Six cats and a city in flux. TO LET is about spaces. Empty, Crowded, Real, Imagined, Urban, Liminal, Nostalgic. A film about moving, renting and living. About cities as they live elsewhere and inside the artist’s head. A single man, a couple, a music band and the filmmaker try to understand what home means in the continuous cycle of migration and flux. All of them are at various stages of settling, moving, shifting as a part of their displaced city identities. What is home for those who only know their immediate urban reality? What is home when there is nowhere else to go? What is the identity of a ‘tenant’ to those who engage in a life of art living in a city in India? TO LET is about spaces, people, cats, and the stories woven around them. Stories that become a film, a song, a memory; as physical spaces replace themselves and addresses change houses.
Spandan Banerjee is a National Award winning filmmaker. Born in Calcutta, Spandan graduated from St. Xavier’s College Calcutta with a Diploma in Advertising from Clarion College of Communication. His stint in art started early as a young cartoonist for The Statesman and The Hindustan Times. In 2003 he founded Overdose Films Pvt. Ltd.
He was one of the six shortlisted for the British Council Young Creative Entrepreneur Award in the SCREEN category. His films THEKEY PEY KYA KARTE HO (2006) BEWARE DOGS (2008), YOU DON’T BELONG (NATIONAL AWARD WINNER 2011) and TO LET (2013) have travelled to film festivals all over the world. He runs his independent outfit OVERDOSE FILMS PVT LTD, which has produced over 50 films in the last 10 years for UNICEF, Ministry of Women and Child Development, Goethe Institut/Max Mueller Bhavan, Ministry of Tourism, National Geographic Channel, ASER, PRATHAM UK, JWT, GSK, OPEN Magazine, MTV, NFDC, PSBT, British High Commission among others. He is one of the Creative Directors empanelled with NFDC (National Film Development Council), New Delhi.
His recent commissioned work includes the widely appreciated set of 6 films for Jammu and Kashmir Tourism, a set of films on the artistry, dance festival and eco-tourism of ODISHA, a short film on the growing area sector of Eco and Bird Watching Tourism in GUJARAT. He has directed the recently released and ITunes chart topper 7 Episode Music Film Series ‘Indian Ocean’s Tandanu’ for Pepsi MTV Indies. His new fiction film CITY OF DARK is under post-production. Apart from this, he is currently finishing the first of his 3 Part Non-Fiction film series on language in India: VOLUME ONE. His other projects in development include; BAHURUPI (Bengali adapted fiction feature) and THE GOLDEN TRIANGLE. Overdose Films is now putting together a platform, OVERDOSE LOCAL to create a collective independent film space in a city with no defined film scene. Spandan Banerjee designs, draws and edits. He can be contacted at spandan@overdosefilms.com