Eeb Allay Ooo!

Eeb Allay Ooo! (2020)

Hired as a monkey repeller upon moving to Delhi, a young man struggles to find his footing in his unenviable job and his place in the unforgiving world.

Date of release
2020-12-18
TMDB
7.5 / 10 (11)
Runtime
1h 37m
Genres
Comedy, Drama
Director
Prateek Vats

Casting

Interesting facts

Eeb Allay Ooo! is a 2019 Indian Hindi-language film, directed by Prateek Vats, in his directorial debut, and written by Shubham. The film revolves around a young migrant in New Delhi, who takes the unusual government job of keeping monkeys away from public buildings, and focuses on his ensuing struggles and disillusionment with the work. The title is onomatopoeiac, as it derives from the three distinct sounds used by an experienced monkey chaser in the film to scare away the rhesus macaques.

Production

The idea of the film came to Vats after he read a news report on how under the Wildlife Protection Act, 1972, langurs could no longer be used to scare away monkeys at the Rashtrapati Bhawan, which is the seat of central government and bureaucracy, and how consequently authorities had employed people to dress up as langurs and imitate them to drive away the monkeys, who often caused a nuisance.

Vats said in an interview in The Times of India: "What we wanted to comment on was contractual jobs. The central character, Anjani, chases monkeys and through him (and others), we tell the story of people who make our cities, our houses, what they are, but remain invisible...Today, we are saying that migrant labourers have been given shabby treatment, but it doesn't really come as a surprise. There are many other examples.

In an interview in The Hindu, Vats said: "I was wondering whether to make a documentary or a mockumentary, but as we got into it, we decided to make it like an absurd fiction while keeping it very real, because only then would the absurdity work...While outwardly a satire, I hope the film is true to the internal complexities."

The filming was done in about 60 days in 2018. For the scenes featuring the monkey menace, the crew often had to wait for days to get the desired reactions from the monkeys, and throughout filming, there was a veterinarian on set.

The location sound was recorded single-handedly by Bigyna Dahal from FTII, who also doubled as a boom operator. This was done because most of the film had to be shot at sensitive and strategic locations near the Parliament of India where crowd control was near to impossible and signal jammers disrupted wireless devices.

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

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