Siddharth Chauhan

The Filmmaker
Siddharth Chauhan started young. He made his first short film when he was 18, and has not stopped rolling the camera since. He never went to film school and learned everything on ground through experimenting in trying to learn the intricacies of the process.
‘This medium and the way it creates images takes people on some beautiful journeys—and that was magical for me. I knew it deep in my heart that I wanted to be this magician at any cost! It was very important for my existence,’ Siddharth tells me. His first short was called Boys Don’t Wear Nailpolish!, then he made a docu-fiction called An Infinite Space, and then Papa, which received rave reviews at festivals. Another short film by him, called Pashi, had its international premiere at the Oscar-qualifying Rhode Island Film Festival recently and is still travelling. His first feature, now in making, is called Karma.

The Film
‘Karma is about five ordinary people who are living their lives trapped in their miseries, like many of us. Their lives unfold and eventually come together in the most unexpected circumstances.’

The Inspiration
‘The pressure of knowing that someone will be reading this article is so strong that I feel like telling you about some great inspiration or story behind it. However there is none! For me, writing and filmmaking are just ways to vent. There is so much going on inside and it has to come out in some form. For me the form is cinema, that’s all! I imagine, I cook up, I manipulate facts I just do any damn thing to entertain myself first. And I end up entertaining a lot of audiences as well. The inspirations are not as noble as one expects them to be and therefore I better not speak about them!’

Text Hansika Lohani Mehtani