[Part of Curator’s Corner, a section dedicated to showcasing work of emerging and marginal filmmakers. See here for details.]
“What if the Kardashians were born in a rural Rajasthani family and lived in Baroda on a budget?” So goes the logline for Dhruv Solanki’s beguiling debut feature It’s All in Your Head (2023), now available for rent on Gudsho in India and on NoBudge in the US.
A family movie, it is, but perhaps unlike any other. At the centre of this carefree comedy are two sets of real-life siblings from the Rajpurohit clan: freelance photographer Jyotsana, the largely absent Deepshikha and aspiring model Bonita who are cousins to office worker Bhagyashree, model Manshree and wannabe dancer Bhuvnesh. They live in two different flats in suburban Baroda, Gujarat, but they seem more at home on Instagram, where they run a thrift store. The film, which opens with an Insta live session, will follow the six characters over the course of a day, charting their individual hopes and frustrations in both the professional and domestic spheres: applications, rejections, flirtations, confrontations, breakups and reconciliation, the whole deal. Any two of the six siblings would periodically appear together, but the whole gang is never to be seen under a single roof.
A self-taught filmmaker, Solanki grew up in Ghaziabad, Uttar Pradesh, and trained as an engineer before teaching chemistry. When he moved to Baroda, he was working on a script about young male hopefuls, but that changed when he came in contact with the Rajpurohits through a common friend. As someone with little interest in social media, Solanki found the sisters’ lives as far removed from his own as possible. “But, ultimately, I realized we were the same,” he remarks, pointing to the common struggles with money and family approval that he was also experiencing at the time.
Some of the names involved in the film aren’t new to this blog. Bonita Rajpurohit is one of the actors in Dibakar Banerjee’s Love Sex aur Dhokha 2 (2024). Dhruv Solanki and Jyotsana Rajpurohit play the leads in Petals in the Wind (2024) by Abdul Aziz, who is credited for the subtitles in It’s All in Your Head. Solanki’s film bears certain similarities to Aziz’s work. Shot on a smart phone with non-actors in real locations and sync sound, it weaves a loose fiction over a bedrock of documentary details, stripped off the kind of stylization we see in even the most realist of mainstream cinema.
But where Aziz chooses a hyper-naturalist mode predicated on uninterrupted chunks of real-time (in)action, Solanki’s film takes the opposite route in terms of technique and tone. Avoiding long takes or complex camera movements, it instead progresses in a series of static or nearly static shots. Sequences sometimes unfold in master shots, but are generally broken down into close ups and mid-shots with odd eyelines. The most pronounced element is the music, composed of an assortment of genres — Hong Sang-soo-esque classical pieces, jazz, Latino, soft rock numbers — at times suggesting hidden emotional undercurrents, but mostly lending a frivolous, sitcom-like texture to the film.
All this nudges the film into Mumblecore territory that seems to be experiencing a new surge in Indian independent filmmaking of late: low-budget productions about the sexual hangups and romantic foibles of young urban professionals. It’s All in Your Head, however, doesn’t have the psychological penetration and fine-grained performances that characterized Mumblecore cinema. Notwithstanding the emotionally resonant final stretch, the actors themselves seem to barely believe in the story they are participating in.
What it lacks in acting prowess, It’s All in Your Head makes up for in the exciting discrepancy it sets up between reality and fiction. Solanki’s film takes a particular familial reality, wraps it in a loose swathe of fiction only in order to get back to a deeper reality. Like Aziz’s films, it presents the lifeworld of a certain class of suburban Indian youth — one firmly embedded in an image economy — with an endearing candour, featuring dialogue, locations and body types that we seldom see on screen. “What I felt responsible towards was the energy and essence of each person,” says Solanki, adding that he wanted to capture the way each sibling negotiated different environments. To this end, he shot dozens of exercises, following the sisters in their routine, making them play out pre-written roles or filming them in real-life situations and gatherings.
