Something about my new short film, "Zugzwang"


‘How can I expect her to love me when I don't love her?’ a character asks this in vertigo of night (removed from the film) and he slowly creeps into darkness.

My previous short film ‘Thirteen’ was inspired from a news paper report. I always feel guilty of doing that short, of not able to adapt it with the deserved emotion. That script should have made by somebody else. It is not my cup. Since then I wanted to do something I am comfortable with, something in the row of ‘Porul’ (which is as of now my favorite of my shorts).

After ‘Thirteen’, I wrote two full length script and many stories. I got the idea of ‘Zugzwang’ from one of those stories (‘Silent’). The script is all about a lonely man in a coffee shop. That’s how the script started. Then I followed him, came back and followed him again and I repeated this few times. I just wanted to go into the mind of a struggling worker who feels lonely in the world full of ‘happiness’. It is his false that he feels that way but I don’t want to give a lecture via this script how he should treat his own life but rather travelled along with his disturbed mind for some minutes. Sometimes, I write things I am afraid of. Why ‘NoName’ is sitting in the coffee shop alone? Why ‘NoName’ is watching the girl closely? Because, he finds his life unsatisfactory.

Usually, I get an idea for the climax and then moves back to the first scene or at the max, I start with a twist point and develops before and after scenes. I tried but never completed anything other than this. But ‘Zugzwang’ started with the character ‘NoName’. Was there a name for any of the main characters in my shorts! Oh sorry, No. If you ask me why, I don’t have an answer. It is just like that. Anyway, the ‘NoName’ gave me enough room for writing this short, he took me to different points of his mind, and I selected three points from the matrix.





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