While the rest of India counts the days to a full lifting of the lockdown, director Shoojit Sircar says he's quite at home, at home. Despite a career in Bollywood, he lives in Kolkata, and arrives in the city only when he has work. "The rest of the time, I am at home, not interacting much. I actually don't like doing movie promotions at all. I just want to release my movie, and let the audience watch," he says in a telephonic interview.

He has emerged from temporary hiding because his movie, Gulabo Sitabo, which was slated for an April release, is now seeing a digital release on Amazon Prime next week. He thinks it's not viable to "sit on a film" and with digital entertainment being the new frontier, he decided to take the plunge. His previous films include the critically acclaimed October (2018), Vicky Donor (2012), which changed actor Ayushmann Khurrana's fortunes, and Amitabh Bachchan and Deepika Padukone-starter Piku (2015) Gulabo Sitabo, also stars Bachchan and Khurrana as warring tenant and landlord, as Sircar teams up with his writing partner Juhi Chaturvedi. They have set the movie in Lucknow, the city Chaturvedi belongs to. The name comes from the puppet characters Gulabo Sitabo, the ever-fighting sisters. The movie, they say, is about simple people, who are shaped by their circumstances. "It could be moral or financial limitations, and how that leads to specific behaviour. We are not judging them, we are just pointing the camera on their lives," says Chaturvedi, known for crafting realistic characters and poignant slice-of-life stories. Sircar adds, "It's about the struggle called life, but with a grin at the end."