It looks like a wedding night. On the screen is a young woman standing at a doorway, speaking shyly to her giggling friends, whom you can't see.
They talk of all the love the new groom was going to shower on her that night. It is when the sound of the laughter dies and the husband enters that you realise the film is shot as a solo play. So the young woman changes roles to become the hurting husband, the suddenly-indifferent brother who shows the door to his crying sister and back to the wife who turns vengeful. Anjana Chandran switches between the characters with so much ease that you think this might be a girl who won for mono-acts in youth festivals. But this girl that director Lenin Rajendran brought for the anthology Crossroad is a Sydney sider of Indian origin, coming to act for passion.
“The passion started young. Both my parents are avid fans of Indian cinema, especially Malayalam, Tamil and Hindi films. So I grew up engrossed in that kind of culture. Eventually, it led on to testing the waters with dance, singing and drama. I’ve been learning Bharatanatyam for the past 17 years and am also learning Indian classical music,” says Anjana, from Australia, where she is a final semester Media student majoring in Communications and Journalism at the University of New South Wales.
She had earlier appeared in the role of a Kashmiri girl in Major Ravi's film Kurukshetra. “I was 14 upon completion of the film and had not done any other films till Lenin Sir’s Crossroad,” Anjana says. The audition for Crossroad had been in front of Lenin and cinematographer Madhu Ambat. The bride she was going to play had a Kozhikodean accent. But at the time of the audition, she had no accent training. “I remember how much I was struggling, but Madhu sir and Lenin sir did not discourage me one bit. They told me to keep going and that kind of faith motivated me throughout the filmmaking,” she says.
Lenin’s short film Pinpe Nadappaval in the anthology was done in about six days. “We had a lot of late nights that turned into early mornings that by the end of the day's shoot, 80 per cent of our system had black tea which we were drinking to stay awake. In the midst of these late night shoots, Madhu sir would come up and crack hilarious jokes and the whole set would be in tears from laughing so hard. It was a great morale boost during those 4 am shoots,” Anjana remembers.
She found every moment inspiring, the hard work of every crew member while shooting at the Chitranjali studio in Thiruvananthapuram, the capital city, where she too hails from. Anjana could speak Malayalam quite fluently, she says, but the Kozhikodean accent was still a challenge. “Not only did the assistant directors and Lenin sir help me, but Joy Mathew sir (who also plays the role of my theatre director in the film) was a great help when it came to teaching me how to master this dialect. Also, having to place myself in the shoes of a very young girl brought up in an orthodox Muslim family who was being married off, was very challenging for me because at some level, I had to identify with that character,” she says, before rushing back to her university assignments.
