It all started with a pinch. Growing up, Uttera Singh always heard the legendary story of her naughty cousin, who pinched people in crowds and started mob fights to get some personal space. The image stuck with Singh, and in 2019 when she was writing a film about an assault and how it impacts a young woman and her community, she knew she’d found a place to use the story.
Not only did it become the title of her feature directorial debut, but Singh stars in and produces the Tribeca Film Festival dramedy, which was selected from more than 14,000 global entries.
Pinch revolves around an aspiring travel blogger named Maitri (Singh) who travels with her mother and their neighbors to the annual Hindu festival Navratri. On the way, she is groped by a respected man in the community. Later, she gets retribution by pinching a woman in the crowd and blaming him. What follows is a darkly comedic story about the female experience, mother-daughter relationships, grief and trauma.
“My job is done,” Singh tells MovieMaker. “I was trying to tell the story I wanted to tell and people can take what they want from it. For some people it’s healing. For some, it enrages them. For me, life is absurd and I like to find the absurdity in it. You can have pain and joy co-exist and uncomfortable humor is my own way of dealing with trauma.”
Initially planned as a short, Pinch became a full feature after the film’s cinematographer and co-writer Adam Linzey hopped on board. The movie made its world debut at Tribeca on Friday, and plays again Saturday and Monday. Singh looks forward to landing premieres in Europe and India, as well as distribution.
We talked with Singh about the importance of community in making the film, the power dynamics of assault, and balancing comedy with trauma.
Uttera Singh on Balancing Comedy and Pain in Pinch
Amber Dowling: You wrote the script in English and then translated it to Hindi. Did you have difficulty with some of the nuances?
Uttera Singh: Those nuances don’t always translate and I found that out the hard way when I sent the first version to one of the actors I really wanted to play my mother’s friend. At first she refused to do it because she said it was bad. That it was really bad, because the Hindi didn’t flow. I was so hurt at first, but then I reread it and she was right. It needed two more passes to get the right flow and have it make sense. I had given up hope on her when she said she didn’t like the script, but when it was ready, I resent it and she agreed to do it.
Amber Dowling: The movie seems to normalize healing from abuse and the collective trauma that women go through — was that the intention?
Uttera Singh: Yes, and one more thing was that I also wanted to talk about how we sometimes leave men out of the conversation. Men also go through abuse. Women come together and talk about it and heal together, but men don’t necessarily get that. This isn’t to diminish what women go through. That can still exist while including men in the conversation. I read this incredible book called Invisible Women, where Caroline Criado Perez talks about how assault isn’t a gender issue, it’s a power issue. That’s such a powerful statement.
Amber Dowling: How did you want to treat the comedy of it all, given the dark subject matter?
Uttera Singh: I had to hold myself back and not treat the assault part in a funny way, because I wanted to be sure we were being sensitive and careful about treating that with care and realism. But the rest? I just see life as very absurd. I always got in trouble for laughing at the wrong moment. I lean more into that side of myself now and accept that it’s okay.
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Amber Dowling: The film has a budget of less than a million. How did you piece that financing together and make what you needed to happen?
Uttera Singh: The best thing that happened was I went back to my hometown in India and made it there. My whole community showed up, and there were privately raised funds, but also a lot of beg, borrow and steal.
One of my favorite examples was that we needed a red refrigerator for the apartment. My cousin called a neighbor, who swapped fridges so that we could use hers for like a month. Other people lent us their living room furniture. It was just so sweet. It makes me emotional to think of where people were just showing up. This was made with a lot of community love.
Amber Dowling: Did that community also factor in for the big crowd shot, where the title pinch happens?
Uttera Singh: Yes, that was extremely challenging and we only had the jib for two hours — that’s what we could afford. People traveled to bring all of the equipment up and that was something we only had for two hours. We were fighting the sun and we had 150 people from my parents’ villages who showed up. People were just standing there. It was hot but we needed the shot. At one point one woman held my hand and said, “It’s okay. Get your shot. We’re standing. We’re here.” I get so emotional, because that’s how the movie got made. By other people showing up.
Amber Dowling: The music threads the narrative together in a really compelling way. What was your inspiration for it?
Uttera Singh: The one thing I kept telling my composer, Raashi Kulkarni, was that I wanted it to feel like an anxiety attack, like a panic attack. I wanted it to feel like Maitri’s heart. Even when I was writing this, I would put on really aggressive music with drums and percussion. Raashi did an incredible job.
Amber Dowling: What other notable challenges did you face in making Pinch?
Uttera Singh: There were so many things, as with any indie film. We were just trying to take boulders up the hill, and we were like, “One more step. One more step.” Sadly, one of the big things that wasn’t a challenge but just a sad thing, is that Nitesh Pandey, who plays the assaulter, passed away a couple of months after the movie. So we never got to show him the film. Not that that’s the most important thing, but he was the nicest and so supportive of the movie.
Pinch premiered Friday at the Tribeca Film Festival.
Main image: Pinch, courtesy of Pinch.