Loev

Loev (2016)

A simple story about love no matter how you spell it

When hot shot, Wall Street dealmaker Jai thinks of putting some pleasure into his 48 hour business trip to Mumbai, Sahil, his young, music-producer friend, drops everything, including his reckless boyfriend Alex, to help him execute the perfect getaway. Hiking the hills and canyons of Maharashtra, amidst half-attempted conversations and sudden silences, business calls and old jokes, the friends discover there is more than just time-zones keeping them apart. Things take another turn when Alex shows up with a new male-companion at his side, throwing up old conflicts and bringing unanswered questions to the fore.

Date of release
2016-05-12
TMDB
5.3 / 10 (105)
Runtime
1h 30m
Genres
Drama, Romance
Director
Sudhanshu Saria

Casting

Interesting facts

Loev is a 2015 Indian romantic drama film written and directed by Sudhanshu Saria. It stars Dhruv Ganesh and Shiv Panditt as two friends who set off to the Western Ghats for a weekend trip and focuses on their complex emotional and sexual relationship. It was Ganesh's final film, as he died from tuberculosis before its release. Loev also features Siddharth Menon and Rishabh Chaddha in supporting roles. The film's title is a deliberate misspelling of the word "love".

Production

Loev's script was written by Sudhanshu Saria in the United States when he was working on the screenplay of another film, I Am Here. Describing the film as "small, fragile, honest", Saria said that through his endeavours he "tries to capture the silences and the things unsaid in male friendships". He began working on Loev because he was unable to manage funds for I Am Here.

Pre-production work for the film began in February 2014, when Katharina Suckale, Jasleen Marwah, and Arfi Lamba of the Bombay Berlin Film Production showed interest in adapting the script into a full-length feature film. Saria said the screenplay was written out of "deep shame and fear" and on completion was not pitched to any investors, but instead put away into a drawer.

The film stars Shiv Panditt and Dhruv Ganesh; the former came across the film's script during a casual meeting with Saria. In an interview with Daily News and Analysis, Panditt discussed the meeting between him and Saria, saying, "he had no desire to cast me, [...] because he thought I do only commercial films. I had to force it out of him. But when I heard it I found it interesting and we decided to do it".

Principal photography began in the summer of 2014 and took place entirely in Mumbai and Mahabaleshwar, a small hilltown in the UNESCO World Heritage site of the Western Ghats, in peninsular India. American Film Institute alumnus Sherri Kauk served as the director of photography for the film. Loev was filmed in a single schedule in a short span of 16 days.

With a modest budget of $1 million, the production of Loev was funded partly by the production partners, and by private equity. A crowdfunding campaign was started on the funding portal Indiegogo, raising an amount of approximately US$4,000.

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

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