an unlikely friendship that develops between two tormented souls amidst the chaos of Mumbai is what The Goddess and the Hero is about.

The chaos of Mumbai, the noise, the suffocation of its visual landscape and it’s sounds, forms the backdrop for their journeys into their own mental labyrinth.

Aditya Kripalani on the film

In India, a country wrought with stereotypes based on chauvinism, imbalances, biases and religious strife, how do we see or perceive a Devi (Goddess)? How, also, do we see or perceive a Hero?
Our past two films were a feminist response to Mumbai as a city, and a feminist response to Delhi as a city. Both films were acerbic to a different degree, based on what we felt the two cities needed as a response to the kind of chauvinism that exists there and is a reflection of the nature of the two cities. Which then brought me to the question, how does an Indian man, obsessed with seeing someone sexually, get over it? And as the writer and director of this film, I felt the need to try delving into a story that dealt with that inner journey. We also wanted to talk about the story of a sex slave and how years of abuse have created a complicated mind, that needs to find peace. How a man could actually help a woman’s journey of fighting abuse and deep rooted chauvinism, despite his own inner demon of seeing her sexually, was something that really piqued my creative interest as a storyteller.
We’ve chosen to imbue the film with contemporary sounds and a visual landscape that is both chaotic as well as organized like the mental landscapes of both the story’s protagonists.
We have chosen to also represent Mumbai, as a city, in a way that mirrors both the chaos and the peace sought, in both protagonists’ minds.