Lockdown film that captures love, loneliness and little joys

In this film, we are attempting to explore two young minds, capturing their silences, loneliness and little joys that life threw at them during the pandemic. The idea was to make a film on how two people fall in love virtually during the lockdown. We shot the film in two different houses with only six people crew. I was fascinated with the idea of drawing parallels with Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden. In the film Bloom, two strangers are happily talking during the lockdown without any restrictions or boundaries. It might feel like freedom but when the characters realise that they don’t have boundaries, then they don’t have any shape or identity. The two characters face this problem at a point. Just like Adam and Eve, they also go into hiding because they became conscious of themselves. But they didn’t hide forever — they came out and tried to cope up with the pandemic and started optimistically seeing things. This is very similar to how the pandemic has panned out for most of us. Initially, we were trying to find new hobbies to stay active during the lockdown. Later, we started adapting to the new normal,” says Richard Anthony.

Starring Mitra Visvesh and Ashwin Raam, the film is produced by Room 101 Production under the banner of Madras Talkies. “Shooting during the pandemic had its challenges -- shooting largely with DIY equipment and improvisational methods, doing auditions and readings over zoom and so on. The music of Bloom is done by Hari Madras Rengarajan and cinematography is by Niketh Bommi,” he adds.