7 Days – Covid Lexicon

7 Days is a romantic comedy of the pandemic genre that premiered at the Tribeca Film Festival on June 10, 2021.

Ravi and Rita are two young Indian-Americans on a pre-arranged date organized by their strict parents who are very traditional. Ravi is boring, repressed, lacks confidence in girls and gets his advice from his mother whom he is very close to but he does good character impersonations. He is looking for a traditional Indian girl and wants three children. Rita is the exact opposite. She eats meat, drinks alcohol, prefers her own company and has no interest in getting married. What initially started off as a failed date ends up with both of them getting closer as a result of Covid-19, lockdown and shelter-in-place orders which forces the two of them to live together for seven days.

One movie reviewer says the film “is a good reminder that characters don’t have to like each other a whole lot for their actors to have great chemistry…7 Days has an overall sweetness that keeps it charismatic for its 85-minute runtime [and] joins the limited ranks of Good Covid-Era Cinema, and applies certain anxieties about the period of shelter-in-place creatively, without manipulation. That is no small feat; neither is making some movie magic out of two actors dancing around the question that, when just elusive enough, always makes for a good story: Will they or won’t they?” (Allen).

Production began during 2020 and filming took eight days. The movie was directed by Roshan Sethi and stars Karan Soni and Geraldine Viswanathan. It won “Best Narrative Feature awards at the San Diego Asian Film Festival and the Coronado Island Film Festival” (Wikipedia). You can watch the trailer below: