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PRODUCTION Bulgaria / France / India

Konstantin Bojanov developing Indian story Your Eyes

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- The director’s third feature is a co-production between Bulgaria, France, and India

Konstantin Bojanov developing Indian story Your Eyes
Director Konstantin Bojanov

Following his second feature Light Thereafter [+see also:
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, which centers on a Bulgarian teenager on a quest to find his idol, a Belgian painter, Konstantin Bojanov seems determined to put even more distance between him and his native Bulgaria: the director’s third feature is set in India and will be shot on location in 2018. The project is being produced by Argentum Lux Films (Bulgaria), Urban Factory (France), and Travelling Light (India). The team is now in negotiations with a fourth production company based in Luxembourg. Your Eyes will be presented in the CineLink co-production market at the Sarajevo International Film Festival.

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Your Eyes follows Rani, an Indian sex worker who announces to her family that she is going on a pilgrimage to a faraway temple. The journey is an opportunity for Rani to reflect on her tumultuous past, more specifically a teenage love affair she had with another girl, Renuka. In the present, Renuka is serving a life sentence for murder in Bangalore, the destination of Rani’s journey.

The screenplay is being written by Bojanov together with Indian screenwriter Buku Sarkar. In December he will start the casting, and plans to have a mix of professional and non-professional actors. The budget amounts to €850,000. The film will be shot on location, over 36 days at the end of 2018, in Bangalore and the state of Karnataka.

Bojanov tells Cineuropa the project started as a documentary, following his extensive trips through India. He even started shooting part of the documentary focusing on a 32-year-old devadasi sex worker, Reshma, “As filming progressed, and I was able to peel more and more layers off the subject, I became sure that I needed to focus on this one single story, set against the background of this centuries-old tradition of sexual exploitation under the banner of religion. At that point I also made a deliberate decision to transition the project, for the purposes of greater artistic control, from non-fiction into fiction,” the director explains.

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