The strange Smile is all about you need to add in your bucket list, a short film Directed and Produced by Arsad Iqbal and Cinematography by Mujahid Raza who is also an incredible and known for GANSTER and ONCE UPON A TIME IN MUMBAI, this short film features veteran actor S.M Zaheer and Zeeshan Ayyub.
The strange smile is a tale of life and loss where even in the dark path life finds its home just like the smile which comes along with happiness as well as despair, the short film The Strange Smile, explores the duality of life that unites life and death as two parts that complete a whole.
The story follows the life of Barkati played by theatre professional Samridhi Dewan, and shows that there is a story behind every smile. She is the granddaughter of Jumman shah, the caretaker of a cemetery. As a young girl, death always brings happiness to Barkati. After all, she would get a new dress, a new toy, even her favorite food, whenever a body was brought to the place where she lived – a graveyard. At a very early age in her life, Barkati realized that her family’s happiness was linked to the arrival the bodies.
The story, however, unfolds in an irony of spiritual when she entered into her youth, got married and had a son. The story gets twisted and in suspense when Barkati was small she is always excited and happy when someone gets expired but when she loses her own child and it devastated her completely. But then suddenly she smile and that’s really shocking and that strange smile become curse for her life.
The film, which was shot in a graveyard in Uttar Pradesh’s Farrukhabad, is inspired by Hindi writer Syed Mohammad Mohsin’s short story, Anokhi Muskurahat. While Arshad has used Urdu and Hindi, he has introduced some elements to make the film more contemporary. “A dakiya (postman) coming to deliver a letter will not make sense to most viewers now, while a cell phone being used by the central characters will be more easy to recognize”.