'Duet': How Sheetal Menon and Bejoy Nambiar Created the First Short Film to Premiere Globally on Spotify

Isolating in the pandemic, a musician grieves in a large house. Mihir (Sidhant Gupta) has recently lost his brother, from whom he was estranged. The loss has reduced him to a weedy, unshaven mess. He paces the house barefoot. The space mirrors his wilting mental state. A metronome ticks. A bent lampshade bows in sympathy. The soundscape is a hive of disconsolate keys and strings. His work suffers. No progress is made. As C.S Lewis wrote of those in grief... "the same leg is cut off time after time."

Family, loss and sibling relationships are the preferred emotional landscape of actor-director Sheetal Menon. After 2018's Siblings, a story of two adult sisters caring for their family, she returns as a director with Duet, which is the first short film in the world to premiere on Spotify.

Menon, as before, has collaborated with her husband Bejoy Nambiar as producer, and co-written the film with Arpita Chatterjee and Neil Balthazar.

In an interview with The Hollywood Reporter India, Menon, joined by Nambiar, spoke about designing the world of Duet, how the soundtrack fell into place, and why short films remain a resilient form in India.

I must ask, was the film inspired by a personal loss during COVID-19?

Sheetal Menon: Even with my previous film, this was a question that was asked a lot: did something happen to your close ones? But no. With Duet, I was looking at the pandemic — the emotional and psychological toll it took on us — from a universal perspective. At the time, we saw a lot of suffering on the streets. But even the privileged among us, who were safely stuck at home, were not exactly okay in those spaces. Some were just left alone and had nobody to communicate with. COVID really tested our capacity for isolation. I started wondering what would it be like for someone to experience a lot of grief and not be expressive. Mihir is just unable to talk. Even the person on the calls from work... he’s not able to communicate with.

How did you find the house in the film?

Bejoy Nambiar: We looked at over 15–20 houses across Kochi, Ooty and Mumbai before we encountered the one we shot in. It's an old house in Bandra that is used for ad shoots. It’s undergone a lot of transformations. Before that, we had the option of shooting in some old Dadar houses for free, but we didn’t take those up. Usually, for a short film, if your location is made available for free, that’s the best thing. You jump at it. But Sheetal had the clarity that none of them would work.

SM: The house is massive and has an almost palatial quality. My brief to our production designer Sushmita Parhalkar was to keep it almost sparse, bare. I wanted that sense of emptiness. Because the house already has a lot of wood, brown and yellow, we had to find furniture that matches the colour palette. The curtain fabrics and wall textures are of a muted, mournful colour too. We went pretty heavy on the production design budget, and the location itself was quite expensive.

How did the music come together?

SM: It was a whole year of me just trying to find the right music. I said to myself, I can’t go and shoot this film if I don’t find the correct music. I had created a playlist for my reference while writing the film. And one day, it just so happened that I reached out to those artists via Instagram. I felt very stupid sending texting them. I thought they were not going to respond. But I got a response from all three artists: pianist-composers Eric Christian (New York) and Ben Crosland (London) and violinist Tineke de Jong (London). They read the script and generously agreed to give me the pieces. Their only question was, 'Will you give me credit?'

Finally, I found Sid Acharya, a talented musician in Sydney, Australia, who composed the background score. The entire score was created over conversations on Zoom. He would just play something and show me and it was all just so beautiful.

How did Spotify come board to release the film? The film will also be on YouTube.

BN: This was an idea given by my producer friend Harini Lakshminarayan, who is CFO at Colour Yellow Productions. We had previously worked with Spotify on Tu Yaa Main, including the Spotify Rap 91 concert that was part of the film. When I told Harini we had this short film, she said, “Why don’t we talk to Spotify? It’s a film about music, and it has interesting musicians from different parts of the world. Just pitch it to them.” So it really began with her suggestion, and I ran with it.

I think I hounded Spotify India’s team for months trying to convince them because it wasn’t something they had done before. It was a big deal that they eventually agreed. They had to get waivers and approvals from their international team. We also had to do test runs because Spotify already hosts video podcasts, and if a podcast contains too much music, the platform’s automated systems can strike it down. Since our film is about music and contains several musical passages, we had to make sure it wouldn’t be treated that way.

We went through all the right channels, secured approvals, obtained NOCs from all the musicians, and carried out multiple test runs. Eventually, I was able to convince them.

The film has an expressionist — some would say indulgent — visual grammar. It also follows a single character over 45 minutes. Were you second-guessing yourself at any point?

SM: Absolutely. It was very daunting. You keep asking yourself: Who would want to watch this person all my himself in a house? Today there’s so much distraction competing for people’s attention, and here was a film with very little dialogue. Who would want to watch something like that for 30 or 40 minutes? Those doubts surfaced at every stage. During rehearsals, after the shoot, and especially in the edit, people would say, “You don’t need this scene. Remove it. It’s taking too much time.”

I do feel that, in places, it may have been a little indulgent. But I wanted to stay truthful to the emotion. I told myself, It’s okay. I’m going to stay with how I feel about this. I was chasing that silence. You never achieve it perfectly, but you try to get as close to that feeling as possible, because that’s how the audience experiences his grief; through simply being with him, through his inability to respond.

BN: A lot of people kept telling her to trim it down. “You don’t need this. You can shorten it.”

Eventually, Sheetal showed it to a filmmaker we both deeply admire, Shimit Amin. She shared all her fears and told him what everyone else had been saying. Shimit's response was really interesting. He said, “This is your story, and this is the way you want to tell it. Forget what others are saying. Who decides what’s right or wrong? You decide. It’s your film. And if you don’t experiment in the short film format, where else will you experiment?”

SM: I really took that to heart. It was great advice.

Short films are making a resurgence post the pandemic, with several mainstream filmmakers backing or directing shorts. Why has it stayed such a resilient form?

BN: I remember when I started out, YouTube wasn’t a big thing. In fact, my first short film still isn’t on YouTube. Back then, I used to carry a DVD of the film with me, and that became my showreel. I’d show it to producers and go, “Watch my short film, and then here’s my script.” Today, shorts have become a proof of concept.

It's the only form where you can make something totally independently, without 50 voices in your head. I made a short during the pandemic as part of Navarasa (on Netflix). It was a wonderful format because I got to collaborate with some very interesting artists, and the anthology itself was a collaborative initiative for the COVID-affected film industry. Given the chance, I’d love to do it again.

SM: After making these two films, I feel I want to continue telling short stories... but only if I got the support.