A STOREY Of love

Love at Fifth Floor, a five-part mini-series set in a Bengaluru apartment complex, explores desire and friendship through the lives of three ordinary women

- MAHIMA NAGARAJU

INDIAN cinema has come a long way from portraying sexuality through metaphors like flowers 'kissing' in a field or relegating women characters to the roles of virtuous wives or scheming vamps, yet films that explore women's sexuality in a nuanced way - eschewing this binary - remain rare.

Aditi Banerjee's internationally acclaimed miniseries, Love at Fifth Floor, released on the Open Theatre OTT platform earlier this month, seeks to challenge this narrative. "I feel like female desire is still depicted in a very over-the-top way. Either you're in a mini skirt, having a drink and talking about sex, or you're a homemaker in a domestic serial. I wanted to break that mould - why is desire only for a certain kind of woman?" Banerjee asks.