We started the day by talking about themes and the story of a film. There are two kind of films:

• Commercial- These films are made with the sole purpose to earn money (The 300)
• Independent- These films have a theme and message. (Shrek, Khosla ka Ghosla)

We saw the movie “Harishchandracha Factory”. It’s a film about an Indian director who follows his passion. He had gotten a job for printing which had a good salary but he chose to follow what he liked and became a magician. One day he accidentally discovers a tent screening a silent movie and gets amazed by the idea of storytelling. This movie depicted his struggle in making the first Indian feature film in 1913, the birth of Indian Cinema.

After watching the movie we had a discussion about a few interesting topics to talk about. They are:

• On selling his cupboard, his neighbours as well as his wife were very disappointed and over reacted. They also gave him condolences for the loss of his cupboard which was quite amusing.
• It was quite difficult for him to find actors which matched the requirements for his film.
• The actresses would be even harder to hire as they would either not participate or charge a lot.
• The female characters were played by males, they had to behave like females during the entire day to get used to it.
• The amount of muslims were much more than hindus.
• The idea of storytelling was quite new to the society and they thought people who dressed for the skit were a part of a gang.