To Bombay and back

UCLA Class of 1999 graduate Rita Rani has seen her 2006 short film “Bombay Skies” travel across the country from Big Bear to Palm Beach, Fla., as well as across the globe from Canada to Germany to Italy. While it makes for a hectic travel itinerary, Rani’s across-the-globe trek with her film closely resembles the story of her 21-minute short.

“Bombay Skies” will be featured at the “Show Off Your Short” Film Festival at Los Angeles’ Raleigh Studios this Friday, Saturday and Sunday.

The film tells the story of a girl who flees Los Angeles for Bombay to take part in the Bollywood movement she has watched closely for years. Her father follows her to Bombay to bring her back home, only to fall in love with the metropolitan Indian city he grew up in.

Rani incorporated Bollywood not only into the story of the film, but into its foundation. Bollywood is an Indian style of films mixing musical numbers with comedy and drama.

“It started because most people grew up on Audrey Hepburn and I grew up on Bollywood. It just started as a fascination I had, and it continued to grow and grow,” said Rani.

“The character thinks in musical form, uses a musical element as a major story point.”

The contrast between the two cities in the film, Los Angeles and Bombay, is one Rani is familiar with. After growing up in the San Fernando Valley and graduating from the World Arts and Cultures department at UCLA in 1999, Rani moved to Bombay. Much like the main character in her film, she was influenced by both her Indian heritage and her longtime love for Bollywood.

However, after two years in Bombay, Rani found herself homesick for America, and Los Angeles specifically.

“When I got there and it was a big eye-opener, … I found out I was a Valley girl at heart, and wanted to come back home,” she said.

While her original plan to stay in Bombay did not work out, she made this change of events work to her advantage.

Once back in the Los Angeles area, Rani studied a variety of film disciplines, including directing and producing for a year and a half at UCLA Extension before enrolling at the Los Angeles Film School to get her postgraduate degree.

When it came time to make her thesis film at the Los Angeles Film School, she stretched back to not only her few years in Bombay and her family heritage, but to her undergraduate education at UCLA to make “Bombay Skies.”

While at UCLA, she had made a documentary about women in Bollywood, which had sparked the idea for a feature-film plot. This idea finally became a reality when she scaled it down from a full-length film to a short.

“There was so much info and so much I wanted to say, so whittling it down to a short film that works on its own was really difficult,” Rani said. “It was just a matter of rewriting 12 versions and four sub-versions of the script.”

While Rani is quick to admit the downside of repackaging her feature into a short thesis project, she still plans to produce the original full-length film in the near future. In fact, she found the cutting process was helpful in discovering the essence of the story.

“(It) helped me figure out what direction I wanted to take the film in next,” she said.

Rani’s trip to Bombay both inspired her work as a student and gave her a bigger perspective. As she reflected on her time in Bombay, she realized the city itself was going to be a big character in both the current short and in a potential feature.

“You can just see all these layers of culture in the city. … It has become so globalized there but there is so much tradition; it’s a lot of layers coexisting in one place,” she said.

Her peers were able to see this influence in her work.

“More than about going to Bombay, it’s a universal story. It’s really about being a second-generation in a country and it happens in almost every country ““ you’re born here (in America) but part of a different culture,” said Alvaro Ron, Rani’s classmate at the Los Angeles Film School.

Besides having the short played at prestigious festivals in large cities such as New York City and Boston, Rani sees “Bombay Skies” as a big personal journey for her as an individual.

“It’s been a process of exploring this fascination I have and moving through it. Now I think I’m moving onto other things that are not as based in Bollywood and musical form.”

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