Solanki’s film stands out in how it thrusts viewers into a microcosm with its own laws, not offering outsider perspectives from which to judge its inhabitants. It challenges us to place these characters socially — there’s little sense here of the normative world of parents or neighbours — and derives much of its appeal out of the incongruence between their aspirational lifestyles and the mundane reality of the world around them: Bonita lounging in a nightgown in a cramped flat, the punk-like Jyotsana walking up the stairs of a certain Sai Vihar apartments, Manshree and her sister eating by a roadside chat joint, or any of them making rotis in the kitchen. Bonita’s transness is taken for granted, as is the social bubble they all seem to move around in. Solanki confesses that he isn’t as interested in the conflict between the characters and their world as in the one they have with and within themselves. It’s all in their head.
Marching to a private beat, the siblings seem to have carved out their own Malibu in mofussil Gujarat. Are we in a utopia, a Baroda that isn’t, but could be? Is the film defiance or wish-fulfilment? It’s All in Your Head offers an unusual, idiosyncratic vision of small-town India: not rotting in backward biases, but scrappy, hungry and punching above its weight.
Bio
Dhruv Solanki is a writer-director based in Vadodara, Gujarat. He has co-written and directed Blah Blah Blah, an independent comedy currently in post-production. He developed The Rebels of Shakambhari, a period action feature, as a fellow of the Writers Ink Screenwriting Lab. It was an official selection at the Cinephilia Film & TV development workroom and was also invited to participate in Rewrite, a screenwriting residency lab. It’s All in Your Head is his debut feature as a writer and director.
In January 2023, the Experimenta Film Festival in Bangalore presented two films by the Yugantar Film Collective. Founded in 1980 by Deepa Dhanraj, Abha Bhaiya, Meera Rao, and Navroze Contractor, this short-lived feminist collective made half hour–long documentary-fiction hybrids on issues of domestic violence, grassroots resistance to deforestation, and labor organizing among maids and factory workers. While Dhanraj took questions from the audience after the screening, her husband and cinematographer, Contractor, remained seated at the very back of the auditorium among students and festival volunteers, speaking up only when Dhanraj deferred to him.
Something of this withdrawn, thoughtful quality permeates the work of Contractor, who died in a motorcycle accident in June 2023. A renowned still photographer, amateur percussionist, and jazz aficionado, not to mention a legendary motorcycling enthusiast who also wrote on the subject, the 79-year-old Contractor was widely remembered in his obituaries as a master raconteur who could charm an audience with his wit and intelligence. As a cameraman for the first generation of Indian documentaries made without state patronage, Contractor was one of the key image-makers of Indian independent cinema. The insightful, non-patronizing films that he shot for Dhanraj and other documentarians in the ’80s, attentive to life on the ground and sensitive to historical context, may be said to embody the first stirrings of a democratic visual media movement in the country.
Born in 1944, Contractor grew up in Ahmedabad, in the western Indian state of Gujarat, and was trained in painting and photography at the Faculty of Fine Arts in Baroda. He applied to the Film and Television Institute of India (FTII) in Pune—the country’s premier film school, and alma mater of stalwarts like Adoor Gopalakrishnan, Kumar Shahani, and Shabana Azmi—to study cinematography, but he could only get a seat in the direction department. However, under the tutelage of the illustrious archivist P.K. Nair, who founded the National Film Archive of India, Contractor learned the ropes of cinematography and lab processing outside the curriculum. When a strike by the institute’s Acting students led to classes being canceled in 1969, the young man dropped out of his course to pursue a career in photography.
In the late ’60s, Contractor was employed by the Ford Foundation as a still photographer to document their socio-economic development projects in Punjab. The color slides that Contractor produced as part of this stint caught the eye of filmmaker and fellow FTII alumnus Mani Kaul, who told the cameraman that if he ever made a color film, Kaul would enlist him—a promise that came to fruition when the director’s regular cinematographer K.K. Mahajan dropped out of Duvidha (1973) because it was to be shot on a Bolex camera under “amateur” conditions.
