The scruffy comedy, “A Hand,” observes the uncomfortable interaction between two co-workers leaving the office. We asked director Prashanth Kamalakanthan how the project started, about creating complicated characters, and changing tones from his previous short, “Houseplants”…

1) Can you talk briefly about your background, and how you first got interested in filmmaking?

I wasn’t thinking about filmmaking at all until college, and even then sort of fell into it by chance (but of course nothing happens by chance!). At that point I was into music, writing, and a lot of political organizing, but remember being in a crisis over getting these things to “work.” I randomly took a Doc 101 class taught by Gary Hawkins at Duke and for the first assignment filmed my grandmother cooking. I showed it to her and she cried, man. This is a small-town South Indian lady who was in an arranged marriage by 19, never completed high school, and doesn’t speak English, so had never really understood anything I’d made prior. But I made a film somehow that reached her. It’s like I broke through a wall and fell into some vast wilderness where I’m still lost today, help.

2) How did this project start - what was the earliest element that came to you, and how did you go about building from that?

This one began as the end of semester project in Alex Ross Perry’s workshop at the Tisch MFA Directing program. The prompt was basically to spend a day + little to no money shooting a simple short—geared toward building this really fast/low-budget process for ourselves in our last year of film school, which was very helpful for me at the time.

I was searching for story ideas and remembered this incident that had happened after work one day, which I’d learned about it in this odd way. If you watch the short, I play my real-life role in a cameo: turned down for a ride, only to learn how bad it went the next day.

But once I had my hands around what felt like this tiny story, I became fascinated by how complicated the feelings were, how muddy all the intentions and decisions. I was holding this big mud pie, which felt exciting given all these super clean shorts I’d seen recently. I had just been to a couple festivals and felt deluged by all these super slick yet melodramatic, cloyingly activist, social realist shorts shot like commercials. I felt this need to direct something in this social realist world, but showing how reality is not simple, how it constantly scrambles your script however much you’d like to simplify it for whatever political purpose. This strange, real-life story is obviously incredibly politically relevant given the current moment, but when you really look at the characters, at each human spirit there, it gets muddy. Like, we have to get into this mud and understand where we are in it if we have any hope of leading meaningful lives, let alone change the world.

3) This is a much different film than your previous short, “Houseplants.” Was there a deliberate attempt to change the tone from the start, or did it just arise naturally from your actors, story, etc? Also, it’s right on the edge of funny and creepy - can you talk about finding that balance, and whether you were concerned that people might perceive you were making light of some objectionable male behavior?

Tone for me is something a film kind of “sweats out" — through the design, the frames, the actors very literally — not something I've ever found helpful just to approach directly. For me it’s stronger the more curious and honest I can be about every single moment. But I knew pretty quickly that meant something very different with “A Hand” from what we did on “Houseplants.” With “Houseplants” it was such a longitudinal idea — trying to compress this prolonged, sometimes lifelong experience of a relationship into ten minutes — so I went back to Indian myth, the Puranas, and how they compress time and use these kinds of synoptic “symbols” if you can call them that. Here it’s a small story that gets big, not the other way around — so I began just trying to stick as close as possible to Ariel’s character’s experience of the events. Just pulling that tiny thread in the way that felt truest to her character’s experience moment to moment. Because it's her experience (as a stand-in for my friend's) that begins so relatably and obviously — like a bone-dry office comedy, which is how we set up the opening — and yet it’s so warped and distorted by the end, your confusion throws you back into the situation and the characters' decisions. What went wrong, when? That’s an important question.

Which also comes to Onur's character, who again I tried as faithfully as possible to pattern after reality. For me casting the eminently likable Onur as this guy — who really is funny and likable a lot of the time — was really important. The idea is to put the audience, especially men, in a similarly muddy position to me when I first heard the story the day after. Specifically because this guy was so likable and funny, I began to interrogate myself and my own self-perception of likability in connection to toxic masculinity — which never would have happened without the self-identification bit. And that requires a complicated understanding. Extreme examples are both easy to portray as a filmmaker and to condemn as an audience member, but neither accomplishes much if the goal is to improve the conditions of life outside the film. I think it’s a misuse of cinema to judge, condemn, or even incite action — at its best cinema relieves us of these needs and dissolves us into a shared reality, at least for a few minutes. Just a glimpse of that can be huge.

4) What’s a film you’ve seen recently, new or old, that you really loved and why?

Funeral Parade of Roses! Recently rewatched this with the cinematographer on my feature, Lasse Tolboll, and was again blown away all over again. So simple, so totemic—yet totally iconoclastic and spontaneous and fun. The excitement of discovery, you don’t feel that too often in movies these days.

5) So you're about to go into production on a feature, correct? That's exciting. What can you tell us about that?

We just wrapped last week! It’s my first feature, a road movie, title TBD, about two women on the run from the law, starring the amazing Lucy Kaminsky (The Plagiarists) alongside my mom, a nonactor in her first film role. It’s a kind of surreal comedy that only gets wackier out from this setup—we also managed to rope in my dad, my grandma (mentioned above), and a bunch of incredible local talent, including 17 Bollywood dancers in an all-out original song/dance number halfway through the film. We shot it in 14 crazy, hot days down in North Carolina, with a small but amazingly talented crew of mostly Tisch and Duke grads. Hoping to have it locked by the end of the year and headed to festivals in 2020! You can learn more on our crowdfunding page—we’re currently raising for post: http://tinyurl.com/pkthesisfilm.

Contact Info:

Director website: http://prshnth.com

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/prashanthkam

Instagram: @p.p.k_

5 Questions with Prashanth Kamalakanthan