You might be aware that engineer turned filmmaker Ivan Ayr’s slice of life drama film ‘Milestone’ is scheduled to be released on the streaming platform Netflix on May 7, 2021.
Incidentally, Ayr’s previous film ‘Soni’ is already streaming on Netflix and was welcomed by an evolved OTT audience with comparable warmth and acclaim.
Both these films ‘Soni’ and ‘Milestone’ premiered in the eminent Venice International Film Festival. The former even got a standing ovation from the festival audience. While the latter went to win the ‘best film’ and ‘best performer’ award at the Singapore International Film Festival.
While ‘Soni’ revolved around the lives and inter-personal relationship between two female police officers (played by Geetika Vidya Ohlyan and Saloni Batra), it was essentially a story of the crimes against women in Delhi and how these two cops handle these cases in their own way, while dealing with gender issues in their own lives.
It was an ultra-realistic film almost overlapping arthouse cinema. The film was apparently made after painstaking research on the intricacies of the working of the police department.
Soni’s treatment and the way it was directed was somewhat similar to another brilliant Netflix television show ‘Delhi Crime’, which was based on the police investigation following a brutal assault on a woman in Delhi. Although the subject matter was entirely different and unlike ‘Delhi Crime’, ‘Soni’ was treated with relaxed pacing in its narrative style.
On the other hand, ‘Milestone’ revolves around a truck driver’s life (played by Suvinder Vicky), his inability to come to terms with his wife’s demise, and who is now on the verge of possibly losing his job as he is given the task of training an intern.
Although both these films ‘Soni’ and ‘Milestone’ have different characters and backdrop, still, some thematic or tonal commonality between them is apparent in the way the characters are written from a unique perspective.
In both these films, the principal characters in some way try to deal with the system. And coming from the same filmmaker, we naturally get the same vibe.
We are glad about the fact that an extremely popular streaming platform like Netflix is giving offbeat yet beautiful films like ‘Soni’ and ‘Milestone’ a well-deserved chance to make a lasting impression on the current crop of sophisticated and cognizant Indian OTT viewers. Besides giving the viewers the freedom to explore unconventional and free-spirited cinema.
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