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'New wave' Bollywood director shoots ground-breaking movie in Lanka

COLOMBO, Monday (AFP) - India's 'new wave' director Amit Saxena, whose film Jism (Body) with its erotic undertones caught the imagination of audiences across South Asia this year, has relocated to Sri Lanka for an even more daring venture.

Following a trajectory away from the usual Bollywood formula of romance, song and dance, Saxena's Take Two examines the role of destiny in a person's life a theme barely tapped on a sub-continent where tens of millions really believe that the stars do foretell the future.

In the movie, ramp model turned fashion designer, Sheena played by Vidya Mallavde arrives in Colombo from India to give a fashion show which she hopes will land her an assignment. Despite working all night on her creations, she loses out on the job and as she walks dejectedly out of the building, her life splits in two.

In one life she realises her dream and in the other she reaches the same point her destiny but first has to tread a tortuous path to get there.

"Whatever is destined for you will come true, irrespective of the path you tread," Saxena told the Sunday Observer newspaper, explaining the rationale behind the movie. "Everybody in this subcontinent operates by that parameter. Even in our dreams and prayers we are thinking of another life to come. It is something unique to this region and I think that's what binds us together as one people." He said his inspiration for Take Two comes from Polish filmmaker Krzystztof Kieslowski and particularly the "what-if" formula of his 1981 thriller Blind Chance.

"People now understand that there is another genre of films other than the commercial classic romantic comedy genre which the Indian cinema has been dealing with at large," Saxena said. "We have reached saturation point with the big budget films. In conventional commercial films, the heroine always treads on well-demarcated lines of morality, will not question anything and always follows a man. "I have never lived with women like that and my mother worked all her life," the 32-year-old director said.

"I do not see venturing out as a lack of morality, but see that parameters set by other people have to be broken. They are being broken now in India."

Saxena said that in Jism, which probably falls into the 'film noir' genre, he tried to create a 'New World' Indian woman who is not afraid of her sensuality and sexuality.

The movie was one of Bollywood's big hits of 2003 and marked a new phase in the gradual breakaway by the Hindi-language film industry from its tried and tired formula.

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