TITLI: When Normal is Dysfunctional in Delhi's badlands

I am sure fans of director Dibakar Banerjee (Khosla Ka Ghosla, Oye Lucky! Lucky Oye!, Shanghai) would hate to miss this flick.

This time, however, Dibakar has donned the producer's mantle (along Yash Raj Films), helping his team member Kanu Behl transform a script into a film that has won rave reviews at Cannes 2014 and other international festivals.

Story synopsis: In the badlands of Delhi's hellish underbelly. Titli, the youngest member of a violent car-jacking brotherhood, plots a desperate bid to escape the 'family' business.

Here is the trailer: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=OOqiQiMkXDA&feature=youtu.be

Dibakar and his team members had some interesting insights on the film.

In one interview, Dibakar says: "To be honest I didn’t quite pick Titli. It was Kanu who picked me as the producer. Titli, as a script from the NFDC Film Script Lab, was one of the most sought after Indie scripts of 2013. At various points, many producers, including YRF (before my association with them), wanted to produce it. I was at first involved only creatively because I was fascinated by the script and the characters. What grabbed me was the fact that it said many profound things in layers, without the characters and the milieu sounding pretentious or arty. It’s one of the simplest films I have seen in terms of its vocabulary: Simple and strong yet truly deep."

In the same interview, Director Behl points out that Dibakar played a big role in creating an enabling environment for the film to be made. "Dibakar is a director’s producer, because he himself is a director. I think that while being the co-producer of Titli, Dibakar was trying to give me the working conditions he himself would want as a director. Whether it was a crucial session on the script or while finishing the edit, his experience as a filmmaker helped cut out the fat. Other than that, the most important I would say, have been the conversations, unrelated to Titli, that we’ve had over the years. They have helped nurture my voice."

In another piece, Ranvir Shorey (who plays one of Titli's brothers in the film) says: “It is never easy to essay characters that are far removed from your everyday life but most of filmmaking is about this. I do not belong to that social class, and it is quite different to read about such things and watch them on TV. We had workshops to help us understand the psyche, and how to talk like them."

The film releases on October 30, 2015.