Set in 90s Chandigarh, Ghich Pich — the directorial debut of Ankur Singla — is a study of adolescent restlessness and the quiet fault lines within middle-class families. The narrative builds its drama from the smallest gestures, allowing disputes and dissensions to accumulate with a natural ease, while the performances carry an authentic immediacy, with the period details grounding the film in a world that is both sharply observed and resonant. Singla doesn’t judge his main characters for their mistakes or rebelliousness, but rather portrays them with empathy, suggesting that there is hope in their futures. The result is a work that speaks of teenage yearning and defiance with clarity and lasting force.

Ghich Pich released theatrically in India in August 2025. In this conversation, Singla reflects on the process of shaping the film, the value of understated detail and the shared human experiences that allow us to connect with one another.

Ghich Pich Interview: Related — An Interview with ‘Moonwalk’ Filmmaker A.K. Vinod

Dipankar Sarkar: You were an entrepreneur before making a pivot into filmmaking with your debut Ghich Pich. What inspired this shift, and how has your entrepreneurial background influenced your approach to cinema?

Ankur Singla: I sold my startup to Amazon in 2018 and was serving the mandatory sinecure of three years post the acquisition. During that time, COVID-19 happened, and that led to a lot of rethinking about life. I had always been a cinema buff, and ran a film club during my college [years]. I decided to try my hand at learning screenwriting and directing. I went for weekend classes and then kept trying to learn the basics of the craft over the next few years. 

My entrepreneurial background helped in many ways, such as running a set and getting people excited about a common purpose. It came more naturally to me. I also made several mistakes as a founder, like chasing vanity metrics and taking hasty decisions. So, this time I wanted to take my time and focus on creating something decent — at least something we could look back on and say, “We tried our best, and given our talent and abilities at that time, this is the best that could have happened.”

Ghich Pich Interview: Related — An Interview with ‘Humans in the Loop’ Filmmaker Aranya Sahay

DS: Ghich Pich evokes 1990s Chandigarh. What personal memories guided this recreation of the period, and how did you ensure that the nostalgia felt authentic rather than slipping into clichés?

AS: COVID-19 was a mind-churn (to use a polite phrase) for many people, including me. Along with that, I willingly followed the advice often given to new writers: “Write what you know.” These two factors combined ensured that personal memories of growing up in Chandigarh became a significant part of the script. The memories came gushing, which was a revelation to me as well.

[George] Orwell’s terse advice to writers includes avoiding clichés. But no matter how hard you try, we all go through similar experiences. Hence, the early drafts contained a lot of material that might have felt overly familiar. I think three things helped: [One], I shared the early drafts with friends and fellow writers, asking for feedback on what felt repetitive or predictable. [Two], I made a conscious effort to ensure that nostalgia was never at the forefront of the script. We focused on the story and characters, allowing the production design to create a nostalgic world. Nostalgia became an incidental element, not the main point. [Three], I was also comfortable making the story deeply personal, believing that the more personal it became, the less likely it was to feel clichéd.

Ghich Pich Interview: Related — An Interview with ‘Victoria’ Filmmaker Sivaranjini J

DS: Did you choose the title Ghich Pich as a metaphor for adolescence — a period that is messy, confusing and yet deeply formative?

AS: I chose the name intuitively, as the first draft was a mishmash of anecdotes and incidents from adolescence, without adhering too strictly to the rules of screenwriting. The name stuck, and it worked on multiple levels, reflecting the state of a 17-year-old’s mind as well as the overall essence of the story.

Ghich Pich Interview: Related — Interview with ‘Narayaneente Moonnaanmakkal’ Filmmaker Sharan Venugopal

DS: Ghich Pich is modest, linear and measured. You balance humor, drama and conflict without slipping into melodrama. How did you calibrate that tonal balance as the  writer-director?

AS: Modest is the best way to describe it. I aimed to get the basics right. Having made multiple short films that didn’t quite work, I approached this one differently. I thought, let me cast well and tell the story as simply as possible. If I could do that, I’d consider it a success. While a great deal of thought went into shot selection, production design and editing, the goal was to never let these elements overshadow the story. I tried to be comfortable with the director’s hand remaining invisible, which is always a tempting challenge.

Maintaining tone is one of the director’s key responsibilities, and for that, the pre-production process and rehearsals were crucial. We also had an acting coach who worked with the younger cast to help them capture the right emotional frequency of their characters. Above all, the intent was to portray “people like us” who are regular middle-class folks in an authentic, grounded way, where conflicts may not be grand but the emotions run deep. While TVF and OTT platforms in India have now made such middle-class stories commonplace, you still don’t see them often enough in feature films.

