Batul Mukhtiar (Film Direction, 1995) writes about the making of her first feature film, Lilkee

Watching the children around me, I saw my daughter Aiman and her friends growing up in a tower complex, going to school with kids from similar backgrounds, not really knowing a world outside their own. So I wanted to write a story with these kids, for them, about them, instead of just saying, "Oh, it was different when we were kids." Also, long ago, I hired a little girl to look after Aiman when she was a baby at the FTII. I could not cope with the guilt for more than a few months. Maybe this is my way of repenting.

Children, especially these days, have lesser opportunity to mix with children from other worlds. The walls are higher. But I would like to believe that when they do cross those walls, it is not too difficult for them to understand, empathize or help.

Like all filmmakers, I've been working on scripts, proposals for feature films. I gave my story Lilkee to the Children's Film Society of India, they liked it, and so, I've made a children's film. I think, the most important reason that I've made a children's film, and not a regular feature film, is - Funding! The money from CFSI is very little, and it is a bureaucratic set-up, but yes, you do have the freedom to tell your own story, in your own way.

Lilkee is about an 11-year-old village girl, brought to the city by a working couple to take care of their baby. The couple lives in an up-market residential complex, in the city. The wife Bela is an architect and the husband Tutu, a corporate executive. Lilkee makes friends with the children in the complex, who through her realize that life is not as easy for lots of other children as it is for them. Lilkee, too is fascinated by many things in the city, which she shares with her mother and sister, Billo, in the village, through letters. Gradually, the couple realizes that they can give a better future to Lilkee and decide to send her to school.

The film was shot in 18 days, in Pune, Korlai and Garhwal. I still need to do patchwork for one more day. We tried sync sound for 2-3 days, but gave up because we did not have the infrastructure or the budget for it. In Pune, we were shooting in a very expensive apartment complex, where we had permission to shoot only from 9 to 6, and take in a unit of only 30 people. We've shot the exterior sequences in available light; the only schedule where we had even a track and trolley. In the interior, we could not even put up a painting on the wall, leave alone lights, or take in a track-trolley, so we've worked around that. The only way that we've been able to pull off this shoot with 5 children, a baby, some puppies plus some very physically taxing locations, is through extensive rehearsals. Children, adults, even the kids in the apartment complex, who worked as ‘extras’ for the football match, birthday party and letter-writing song, all rehearsed over a month. Apart from the children, I chose to work with an adult cast who would give me a lot of rehearsal time, who would support me in what I was doing, who would not be on their cell phones all the time, and all that for very little money. In fact, two of my actors also doubled up as my assistants, working with rehearsals, continuity and costumes.

The children are all non-actors, and were thrilled to put in as much time as I asked for. An added advantage of rehearsals was the fine-tuning of script and dialogues, until we were ready to roll. As for my crew, they are all FTII colleagues, whose work I like and whom I am comfortable working with. The important thing was, the children had loads of fun, shooting. Of course, tempers were shaky at times, there were tears, but no tantrums and all of them fussed endlessly about how they were looking. The worst thing I did was give one of the girls, Sani, lollipops to suck all through the film. That made all the other kids jealous and led to a lot of fights and demands. While in Pune, it was difficult to fulfill the demands because those lollipops were not available there. I tried to make it up by giving all of them lollipops in the beach song at Korlai. The combination of two strenuous days of climbing up and down the fort and rocks in the sun, swimming in the sea, and sucking those giant lollipops all the way home, led to all of them being sick for the next couple of days!