‘LOOK OUT FOR THE SIGNS OF DEPRESSION IN THOSE NEAR YOU’

Suicide prevention is a subject close to filmmaker Aditya Kripalani’s heart. And his film Not Today is based on the same. “My wife (Sweta Chhabria; producer) and I have lost people to suicide and we wanted to make a film about prevention,” he shares.

On World Suicide Prevention Day, today, he has a request for all: “Look out for the signs of depression in those around you. Sudden changes of sleeping patterns, listlessness, not being able to be happy and light at all anymore, being unaffected by emotions as one used to, dramatic changes in eating patterns... Reach out to anyone you suspect of being depressed and talk to them. Putting the onus on them is silly, I feel.”

The film has travelled to festivals across the world, including UK Asian Film Festival, Indian Film Festival Stuttgart and Ottawa Indian Film Festival.

Kripalani reveals that while working on the film, they visited suicide prevention

ADITYA KRIPALANI,

Filmmaker centres in Mumbai, and found them grossly underfunded. “They don’t even have money for separate cubicles for counsellors... It made us feel more strongly for this subject,” he says, adding that the film is also about “the loneliness of big cities”.

Last year, when Sushant Singh Rajput and a few other actors died by suicide, people began talking about mental health. But the conversation has lost steam now. Do we, as a society, suffer from amnesia when it comes to such subjects? “It’s not amnesia... I wish we had done justice to those we lost by talking enough about depression and suicide. We started to talk about it. And then it became a completely different story and everyone began to follow that,” he concludes.

A still from the film