That Kaul entrusted the cinematography of his first color film to someone who’d never shot a movie before is astounding given the delicate beauty of what they accomplished together. Based on a short story of the same name by acclaimed writer Vijaydan Detha, Duvidha centers on the dilemma of a taciturn teenage bride (played by Raisa Padamsee) whose miserly husband goes away on business a day after their wedding. Smitten by the bride at first sight, a ghost inhabiting a nearby tree takes the form of the absent husband and moves in with her. Things come to a head when the real husband gets wind of the impostor back home.
Partly financed by the leading lady’s father, the painter Akbar Padamsee, Duvidha was shot on 16mm Kodachrome II reversal stock (later blown up to 35mm) in the village of Borunda in Rajasthan, not far from Kaul’s birth city of Jodhpur. “We had very little money, just two sun guns for lights, a Uher non-sync tape recorder, no trolley and tracks… nothing,” Contractor recalled in an interview. Since Borunda was home to Detha, who personally requested the villagers’ cooperation, they were willing to comply with special requests from the film crew, such as painting all the houses of the village white or not turning on their lights at night so that the shooting could proceed without hiccups.
Inspired by the approach to space in Indian miniature painting, Kaul and Contractor sought to disrupt linear perspective as the basis for their image construction. This influence is perhaps most apparent in the film’s many high-angle shots in which the camera adopts the elevated “balcony view” characteristic of miniature paintings, while also suggesting the point of view of the ghost on the tree. With these off-kilter flourishes, sudden changes of scale, extreme foreshortening, deliberate underlighting, and partial framing of faces, Duvidha demands constant visual readjustment on the part of the viewer.
“Often when a camera movement had to be made,” Contractor said of Kaul in an interview, “he would sing in my ear, that was my speed, rhythm of the shot.” While the director asked Contractor to pan the camera only horizontally or vertically—never diagonally—the actors’ bodies, the staircases, and the oblique eyelines nevertheless produce a warped perspective with strong diagonals. The most striking visual element of the film may be the freeze-frames that Kaul employs to telescope the narrative. But equally notable are the various zooms, used at key moments to intimate the supernatural dimensions of the story—most memorably in the shot in which Padamsee, clad in a red saree and leaning against a white wall, stares back blankly into the telescoping lens.
The consistent use of roving zooms is perhaps the single most recognizable aspect of Contractor’s cinematography, and in his documentary work with the Yugantar Film Collective, he elevated this device into something like a modus operandi. The handheld zoom provided Contractor the nimbleness required in such dynamic situations as the conferences, rallies, and strikes that he often found himself recording. A remarkable shot at the end of Tobacco Embers (1982), lasting more than five minutes without a cut, offers a shining example. As a group of women discuss strategies for an upcoming protest, the camera travels from face to face—now zooming into one speaker, now darting over to the next. Within the film’s fly-on-the-wall framework, the zoom lens allows Contractor to move seamlessly between the individual and the collective, between consensus and dissent.
By the time he came to work on Sanjiv Shah’s Love in the Time of Malaria (1992), Contractor had shot more than 20 documentary works of varying length, including ones made by Shah, and five narrative features. Shot largely in Contractor’s hometown of Ahmedabad, Love in the Time of Malaria takes place in the fictional kingdom of Khojpuri and charts the fortunes of Hunshilal (Dilip Joshi), a young scientist who follows the king’s call to develop a concoction to eliminate “dissident” mosquitoes from the country. Hunshilal succeeds in his mission, but when he falls in love with a fellow scientist and underground revolutionary, his loyalties are challenged.
Shah’s film may be described as a “political musical comedy,” but that wouldn’t do justice to the sui generis work that it is. Blending a host of genres and expositional modes, it brings together archival footage, documentary sequences, musical numbers, and absurd vaudeville-like tableaux into an unholy composite that plays as broad, blunt satire. Brimming with references to contemporary personalities and events, Love in the Time of Malaria sharply encapsulates the anxieties of India in the early 1990s, a period marked by religious strife and economic liberalization—principal forces that have shaped, and continue to shape, present-day India.
