How Siliguri's Richa Moitra, a woman cinematographer, bagged Bhediya and Netflix hit Qala

"I never knew I would work in Bollywood because I come from a small town where people don’t know or don’t care about how films are made. Most of them will also not stick around for credits to read the names of the crew members."

Two weeks ago, the Varun Dhawan-starrer Bhediya hit theatres. Given the fact that Stree’s Amar Kaushik served as director and Dhawan played the titular werewolf, Bhediya was supposed to be a big screen “masala” spectacle. Contrast that with a Hindi Netflix film that came just a week after that: Qala (read our review here). Anvita Dutt’s sophomore feature on Netflix played out as a dark psychological thriller set in the world of 1930s Indian classical music, an artistic watch meant for niche adult audiences. 

What connects these two polar-opposite films is a young cinematographer who worked on both productions. 27-year-old Richa Moitra, a native of North Bengal’s Siliguri, dabbled in both Bhediya and Qala in the cinematography department. 

While Amar Kaushik’s horror comedy gave her a chance to serve as an assistant cinematographer under Jishnu Bhattacharjee (Ajeeb Dastans, Mardaani 2), the Netflix India original found her working in the same role with Siddharth Diwan (Queen, Bulbbul) as the Director of Photography (DOP). 

Outdoor challenges with Bhediya: “Bhediya is all about action and it’s more of a dramatic, masaledaar film. And we had to utilise outdoor locations like forests. Qala, on the other hand, is a very artistic project as you can see from the lighting and compositions itself,” Moitra starts off by discussing the aesthetic differences between her two Bollywood projects. 

In the midst of a creative chaos, her schedules conflicted while working on both films. This made her miss out on the Kashmir sequences from Qala (depicted as a snow-covered Uttarakhand) as she was busy working a majority of Bhediya’s forest scenes in Arunachal Pradesh’s Ziro at that time. When it came to the former, Moitra was a part of the Mumbai shoot that involved a lot of camerawork on the streets and indoor suites for scenes that cover the titular character’s (played by Tripti Dimri) rise to fame. 

When it came to Bhediya’s outdoor shoots at Ziro, Moitra’s challenges included shooting in the landscape of dense forests; that too in the course of dim-lit nights. Sometimes, if a shot was delayed due to the lighting and weather conditions, a lot of coordination had to be undertaken with the VFX team for the usual blue screen/green screen wizardry. 

Nature too posed its own challenges. “The team was often attacked by leeches. The winter fog could be a problem at times as we were shooting in January and February of 2021. Sometimes, our vehicles could be stuck on the narrow roads and we would be left stranded with heavy equipment to handle,” Moitra tells DailyO.

Lighting in Bhediya and Qala, a comparative analysis: As for Bhediya’s lighting, she adds that in some cases, the lights had to be fitted in at the top of pine trees. Ultimately, the end product was one full of colour. But in the case of Qala, the colours had to be toned down to a more intricate palette. As even a layperson viewer can see, Qala makes use of drab shades and dim-lit settings that emphasise the narrative’s gloomy and tragic overtones. 

“Large and single sources of light had to be used making the film dull and lively at the same time,” Moitra adds that a lot of hard light was employed, the photography technique to focus on distinct shadows and a high-contrast look on the subjects involved. In the case of Qala, the characters do pop out in frames even if the background and the costume design would rely on subtle shades. 

But while Bhediya might be flashy with livelier colours, Qala also has its own variations in shades. A good example of artistic colour grading in the film can be illustrated from how the sky changes from whitish brown to greyish black when Amit Sial and Tripti Dimri’s characters engage in a disturbing interaction in front of the under-construction Howrah Bridge.

“Siddharth Diwan and even Anvita Dutt are very imaginative people. And you can see that with the colours and sets of Qala,” Moitra notes while commenting on the artistic tones of the psychological drama, “Ultimately, the lighting depends on what the script demands and what the director wants.”

Luckily for Moitra, she is having the best of both worlds.

Future projects with Sidharth Malhotra and SRK: Although a relative newcomer, Moitra seems to be pleased bagging mainstream credits like Bhediya and Qala with equally mainstream titles to come out next year.

Sidharth Malhotra’s upcoming action flick would reunite Moitra with her Bhediya collaborator Jishnu Bhattacharjee and if this weren’t enough, she has also secured a spot for the cinematography team behind Shah Rukh Khan’s Jawan. 

“Being in the same set as SRK is a dream come true; a different feeling for a newcomer like me,” Moitra gleefully says, even though she obviously stays mum when asked about further details regarding the plot which is still under the wraps.

So, how does a girl from small-town Siliguri achieve her B-Town dream? Needless to say, Moitra currently resides in Mumbai given her involvement with Bollywood. But her start with Bollywood was preceded by her upbringing in Siliguri, followed by a professional stint in Dubai.

