| Adda | |
| Director: | Devayush Chowdhary |
| Producer: | Maxim Pictures, Reeldrama Productions |
| Music: | Joydeep Banerji, Suvam Moitra |
| Cinematography: | Roopesh Shaji |
| Editing: | Saikat Sekhareshwar Ray |
| Production Companies: | --> |
| Distributors: | --> |
| Runtime: | 110 minutes |
| Country: | India |
| Language: | Bengali |
Adda (English: Gossip) is the first feature film by filmmaker Devayush Chowdhary.[1] It has been produced by Maxim Pictures and Reeldrama Productions and released in India on 13 September 2019.[2] [3]
Adda is a modern-day fable of four interconnected tales of love, friendship, karma, and catharsis. The film is about two naughty angels, Black and White, who come down to Kolkata to spy on the lives of four jobless friends, an aging freedom fighter, a struggling actress, and a self-righteous journalist in order to decide humanity's fate and in the process become witnesses to bumbling attempts at happiness.
Adda opened to generally positive reviews[4] but a tepid response at the box office owing to a lack of big commercial stars and huge publicity. However, the film soon caught on through word of mouth.Renowned film critic Shoma Chatterji of The Statesman (India) called the film "An accomplished debut".[5]
The film drew both appreciation and criticism for its stylistic approach which included shaky camera movements, long monologues, and incomplete narrative threads which are all uncommon in Bengali Cinema.[6] The Times of India said it was "not a bad film" and gave it 2.5 stars.[7]
The film was originally conceived as a found footage film while the director was still a student at NYU's Tisch School of the Arts. The director Devayush Chowdhary originally conceived the film in 2011 and it took him seven years to write the screenplay. In an interview, he mentioned that because the titular characters Black and White speak in a rhyming tongue of their own, writing rhymes in Bengali was the toughest part for him.[8] By his own admission, the film is inspired by several Hollywood and Bollywood indie films, key amongst them Jim Jarmusch's Coffee and Cigarettes and Kiran Rao's Dhobi Ghat.