A 32-year-old filmmaker, Luke Sydney who hails from Mangaluru made a short abstract film about the city called The Sky and the Sea which went viral on social media recently. Luke was tired of Mangaluru always being mistaken for Bengaluru and the fact that Google only showed the negative aspects of the city. This is why he came up with this short film about his hometown.
“Another one of the random reasons I made this film was because I wanted people to come and taste the food in Mangaluru. A lot of people might be unaware of many Mangalurean dishes like Chicken ghee roast. Which is why I shot a large section of the video about the food,” Luke says.
For those who might think this video is a tourism video, you are totally wrong.”
Luke came up with the idea to create nostalgia for the people who have left Mangaluru and moved on to a bigger city for work just like him. He quotes George A Moore at the end of the video saying, ‘A man travels the world over in search of what he needs and returns home to find it.’ Many people from all across the country responded to the video commenting along the lines of, “Oh! I remember the time when I went and ate at that Bhelpuri shop.”
Luke says if he had to show Mangaluru to a friend, this is what he would show him – referring to his short film. “The simplicity of life, cleanliness of the beaches, the warmth of the people are what I picture every time I close my eyes and think of Mangaluru and that's what I included in the film,” he says. Luke started off his career almost 10-years back as an ad filmmaker and has now graduated to making short films. “Shooting commercials tend to drain you creatively. I want to do something that I expect and respect,” he says.
Apart from filmmaking, Luke is a travel enthusiast and a film-geek who can continuously watch numerous movies in various languages and genres. The one thing he completely misses about Mangaluru is the quietness of the city because he now lives in Mumbai where ‘the noise gets to you’ and to which Mangaluru is the remedy.
He owns a blue book where he basically writes all his ideas for the videos. Luke calls it a ‘vomit book’ because he would write 30 pages of the an idea that plays in his head and then condense it to a sentence. He signs off by stating, “For an amateur filmmaker or for the ones who just started, you should always have a backup plan while planning an idea because the shoot is the easiest part but planning the whole thing is not.”
