Destination: Home wedding

They say you need to go places to find success, but this group of Hyderabadi filmmakers are making their way to the top of the wedding and indie film world — after coming back to their hometown.

Faiz Rai, Umair Hasan, Hari Charan and Darshani Nene have been working on unique, documentary-styled wedding films for a little over a year-and-a-half now. And their work isn’t just appreciated by their clients. After their first film was selected to be screened at the Short Sweet Film Fest and Cincinnati Film Festivals, their 2015 film — Shimla — will now be screened at the Long Beach Indie International Film Festival in Hollywood, LA.

While the company was formed only a few years ago, the team has been working together for years now. Self-taught, Faiz and Umair first began making short, ad and corporate films after they graduated from college, and followed their dream all the way to Mumbai, with a script in hand.

“But we realised that there’s only the established route of working up the ladder in the industry there,” says Faiz, adding, “So we decided that we wanted to figure out our own way, stay in Hyderabad and make it here. Our first office was a teeny-tiny space — maachis ki dabbi is what I used to call it.” Giving in to temptation when the wedding-film boom began a couple of years ago, shooting for a friend’s sister’s wedding helped them realise they wanted to pursue this as well. Faiz says, “The first thing I appreciated was the fact that weddings are where emotions are as real as it gets. It’s absolute chaos, but within that chaos there are these fleeting moments between people... that got me hooked on to it.”

About their format of documenting the stories of couples rather than just focussing on the ceremonies, Umair says, “We try to be as friendly with the couple as possible, because only then can we access those private spaces and be able to capture those intimate moments. That’s the biggest hurdle we face.”

But Darshani says that their comfort is what makes them a strong team: “We all just share a good comfort level with each other. Even on shoots, all of us have to be really alert... but our wavelengths just really match, so that’s a big plus for us.”