Shivajee Chandrabhushan’s Frozen goes to Toronto Film Festival

First-time filmmaker Shivajee Chandrabhushan’s 107-minute, black and white film, Frozen (Hindi/Ladakhi), is going to Toronto Film Festival 2007 in the Discovery Section, the festival’s only competition section, tailored for emerging filmmakers from around the world.

The film, which has in its cast Danny Denzongpa, Gauri, Shilpa Shukla, Angchuk, Anuradha Boral, and Yashpal Sharma, explores the displacement of people. The filmmaker, a 35-year-old Mumbai-based photographer born and brought up in Delhi, explains why he chose to make the film sans colour.

“We chose Ladakh as the backdrop and landscape is stark. We shot in winter when there is no green anywhere. We wanted that look since it goes with the film’s name, Frozen, which is symbolic of the mind of the people who are running under threat of being displaced with an army setting up camp at their place,” says the director who is a trekker. The movie has been filmed in Stakmo, which is an hour’s drive from Leh.

“Cameron Bailey, the programmer of the festival, saw the film a week ago and approached us,” informs Chandrabhushan, who also produced the almost Rs 4-crore film.

The film is the journey of a father and his son and daughter, seen through the daughter’s eyes. Danny plays the father. The director says it is Danny’s 150th film. And why did the veteran do it?

“He loved the script and when I showed him the pictures of the locales he was sold,” says the filmmaker. Frozen was shot last year in February, over 34 days at an average height of 15,000 ft above sea level, informs Chandrabhushan.

The film was processed at Deluxe Lab in Los Angeles, from where final prints will come. “The film was shot in colour and was digitally intermediated to black and white. It was finally printed on black and white stock so we got the tonality we needed,” says Chandrabhushan.

The filmmaker is depending on the festival route and hopes to invite distributors after some publicity is generated.