Irrfan Khan to reunite with director Anup Singh for Lasya – The Gentle Dance

After Qissa (2015) and The Song of Scorpions (2017), actor Irrfan Khan will work again with director Anup Singh on his next project,  tentatively titled Lasya – The Gentle Dance.

Their second collaboration, The Song of Scorpions, will be screened at the ongoing Singapore International Film Festival. 

Singh spoke to Hollywood trade magazine Variety and revealed that he is planning on working with Khan again. “It will be my third film with him, a kind of conclusive trilogy bringing to some resolution, I hope, [to] the themes that have been haunting me since Qissa and have continued to pursue me with The Song of Scorpions,” he said.

The director also spoke about the next project is about, stating, “The film is about a man who grew up in the tradition of the Krishna Leela, a ritual performance, where men play as women. Here, the man realizes that he likes to play at being a woman in his everyday life too. For the moment, the film is titled Lasya – The Gentle Dance.”

The Song Of Scorpions review: Lilting, folklore-ish, but monotonous tale

The Song of Scorpions, also stars Golshifteh Farahani and a special cameo by Waheeda Rehman. The film had its Indian premiere at the 19th Mumbai Film Festival in October 2017 and its world premiere in Locarno, Switzerland in August 2017. 

Singh said he was disturbed by the Nirbhaya rape case in New Delhi in December 2012 and the images and visuals of The Song of Scorpions came to him in a nightmare. 

“What I still remember are flickering images of light so bright and dry that it was like salt in the eyes. Rippling vistas of burning sand and, strangely, a shawl made of tattered rags of purple and green and blood red wavering in the wind,” Singh told Variety.

“And within all that rage and glare of fire and sand, a singing voice as gentle and calming as the first drizzle in a desert. I awoke breathless with the whole story of the film racing through me. Because of imagery and the clash of different realities in my nightmare, the story quite organically started unfolding as a folktale when I started writing it,” he said.

Despite being shot in India, The Song of Scorpions is a France-Switzerland-Singapore co-production. Singh felt he would lose his creative freedom if he had made the film with an Indian producer. The film is due to be released in Europe in March 2018 and should be released in India and other territories sometime in 2018.