ZENI & NADIR

Here is a text written for a VR project in development, produced by Pyaré Studio, supported by CNC – Development Fund.

“My film is not a denunciation and it is not a sermon. It is a story told through images and I want there to be seen in it not the birth of a wrongful feeling, but the way in which we can be wrong about our feelings. (…) The conclusion reached by my characters is not moral anarchy. At best, they attain a sort of reciprocal pity.” Michelangelo Antonioni, extracted from his presentation of L’Avventura at the Cannes Film Festival in 1960.

Desire is at the heart of my story, but it is revealed to the viewer by the prism of events lived by the characters : via the city itself, its walls, its streets or by the moralistic view of the society. The characters are in obedience to an invisible organization, this city-maze that closes in on them. The dimension of ZENi & NADiR embodies a shift from psychology to topography. How to transcend the maze between individual desire and collective imperative ? In short, what to do when one wants but can not ? Kissing in public are acts that are judged to be immoral by the modern Indian moral code. 

Their desire is therefore transformed into a quest strewn with obstacles, a labyrinth from which to escape, in the manner of the Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie by Luis Buñuel, where six friends desperately try to dine together, without ever finding the right time or place. The characters in ZENi & NADiR are going to have to adjust, adapt, get around, escape from, plot, dodge and thread their way through their relations with the outside world, like water trying to find a way to trickle through a dam built of sand and rock. Therefore, the visual leitmotif of the project is the maze but evokes more subtly, the popular board game of Snakes and Ladders. Zeni and Nadir move in Bombay as pawns on a board, rolling the dice on their journey, trying to reach the shortcuts or ladders and avoiding traps and snakes, contrasting determinism and desire.

I express via a cinematic form, transcendence through sound, which gives a different perspective for the viewer. Indeed, the numerous songs and moanings spread by the speakers are an aesthetic enjoyment without narrative justification. The ending is a creative excess beyond the visual and moral frame of society in the manner of a transgression, literally orgasmic. So I take a political position by giving a poetic form. Using the same logic that makes the characters “become” the voice of the loudspeaker by sublimating the moral messages into the sounds of orgasm, I invite the spectators to “become” the 360° camera ; in other words, to appropriate the tools of the technological erosion of the imaginary. They use the controls to develop an intimate relationship with the characters at the heart of their private sphere. Through this experience, the 360° imagery techniques enter into the spectator’s emotional realm by the fact of assimilating a human story.

In conclusion, ZENI & NADIR is both an ode to love, that is to say a right to love freely and the playful game of life and desire, without winners or losers. It immerses viewers into the intimate sphere of the characters to make them escape the urban patriarchal maze. By that they reclaim a private life and imagination of elsewhere. The technical tool for Virtual Reality is used to immerse the viewer in intimacy.