Breaking the mould

The firmly reticent Konkona Sen Sharma speaks to AVANTIKA SHANKAR on working with her mother, digging deeper into storylines and the future of the film industry

AT A TIME WHEN streaming platforms are constantly transforming the way creators create and consumers consume content, Konkona Sen Sharma continues to stand as one of the film industry’s most steadfastly individualistic voices. The actor, who has turned writer, director and producer since starring in the hit coming-of-age comedy drama Wake Up Sid in 2009, had her first outing on screen when she was just four years old. Her mother, the National Award-winning filmmaker Aparna Sen, was playing the titular character in Dinen Gupta’s Indira, and Sharma appeared briefly as a small boy. Later, at age nine, she was cast alongside Shabana Azmi and Farooq Shaikh in Sen’s 1989 film Picnic. Since the early 2000s, Sharma has worked with her mother on films that have set the tone for experimental cinema in India, tackling issues like religious contention (Mr. and Mrs. Iyer, 2002) and mental illness (15 Park Avenue, 2005) with a sense of nuance and empathy that simply cannot be formularised. Even as she has carved an identity of her own, what the 43-year-old multi-hyphenate continues to share with her mother is a keen instinct for storytelling. “My mother helped expand my world so much,” she recalls. “From a very young age, I would go with her to movie sets, the editorial office of the women’s magazine that she ran, or film festivals in Moscow and Cairo… I got so much experience from being exposed to that world.”