Titli

Titli (2015)

तितली

Not every family is a family.

A young man in Delhi tries to break free from his controlling, criminal brothers.

Date of release
2015-05-06
TMDB
6.7 / 10 (43)
Runtime
1h 52m
Genres
Drama, Action, Crime
Director
Kanu Behl

Casting

Interesting facts

  • Filmed in: Delhi
  • Awards: 0 · Nominations: 1

Titli (transl. Butterfly) is a 2014 Indian neo-noir crime drama film written and directed by Kanu Behl, and co-produced by Dibakar Banerjee Productions and Aditya Chopra under the banner of Yash Raj Films. It features actors Shashank Arora as the title character, Shivani Raghuvanshi, Ranvir Shorey, Amit Sial and Lalit Behl in the lead roles.

Production

Behl, who co-wrote and also assisted director Dibakar Banerjee in Love Sex aur Dhokha (LSD) (2010), started writing Titli as LSD neared completion. In 2011, the news report of a car-jacker gang in Delhi led by a local goon, Joginder Joga, inspired him to start working on the story of a thriller. However, as he developed the script, other themes started joining in, from his personal experiences growing up in the city.

In 2012, the script of the film was selected for NFDC Film Bazaar's Screenwriter's Lab and won the Post-Production Award at Film Bazaar's Work-In-Progress Lab in 2013. It also won an award for Best Work-In-Progress Lab Project and was selected for Film Bazaar Recommends, where the 2014 Cannes Film Festival selection committee first saw the film.

For the lead roles, relative newcomers Shashank Arora and Shivani Raghuvanshi were selected. Actors Amit Sial and Ranvir Shorey were chosen to play the role of two elder brothers to Titli's character. Next, he decided to cast his own father Lalit Behl, who is a Delhi-based director and actor, for the role of the patriarch of the family, considering the film itself was based on his early life experiences.

The film was shot across various locations in Delhi. During filming, he allowed the actors to explore the scenes and improvise as no scripts were brought to the set. The production team redesigned a house to give a claustrophobic feel to the family home, where much of the filming was done, to provide a contrast from the expansive real world outside, which the protagonist is trying to escape into.

By early May 2014, the movie's post-production was completed, ahead of its Cannes premiere due in the same month.

Read on Wikipedia · Text from Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 4.0. Data from Wikidata.

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