Cargo (2019)

Curiosità

Cargo is a 2019 Indian Hindi-language science fiction dark comedy film written and directed by Arati Kadav. The film is produced by Kadav, Shlok Sharma, Navin Shetty, Zain Matcheswalla, and Anurag Kashyap. Starring Vikrant Massey and Shweta Tripathi in the lead roles, the story is set on a spaceship named Pushpak 634A where a scientist Prahastha, works for the Post Death Transition services with the help of a female astronaut, where dead people are recycled for rebirth. Cargo premiered at the 2019 MAMI Film Festival under the spotlight section. The film premiered on Netflix on 9 September 2020.

Production

The idea of Cargo came to director Arati Kadav in 2017 after she worked on pre-production for a film for six years before it got shelved. After getting angry at the situation, Kadav started writing another script and after 2–3 months, she developed an idea. A friend, Rahul Puri, had told her that film school Whistling Woods International was going to be free for a month and its studio space, camera and some lights will be available for shoot.

She then wrote a new screenplay based on a one liner, "an immigration office in space for dead people." Cargo is the sixth screenplay written by Kadav who has earlier made short films like Time Machine. In order to manage the budget of the film, Kadav decided to make a film with minimum location. She wrote a science fiction story set in a spaceship that also tapped into Indian mythology and issues like life and death.

Kadav was planning to make a film with Phantom Films, but the production house dissolved and the project was shelved. However, its founders Anurag Kashyap and Vikramaditya Motwane decided to back Cargo. Kadav cited Argentine short-story writer Jorge Luis Borges and sci-fi writer Ted Chiang as her inspirations for the story.

Several spaces from the set of spaceship were reused during the shoot. Discarded automated teller machines were used as palm reading machines in the film. The film was shot in a spaceship set for 27 days. Kadav felt that a single-location film could be visually boring so decided to use a lot of different colours and lights to make it look interesting. There were two spaceship sets for both interior and exterior shoots.

Kadav got permission to use a shooting floor at Whistling Woods International for a couple of weeks. She used the space to create the Pushpak 634A, a futuristic space station, and other domains in the film. She said that she was "very aware of its graphics requirements while writing the script itself, and a VFX person was always involved in the making, right from the pre-production stage."

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