Chance

Andre is having an existential moment as his thoughts collide and his hopes and dreams are at a cross-roads with destiny.

Creative team

Writer/director/producer: Kuru Selvarajah

Director’s statement

Kuru Selvarajah says:

“This movie came about after graduating from university and being rejected from my master’s program. I’ve always been conflicted with the idea of things happening for a reason or the idea of destiny. Even though I didn’t have a means to explore this beyond the scope of my thoughts, I began writing them and eventually wrote the dance sequence monologue and based the script around that.

The script was just a script for about a year. Then I met Chase Lo, who was an excellent dancer. I showed him the script and got him on board, bought a DSLR camera, borrowed two lenses from a friend (Jessica Roy) got a crew ready, two other friends O.R. Abedin, and Fahad M. Qureshi and shot the movie.

As a first time director, I had a hard time being organized, creating a storyboard and expressing what I needed from the actor. Many of the shots you’ll see are spontaneously planned on the spot except for the dance sequence.

The voice-over was the toughest thing for me to put together. I wasn’t getting the feel I wanted from the original actor’s voice. Eventually, I found Paul Edward who was a follower of my poetry blog. I sent him a rough cut of the movie and the script with my own voice-over to give him the feel.

He got on board and did a wonderful job emulating the contemplative nature of the script, an unlikely international/online collaboration. I had mixed reactions with choosing the voice-over as some felt it didn’t fit in with the character, or felt out of place.

The movie took about six months to make because of scheduling problems, which I dread the most when organizing a shoot. But if you cut that out, it took about five days of shooting at different locations.

This was definitely a learning process in many different ways, especially being organized and being more decisive as well as taking constructive criticism.”

About Kuru Selvarajah

Kuru Selvarajah is a Toronto-based writer/director/video editor trying to develop his career in one of those areas. He began writing poetry since 2010 and started a poetry blog in December 2011. Opening up the blog helped him to write regularly and get feedback on his writing. After flushing out a lot of mediocre poetry he began to take screenwriting more seriously and is currently working on a few scripts for short films and music videos. Chance is his first directorial venture but as a video editor he has worked on several short projects for his friends as well as for organizations he volunteered for prior to working on his own movie.