An acclaimed actor with credits including “Fire,” “Kannathil Muthamittal” and “Kamli,” Das made her directorial debut with “Firaaq” , which debuted at Toronto. Her next film as director, “Manto” , bowed at Cannes.
“As I began to delve deeper into it, I was drawn to the human aspects of this mashup of high technology and the life of the workers, who are just a cog-in-the-wheel. With the rise of the gig economy, the struggle between man and machine that Chaplin depicted in ‘Modern Times’ has now shifted to one between man and algorithms,” Das told“During the pandemic, we consumers, for our own convenience, became more and more dependent on the gig workers and less and less aware of their struggle.
“What appealed to me besides the obvious lures of working again with Nandita and the script she envisioned, was the character of Pratima who is so full of innocent hope and excited to experience a new life legitimised by the difficult conditions of her reality, despite the fact that her work requires cleaning toilets in a mall,” Goswami told: “We wanted to show both lenses – so there’s one about these unseen people whom we don’t know about and about the life they lead and their gig economy, but...