Ghich Pich Interview: Related — An Interview with ‘Alappuzha Gymkhana’ Filmmaker Khalid Rahman

DS: The struggles of Gaurav (Shhivam Kakar), Anurag (Aryan Singh Rana) and Gurpreet (Kabir Nanda) all trace back to their fathers through expectation, tradition or prejudice. Yet you don’t portray the fathers as mere antagonists. Was this father-son dynamic always pivotal to your vision?

AS: No, it was not. The script began as an anecdotal soup of recreated memories. The concept of a theme was not a big bother for me. That has its pros and cons. The pros are that you tend to write more naturally, and the characters can be truer to themselves than to the needs of the theme. The cons are that you end up with a script that is not a good screenplay. For the definition of “good,” I would [paraphrase] Elia Kazan, who described it as flowing like an arrow by building everything toward a unified climax and maintaining a constant focus on the central character in every scene. But that is where re-writing comes in, and slowly, we chiseled away the unnecessary to bring it into shape. However, because of its origins, too much material still remained that did not move the story forward like an arrow. Hence, a lot of additional chiseling happened on the edit table too. Finally, a father-and-son theme emerged, almost as if the editor Syed Mubashshir Ali picked up a wooden stick from under a pile of fallen leaves.

Ghich Pich Interview: Related — An Interview with ‘Bokshi’ Filmmaker Bhargav Saikia

DS: Ghich Pich avoids loud messaging and instead finds a middle ground between generations. With Rakesh bound by social prejudice and Gurpreet determined to cut his hair and abandon his turban, how central were these generational tensions to shaping the narrative?

AS: I think these are things that are more related to personal taste. I prefer stories where the villains are intelligent or at least human. Also, being older and a parent, it was easier for me to see the perspective of the vilified side of the generation gap.

Ghich Pich Interview: Related — An Interview with ‘Kaisi Ye Paheli’ Filmmaker Ananyabrata Chakravorty

DS: In Ghich Pich, the aforementioned Kakar, Rana and Nanda capture recklessness, ambition and vulnerability in different ways. What guided your casting choices to find actors who could bring rawness to their performances?

AS: They say directing is 90 percent casting. I think they are wrong. Directing is 99 percent casting. An actor pretty much makes the scene, and all camerawork, production design and even the quality of the writing (at a scene level) matters a lot less. Yes, a good, well-structured screenplay is a fundamental requirement. But when the script is written by someone else, directing is casting the right individuals. I was looking for innocent and fresh faces who looked the part. I loved the casting of Jamtara Season 1 and reached out to Vikas Pal of Casting Pro, who had cast for that show. He helped us achieve a great cast, working closely with Karmaditya Bagga, an AD on the film.

Ghich Pich Interview: Related — An Interview with ‘Sabar Bonda’ Filmmaker Rohan Kanawade

DS: The cinematography captures both the intimacy of family spaces and the wider texture of a bygone period. What visual approach did you and your cinematographer, Sukhan Saar Singh, pursue to invoke realism within Ghich Pich?

AS: We shot in real houses of people, and our job was to just find time capsules — houses that felt like they were stuck in the 90s. Shooting in cramped rooms limited our shot choices. There was a wall everywhere we wanted to put a camera. But Sukhan Saar Singh, the cinematographer, used this to his advantage by framing cleverly. For exterior shots, the real advantage was that Chandigarh’s architecture has remained the same due to building by-laws. However, in every wide shot, there were too many modern cars or folks walking around with mobile phones. Since we didn’t have the budget for expensive VFX, we did our best to take as many wide shots at secluded locations as possible.

Ghich Pich Interview: Related — An Interview with ‘The Elysian Field’ Filmmaker Pradip Kurbah

DS: Ghich Pich is rooted in a specific time and place, yet it resonates with universal teenage anxieties. What do you want audiences to carry with them after watching it?

AS: I think a lot of things have changed, but the central conflicts of each character still resonate. The failed ambitions of Naresh (Satyajit Sharma), the pressure of traditions on Lakhpal (Nishan Cheema) and the secrets of Rakesh (Nitesh Pandey) — all these things will never change, perhaps. I wish teenagers would see their parents as more human after this film.

Ghich Pich Interview: Related — An Interview with ‘Feminist Fathima’ Filmmaker Fasil Muhammed

DS: Do you think today’s filmmaking and distribution landscape still has space for independent films like Ghich Pich?

AS: It has space in the hearts of the people, but maybe not in the landscape of distribution. Both OTTs and theatres/exhibitors feel that this kind of cinema does not work. But one must make the film one wants. Otherwise, what’s the point of being a filmmaker?

Dipankar Sarkar (@Dipankar_Tezpur) is a Rotten Tomatoes-approved film critic based in India. As a freelancer, he regularly contributes to various Indian publications on cinema-related topics.  

Ghich Pich Interview: Related — An Interview with ‘Saba’ Filmmaker Maksud Hossain