Bishal Dutta is overjoyed to be at the Sitges festival with his first film, Live Inside, which is competing in the official section. “It is a real honor to come to Sitges. I feel overwhelmed because I have traveled to many festivals to present the film and doing it here is a dream. Everyone told me that I had to come to Sitges and when they sent me the invitation I said yes immediately “, comments the young American director of Indian origin to La Vanguardia.
Dutta, who was born in India but as a child settled with his family in Canada and then in the United States, has previously worked making short films, music videos, advertisements and has directed several chapters of the series Triads (2017), “all a background that “has allowed me to embark on the adventure of making my film debut” with the support of a great team and the distributor Neon, acknowledges this filmmaker who is already being dubbed the new Shyamalan.
In Live Inside, released in Spanish cinemas on January 19, 2014, we meet Sam, an Indian-American teenager who lives in an idyllic area with her parents. She speaks with her mother in English, but her mother reproaches her for not speaking Hindi and following the traditional customs of her country. However, Sam is more interested in fitting in at school by making new friends and behaving as if she were just another American. A childhood friend, Tamira, with whom she no longer speaks, appears like a lost soul in the school hallways holding a mysterious glass jar that ends up breaking and unleashes an ancient Indian demonic force.
Tamira disappears and other terrible events also occur that alter the community. So Sam, who keeps having horrible visions, must join forces with his family, using his own cultural heritage, to try to put an end to an invisible monster that feeds on negative energy. “The origin of the film was born from a ghost story that my grandfather told me about a creature that lived inside a jar and that ended up suggestive to him to the point of hearing noises at night. I soaked up all the mythology around those creatures and demons, and when I found the figure of Pishacha, a carnivorous demon, I realized that everyone, wherever they were, would be terrified of that thing and I wanted to develop the script together with Ashish Mehta, a friend and writer,” says the director, who began the writing process during the pandemic, “where he had all the time in the world.”
The story is a mix of those ghost stories he heard in his childhood with the typical conflicts of adolescence, “a stage in which we felt especially insecure, and above all the feeling that as an Indian-American I was trapped in the middle of two worlds and I wasn’t able to fully identify with any of them. That’s why he insists that the film is not autobiographical, but there are things that he shares with Sam and his desire was to show “all the complexities” that he has to deal with at such a vulnerable age.
The relationship with the mother is not easy, although they are forced to collaborate together to eradicate evil. “They both go on an internal journey of discovery. I didn’t want to judge any of them on their attitude and I didn’t want to make this film just for the Indian-American audience either. I think that today we all have different identities and I wanted to portray someone who is in conflict with who he is and in the end finds some peace.
For Dutta, the ideal genre to synthesize these conflicts in adolescence was horror. “I love horror and I always knew I wanted to make films of that genre. It is a universal language that allows you to explain your most personal stories in an honest way. And the emotional experiences of high school students work phenomenally in that context,” adds the director, who names as references from A Nightmare on Elm Street, Poltergeist or Christine. “I like the idea of ??something that lives inside and manifests itself in some way,” he declares.
And on an aesthetic level it has been based a lot on Hellraiser and Candyman, “two of my favorite movies.” Dutta assures that with a combination of so many titles that have inspired him, he wanted to make “my love letter to the genre with my first film.” And he concludes that he is already working on a new project that he hopes will be like a “roller coaster” for the public.