Actor Sonal Sehgal shares her experience of working with a foreign cast in the upcoming film Manny

Actor Sonal Sehgal, who was last seen in the film Aashayein, will be seen romancing Russian actor Jurijs Dyakonovs, in the Indo-Latvian co-production and sci-fi thriller Manny.

A story of a woman trapped by an AI inside a house, Manny will mark Sonal’s debut as a producer. The film has been directed by Latvian director, Dace Puce and stars Russian, British, Latvian, French and Indian actors of repute.

Jurijs Dyakonovas, a well-known actor in Europe, will be next seen in a series sharing screen space with Sophie Turner, better recalled as Sansa Stark from the popular Netflix series Game Of Thrones. The other primary characters in the film are played by British Actor Tony Hopkins and Latvian actors Darta Danevica, Egons Dombrovskis and Marta Grase.

“All the actors made themselves available for all the online readings with the entire team and by the time I actually met them, it was like we already knew each other pretty well. The film is futuristic and the process of making the film has also been a very unconventional one,” tells Sonal.

Talking about her co-actor Jurjis, Sonal says, "I was surprised that Jurijs had been to India five times and he was very well-accustomed to Indian culture, requiring minimal explanation regarding the nuances of my character. I play an Indian girl who travels to Latvia on a writer’s retreat and then gets trapped by artificial intelligence”.

This sci-fi psychological thriller has been entirely shot in Latvia in January and since then, the team has been working online during COVID-19 pandemic to finish the postproduction. While the edit and colour grading are being done in Latvia, the music and sound mix are being completed in India.