Prantik Narayan Basu

This Foundation Project implemented by IFA under Explorations will critically examine the conflicting emotions of pleasure and guilt in the context of self-awakening as a homosexual and investigate the ethical representation of love and sexuality on screen. Prantik Narayan Basu is the Coordinator for this project.

Prantik is a film director and screenwriter based in Kolkata. His latest film Bela, a creative documentary supported by IFA and an Early Career Fellowship from SMCS-TISS, premiered at Visions du Réel and IFFR, Rotterdam in 2021. His experimental short film Sakhisona won a Tiger Award for Best Short Film at the International Film Festival Rotterdam (IFFR) in 2017. The film also won the Best Short Film Prize at the Mumbai International Film Festival. An alumnus of the Film and Television Institute of India (FTII), Pune and Berlinale Talents, Prantik's work engages with the politics of gender, and the fragile relation between nature and humans. Given his experience he is best placed to be the Coordinator of this Foundation Project of IFA.

This project attempts to explore the contrary emotions of pleasure and guilt as experienced in the context of growing up and understanding oneself as a homosexual, as well as its depiction on screen. In this self-reflexive work Prantik will explore his personal experience of an unwanted sexual advance that he received as an adolescent from a stranger in a public place. The exploration will also throw up important questions about sex education in the country, as reflected in the following words of Prantik, “While growing up as a gay man in India during the pre-internet times, I have often been preoccupied with the thoughts of what is ‘natural’ and what is not. There were little avenues for one to even understand what it meant to be gay, especially with no safe spaces to educate oneself, and our popular culture doing more harm than good at any such representations.”

While the project is a journey into the self and sexuality, it is also a point of departure for the Project Coordinator as a filmmaker. In his ongoing practice, the nonhuman has been in focus, making this emotionally explosive human subjectivity a demanding deviation. This will be especially challenging because it will involve filming the narrative with an underage protagonist. Thus the project will be aided by intimacy experts from The Intimacy Collective, India’s first network of intimacy professionals who coach, guide and conduct workshops on the subject of on-screen intimacy for films.

The outcome of the project will be the script for the short film. The Project Coordinator’s deliverables to IFA with the final report will be the short film script and the process documentation. 

This project suitably addresses the framework of IFA’s Arts Practice programme in the manner in which it attempts to examine the confusions of growing up as a homosexual in the country, and an unexplored aspect of filmmaking - the representation of love and sexuality on screen in a safe environment with professional help from intimacy experts.

IFA will ensure that the implementation of this project happens in a timely manner and funds expended are accounted for. IFA will also review the progress of the project at midterm and document it through an Implementation Memorandum. After the project is finished and all deliverables are submitted, IFA will put together a Final Evaluation to share with Trustees.

This project is made possible with support from Sony Pictures Entertainment Fund.