The eclectic form of the film is reflected in its heterogeneous visual texture: pastel-colored sequences in serene daylight rub shoulders with grainy archival clips, seductively lit indoor musical numbers, and gritty street photography. The cinematographer of the spectral Duvidha and the steely Yugantar documentaries may have been particularly well-suited for this unique mix of granite and rainbow, of fable and hard fact. An example: as an exhortatory poem about dissent is recited on the soundtrack (by iconic Indian actor Naseeruddin Shah), the camera zoom-pans across a shipyard full of toiling workers, stopping finally at a narrator in a hard hat who breaks into a song.
Like many cinematographers, Contractor was a protean professional who adapted his technique and style to the needs of individual films and filmmakers. He made both single-shot films about local artisans and narrative features with no camera movement, such as Vishnu Mathur’s austere study of bachelor anomie Pehla Adhyay (1981). Though he cut his teeth on 16mm, he also studied video production at Sony Corporation in Tokyo in the 1980s and later shot one of the earliest Indian films in high-definition digital video, Chetan Shah’s English-language campus thriller Framed (2007). From embedded documentaries to low-budget fiction to works of high modernism, Contractor has left behind an eclectic body of cinematographic work, spanning almost half a century, unified by its fierce independence from the commercial mainstream.
[Part of Curator’s Corner, a section dedicated to showcasing work of emerging and marginal filmmakers. See here for details.]
Ever since the Sunday in 1895 when Louis Lumière photographed workers streaming out of the gates of his factory in Lyon-Monplaisir, the history of cinema has been tied up with issues of labour, leisure and workplace surveillance. In the century that followed, the image-making tools sometimes made it to the hands of the workers themselves, or to those of sympathetic filmmakers speaking on their behalf, throwing open questions around representation, ethics and consent. Who wields the camera? Who is the subject? Who holds sway over whom? Can an employee, especially dependent on the next paycheque, ever withhold permission to be filmed? Is consent paramount when filming people bound by lopsided contracts?
These questions all surface vividly in Renu Savant’s compelling new documentary The Orchard and the Pardes (Bageecha aur Pardes, 2024). An alumna of the Film and Television Institute of India, Savant is a Mumbai-based independent artist with an acute awareness of the complications of her practice and positionality. Her most prominent undertaking is the four-hour-long feature Many Months in Mirya (2017), shot in her ancestral village in coastal Maharashtra in Western India. A warm and unassuming pastoral diary film, Many Months in Mirya surveys not just the social fabric and the rhythm of life in this heterogenous village, but also the visual and aural experience of living in the place, in addition to its history, politics and ecology. Interweaving microscopic details and macroscopic events, it crafts a cinema of the land, demonstrating that a work of art can limit itself to a few square kilometres and still discover the world underneath.
The Orchard and the Pardes is set in a private mango orchard outside the town of Ratnagiri, one of the epicentres of mango production in the country, not far from Mirya. It follows the everyday activities of immigrant workers who come down to Ratnagiri from Nepal every year during the harvest season. We see the workers gathering the fruits, pruning trees and carrying out whatever tasks their Marathi-speaking employer assigns them. To get through their arduous days under a beating sun, they drink locally brewed liquor, talk over the phone or sing songs. It is the summer of 2021 and the pandemic is posing a threat to both the men’s livelihood and their timely return home.
Discussing what The Orchard and the Pardes is about risks reducing it to an issue-based documentary. Savant’s film is instead animated by the spaces in between people, each shot a record of the shifting dynamics of trust, power and language between the filmmaker, the workers and their employer. An opening intertitle clarifies the social position of the filmmaker: “The film is a document of the conditions of migrant labour in Konkan, Maharashtra, India. The film is also about the encounter between an urban woman filmmaker from the dominant caste and rural, Bahujan caste men from a male-dominated, agro-business field.”
