Bringing small-town stories to mainstream audiences

Contemporary audiences have developed a taste for realistic cinema where content plays the most important role. As a result, rustic stories have found a wider reach as more and more audiences have started to relate to stories from the heartland. With India being such a versatile county in terms of culture and lifestyle, producer-director Dinesh Vijan has used that as a backdrop for his films, as his stories bring home-grown characters to the silver screen. From '

Badlapur

' (2015) to 'Hindi Medium' (2017) and now '

Stree

', Dinesh Vijan has hit the right chord with the audience by creating stories that are different and yet relatable.

Using India’s milieu as a canvas, the producer has depicted smaller towns in his films and his latest offering, 'Stree', which stars Rajkummar Rao and Shraddha Kapoor, is shot in Chanderi, a quaint little town in Madhya Pradesh. The debutant director Amar Kaushik also hails from the same region.

Small towns often have local legends around paranormal activities. Over the years, a legend that’s gained popularity in the ghost-story circles is the one where someone calls out your name from behind late at night, and how you’re not supposed to turn around. Vijan’s new film 'Stree' is based on this phenomenon, where of the ghost of a bride takes men away, believed to be true in small towns across India. To keep true to the concept, the team set up the entire film in Chanderi, a place which has never been explored by Bollywood. To add to that, the actors imbibed the culture of Chanderi for their performances, by dressing up like locals and also picking up the language. 'Stree' releases on August 31.