No Place Like Home

Banerjee made Delhi his home almost 15-years-ago. “Home,belonging and rootlessness are ideas that Rupleena Bose (the scriptwriter) and I like to explore. It is a concept which is fluid,real and imaginative. It’s a space where stories live,” says Banerjee,who reveals that the film is about looking closer and turning the camera to simple and real things.

Shot primarily in Delhi and Kolkata,the film gets into the lives of a couple with five cats,a single man,a music band and the filmmaker himself as “everyone tries to understand what home means in the continuous cycle of migration and flux. Each of them are at various stages of unsettling,moving,shifting as a part of his/her displaced city identities,” he says.

Banerjee has used the surreal world of cats,a theme that appears frequently in Japanese author Haruki Murakami’s writings,to define displacement. “Cats are a part of the lives of a couple caught in the middle of resettlement. They are one of the characters of the film and are a recurring motif of settling,moving and change. They also have a curious relationship with urban spaces and that is also what I have tried to explore,” says Banerjee. As the story unfolds,the couple tries to make this transition as “natural” as possible for the cats. The music band loses their jampad in Karol Bagh after 18 years and moves to a completely different part of the city,and the single man gets permission from his landlord to screen films for friends on the terrace.