As a lone woman engaging with an all-male environment, Savant finds herself in a complex power equation with the people she is filming. For the workers, she appears first as an emissary of their employer, and the camera a surveillance device. Their natural distrust of her presence leads them to perform for the camera, on the one hand, and take refuge in their native Nepali tongue, on the other. Throughout, we see them saying one thing to Savant in Hindi and adding something else among themselves in Nepali, despite their awareness that everything they utter could be translated. These quips, often teasing the filmmaker and sometimes of a lewd nature, are subtitled post-facto for us, but Savant herself doesn’t fully understand what is being said during the shoot.
At the same time, a sexual tension permeates the air, with these anxious bachelors sizing up the filmmaker, wondering what a single woman is doing in their midst. The threat becomes palpable in one particular sequence, in which Savant’s reticent camera records the group of men drinking during their break. With alcohol lowering the workers’ inhibitions, the camera turns into a kind of protective shield for the filmmaker, now comparably vulnerable and out of place as the workers are in Ratnagiri.
For the employer, whom we don’t see as much as the workers, the filmmaker is a potential embarrassment, someone who could record unflattering things that the labourers have to say about him or the unfair working routine he is putting them through. He is withdrawn, but his power is felt in the instructions he gives and in the workers’ testimonies of how ruthless and money-minded he is. We also sense that he has the capacity to evict the filmmaker were things to go out of control.
This three-way tug-of-war between the workers, their employer, and the filmmaker is embodied perfectly in a shot in which the camera gazes up at one of the men on a tree trying to cut down a branch. It is a dangerous job that the worker, speaking into a lapel mic, is reluctant to do despite the boss’ insistence. As he unwillingly completes the task, barely avoiding a major mishap, the filmmaker records the scene perched next to the employer. In this particular instance, the three stakeholders seem to have expectations that are orthogonal to each other. Standing shoulder to shoulder with the employer, the camera monitors the worker, while also potentially incriminating the employer for the hazardous working conditions he has put in place. But the camera itself isn’t beyond reproach. While it may not wish for an accident, the act of filming nonetheless produces a voyeuristic moment pregnant with high drama.
Despite these standoffish situations, a gradual trust develops between the filmmaker and the workers. The camera’s presence seemingly allows the men to carve out moments of leisure and imagination from their regimented schedule, and over time, they feel secure enough to talk ill of their boss or to plan to abuse him verbally. To be sure, this isn’t total solidarity, and the workers are never beyond playing the filmmaker for a fool, such as when they pass off popular Nepali songs as their own. But there is a modicum of affection and mutual respect that becomes apparent.
Part of the reciprocity has to do with language, particularly poetry. One of the workers, Kushal, says that he likes to make up songs during work — a claim that the filmmaker pursues, urging him to pen down his poems in a notebook. While he begins by claiming authorship to popular Nepali numbers, as time passes, he comes to make them his own, even writing original lines for them. Kushal’s vulnerability as he reads his original compositions for the camera, risking ridicule by the other boys, is touching. And it is the filmmaker’s intervention that makes this unveiling possible.
The Orchard and the Pardes offers a virtual compendium of the roles that the documentary camera has historically assumed: a device for capitalistic surveillance, a tool for journalistic exposé and academic knowledge production, and finally a poetic instrument probing beneath surface appearances. Rather than a fly on the wall observing an inviolable reality, the camera becomes a fly in the soup, self-consciously catalysing the reality it sets out to document. Within the outline of an ethnographic portrait, Savant’s deceptively simple film manages to explore fundamental undercurrents coursing through all of documentary cinema.
The Orchard and the Pardes had its world premiere at the Kolkata People’s Film Festival earlier this year and is awaiting its international showing.
Bio
Renu Savant’s film work has centred on methodologies of video documentation and reflexivity and story-telling in fiction. While a student at the Film and Television Institute of India, she was the winner of two National Film Awards in 2012 and 2015 respectively for her short fiction films, and other awards such as the Special Jury Mention at IDSFFK, 2011, and the 3rd National Students’ Film Award for Best Short Film in 2015. Her film Many Months in Mirya received the John Abraham National Award for Best Documentary, 2017, and an invitation to the Yokohama Triennale, 2020. In 2020, BAFTA selected her for their Breakthrough India programme.
The Seventh Art 