When Amit Agarwal came across a newspaper report on the rise in the suicide rate in India, the figures shocked the Ghaziabad guy. “The statistics were depressing. I just wished someone could do something to improve the situation,” he recalls. For his part, the 30-year-old started scripting Mast Curry, a satirical movie on the subject. “Humour is entwined with the serious narrative to urge people to look at lighter things in life,” says Agarwal, as he unwinds in Delhi, after a shooting stint in Corbett.

“The storyline is based in Corbett and we are almost done with the filming, except for a few scenes that’ll be shot in Mumbai later this month,” says Agarwal, who is playing the lead character, apart from producing and directing what he claims is India’s first real-time movie in which actions are unedited and the movie time of a particular sequence corresponds to real time it takes. Every action is filmed and the plot does not randomly shift from one location to another. Why did he opt for the unconventional genre? “It went in tandem with our aim to keep the film realistic,” says Agarwal.

So in his 90-100-minute movie, the trained filmmaker from the Asian Academy of Film and Television, Noida, plays an aspiring filmmaker who is on the verge of committing suicide, before he is informed of a three-film deal with a renowned production house. He no longer wants to end his life, but Saira, who intends to sell tapes of his suicide, convinces him to go ahead with the plan. “It’s a black comedy,” says Agarwal, who has earlier made a feature film Virgin Mira that did not go beyond private screenings and documentaries like A Pig’s Life on animal rights and Khilti Kaliya that focused on female literacy.