“I always knew I had to get into films,” she says when we ask her how she started out. Going further back in the past, she reminisces how she was always into painting and subsequently photography in childhood, convincing her to follow a creative pursuit. “Siliguri is a small town, surrounded by nature. We have mountains, rivers, and even a wildlife sanctuary. That played a major part in the way I saw the world.”

A watershed moment came in sixth grade when she got her first camera: a Kodak Kb10, a small camera that utilised 35mm reels. This was followed by her moving towards a more advanced camera that she bought herself in her first year of undergraduate journalism. More creative projects followed in college with a portfolio creative enough to bag her a contractual job in Dubai.

Given that she spent all of her education in Siliguri, Dubai offered new avenues. Her work here mostly included shooting music videos and advertisements for private clients.

But then came the pandemic...

A blessing in disguise. Fortunately, that’s how the pandemic turned out to be for Moitra. Having her fair share of commercial work in Dubai, she planned to head back to her hometown for some time till she found a new project to work on. Working in films was still an idea that constantly resided at the back of her head even though she didn’t have a clear-cut plan on how to achieve it. 

In a case of coincidental fate, Moitra had to take a detour to Mumbai before she could travel to Siliguri. 

“That’s when the pandemic started. The Mumbai airport had anyway put a stamp on my hand and asked me to quarantine for two weeks. And then just a few days later, the airport itself shut down. I took it as an opportunity to make new connections in Mumbai.”

Getting in touch with some mutual friends from the film industry was the first step that eventually led her to both “good people and bad people”. In the search for new work, the pandemic finalised her decision to stay in Mumbai for her creative pursuits. And by the end of 2020, she had bagged Bhediya.

The next year, work on Bhediya and Qala commenced simultaneously, resulting in Moitra’s IMDb page (which she hopes grows soon as she bags more films).

But being a female cinematographer comes with its own challenges. Somewhere in the beginning of Anvita Dutt’s period psychological drama Qala, Swastika Mukherjee’s character tells her daughter that if she is to be a classical singer, she has to work twice as much and twice as hard as her male counterparts. The era in this setting is the 1930s and gender relations have definitely changed, albeit at a slow pace. 

It is only ironic for Moitra to similarly describe how women in her field also need to prove their worth more than the men do. 

“When you’re a woman cinematographer, you get respect but people don’t trust you initially. In the film industry, a lot of people have definitely helped me but yes sometimes, you have to constantly prove to them that you have the talent,” she says.

It might be a dated cliche to imagine a white-bearded aged man as the typical image of what constitutes a “cinematographer”. However, now with changing times, Moitra hopes younger artists will hold the camera. 

When it comes to the stalwarts of Indian cinematography, Moitra is a huge admirer of the work of Santosh Sivan (the man behind Mani Ratnam ventures like Dil Se, Iruvar, Roja and Raavan), Sudeep Chatterjee (Sanjay Leela Bhansali’s right-hand man), and Ravi Varman (Tamasha, Barfi, and more recently the pan-Indian hit Ponniyin Selvan: 1). 

The legacy of these auteurs aside, it seems to be a common truth that women cinematographers like Moitra are a rare breed, be it in this country or in the West. After all, in the nine-decade history of the Oscars so far, it was only in 2017 when Rachel Morrisson’s nomination for Mudbound made her the first woman to be nominated for Best Cinematography. Since then, only one woman has been able to repeat the feat, with Ari Wegner securing a 2021 nomination for The Power of the Dog.

Closer home, some female cinematographers have been associated with mainstream titles, Priya Seth (Chef, Airlift) and Archana Borhade (My Name is Khan) being notable cases in point. While Moitra is keen on proving her own artistic merit in the future as a cinematographer and perhaps later even as a director, she states that a major challenge for her is the attitudes of a few crew members in the initial stages of production. 

“People I work with, who are in the grip or light team; they are people who work almost every day. So, naturally, they are experienced. And when they see me, a woman, they don’t take my words seriously in the beginning. It takes at least a few days for them to know my work and respect me.”

What’s next? Apart from the upcoming releases of Yodha and Jawan, Moitra hopes to bag as many films as she can with her future dreams including working with directors like Rajkumar Hirani and Sanjay Leela Bhansali. She also hopes to direct her own work one day. 

When asked what profession she might have ended up in if not film, she wonders, “Maybe a businesswoman.” She chuckles on the thought that if she indeed was a hot-shot tycoon, she might hire cinematographers for promotional campaigns and find faults in their work!

As for Moitra’s present life, she just hopes that more and more people show up to see her big-screen credits like Bhediya. “Often 70 percent of my friends might end up seeing it in the theatres but 30 percent would ask ‘phone pe kab aayega’ (when will it drop on the phone),” says Moitra, on the changing status of content consumption. After all, her current dabbling between a theatrical release and a Netflix original only reveals this duality.