TLI Staff
New Delhi: After receiving critical acclaim across the globe and a national award for his debut directorial Ship of Theseus, writer, director and producer Anand Gandhi is working on his next Emergence.
The concept of Gandhi’s upcoming film is sure to take his fans by surprise as Emergence revolves around a deadly virus. Even more surprising is the fact that the script was titled 2020 and was written much before the Coronavirus emerged on the face of the planet, in 2015.
Anand is fascinated by microbes and neuroscience and has admitted to have been influeced by Richard Dawkins and Douglas Adams. Right from the time Anand has started making films, his stories mention some microbe, virus or the other.
In 2012, his National award winning film Ship Of Theseus questioned the idea of the alien microbes living in our body. His 2018 film Tumbbad was also set in the 1918 period when the Spanish Flu struck India. Now with the Coronavirus Outbreak leaving the world struggling, Anand’s film Emergence will be relatable at many levels.
The film’s story is about four scientists, as they race against time to fight a pandemic that’s threatening to destroy the world.
If you ask Anand, his quest has always been to find answer to the basic question–Who am I?
“It all started with me asking the ‘Who am I, where do I come from and what I am supposed to do?’ questions. It’s the stuff children ask, and philosophers don’t answer. I looked for answers in spirituality and history. Then, later, as the questions became more comprehensive, I started looking into evolutionary biology and cognitive sciences. All my previous movies have had hints of the question, what is human identity? We are not monolithic entities, we live in an ecosystem. Not just around us, but inside us. Inside us, there are trillions of bacteria that don’t share our genome. So, we are a colony of organisms. For example, the bacteria in our gut affects our mood—people who have bad gut health tend to suffer from stress and anxiety issues,” says Gandhi.
When this idea started to trigger conversations, he thought of making a movie on a virus that changes the way humans behave.
He further adds, “The more I dug, and the more I developed the story [of Emergence], the more I realised that this was an eventuality. When it did happen, my reaction was paranoia. But we have to live with it. Pandemics are like the stars in the night sky. They started their life a long time ago, but have begun to reveal themselves now,” he added. Anand is working on the script even now and he is adapting the story to the current circumstances.
Gandhi believes that although the virus is forcing us to change, many are not going to since human behaviour is hard-wired.
Talking about the story he also adds, “It functions as a story of caution, but also as one that celebrates resilience. But the quest is the same as before—to answer the question, what is human identity? The virus is pretty new that way, it’s a punctuation event in our lifetime—so big that people will die. We need to get the death rates down and get to a vaccine soon. We have to learn how to live with the virus, and know that this [large scale spread] could recur again.”
Professionally, Anand has been doing a lot more than making interesting and award-winning films, he has been an innovator systems researcher and co-creator of ElseVR, India’s first virtual reality (VR) platform. He is also the founder/CEO of the Mumbai-based new media studio and systems think tank Memesys Culture Lab.