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May 12, 2025

Showcase: The Light for the Rest of the Walk (Naresh Hegde Dodmari, 2024)

Posted by Just Another Film Buff under All Posts, Cinema of India, Curator's Corner | Tags: , , , , , |
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[Part of Curator’s Corner, a section dedicated to showcasing work of emerging and marginal filmmakers. See here for details.]

A few days ago, I watched the Malayalam classic Irakal (1985). K.G. George’s dark and disturbing picture of youthful anomie finding outlet in sadistic violence. Irakal locates the root of its protagonist Baby’s malaise in his environment, namely his feudal, power-hungry household of landgrabbers, liquor barons and assorted self-seekers. The family in George’s film is a hotbed of pragmatic evil, Baby being simply its Platonic ideal. A new independent Kannada film by Naresh Hegde Dodmari, Tingl Belku (The Light for the Rest of the Walk), crafts a counter-portrait of sorts, offering a gentle domestic drama where the family is a source of support and salvation for a sensitive young man losing his bearings in life.

A poet who grew up in Honnavara and Yellapura in northwestern Karnataka (not far from the home of his near-namesake Natesh Hegde), Naresh Hegde wasn’t particularly drawn to films in his childhood. It was during his days as an engineering student in Bangalore – and later as an employee in Pune, where he had the chance to interact with film school students – that he became acquainted with international cinema through pirated DVDs and public screenings. Like a number of his self-taught peers, Hegde began his journey with short films made for YouTube before scraping together private equity to produce his first feature.

At the centre of Tingl Belku is Sandeep, an engineering student who returns home to Kumta, Uttara Kannada, for the summer vacation. Once an active poet, Sandeep has become, per his editor friend, sporadic and abstruse in his writing. He often takes off on his bike, spending his days alone away from home. Concerned with his aloofness, Sandeep’s parents seek the help of Harish, a local lawyer whom they are in talks with for marriage with their daughter. We gradually learn that Sandeep is under the influence of drugs and that he has been keeping away from college due to a police raid in the campus. As Harish tries to get to the bottom of things, Sandeep becomes increasingly incommunicative and introverted.

Tingl Belku stands out from the horde of cautionary drug dramas in the way it steers clear of the sensationalism inherent in the subject. There are no dramatizations here of withdrawal symptoms, no writhing in underlit corridors, no shocking glimpses of syringes or tie-off belts. Not once do we actually see Sandeep take drugs; we don’t even get to know what kind of drug it is. Part of this elision has to do with Hegde’s abstract treatment of the topic, which doesn’t really delve into the nitty-gritty of substance abuse or its sociological reality; the filmmaker is rather interested in the effects of addiction on the fabric of a rural middle-class family. But it is also the result of a consciously dialled-down approach to drama in which conflicts are defused as soon as they arise and characters are treated with a great deal of dignity.

Hegde depicts Sandeep’s affliction without condescension or pity. A dreamy-eyed poet of a philosophical bent, Sandeep views his drug habit as an exploration into expanded consciousness, a way to access realms of artistic inspiration inaccessible in waking life. Played without frills by Sharath Raysad, Sandeep shares little of the screen conventions of a discontented young man. Although his haze keeps him away from his family for long periods, he is well aware of the implications of his addiction on his near and dear. Not one to vocally rebel, Sandeep lays low and takes particular care not to upset the family cart, dutifully helping his father renovate the house and making sure that his situation doesn’t jeopardize his sister’s impending wedding.

These moral nuances extend to the secondary characters as well. Harish (Naresh Bhat), the prospective brother-in-law, fashions himself as a community leader, a problem solver who likes to make his presence felt everywhere he goes. But he is also a genuinely nice guy who goes out of his way to help Sandeep and his family. Above all, there is Sandeep’s soft-spoken father, Gopal (Venkatraman Gudaballi), the antithesis to the authoritarian patriarchs that dominate Indian cinema. Gopal, who defers to Harish in handling the situation, understands the limits to which he can probe his dodgy ward, the boundaries that he must respect with a son who now towers above his shoulders. More than anything, it is in these closely observed textures of everyday living that the film comes alive.

A beautiful sense of proportion and discretion marks all the relationships in the film: the palpable feeling that these are delicate bonds that it would be unwise to stress beyond a point. The film’s form reflects this reserve. In its leisurely pacing, soft naturalism and refusal of cable-TV hysteria, Tingl Belku may remind one of the telefilms that used to be broadcast on Doordarshan in the 1990s. Scenes are built elegantly, with no more than two (largely static) camera setups and attention paid to the flows of everyday interaction. Even when the style is uneven, caught between description of facts and an elaboration of the Sandeep’s interiority, there is a uniformity in tone that holds the film together.

Hegde imbues Tingl Belku with a heightened sense of place and time, with its scenes unfolding in strikingly varying landscapes that showcase the visual richness of the Uttara Kannada region: vistas of plains, woods, low hills, beaches, highways and fields all find prominent representation. Even if one doesn’t remember plot details, it would be hard to forget the stairways leading down to Sandeep’s house, or the one inside the living room connecting to the young man’s attic. This visual approach lends the film a subtly expressionistic quality where the settings reflect Sandeep’s fluctuating moods: the reclusive forest, the expansive sea, the melancholic horizon and so on.

An admirable debut feature of overarching benevolence, Tingl Belku had its world premiere in competition at the Rajasthan International Film Festival and is currently awaiting its international premiere.

 

Bio

Writer and director Nareshkumar Hegde (33, BE, MBA) was brought up in the Western Ghats and coastal region of Karnataka. He developed an interest in poetry and creative writing during his college days, which later transitioned to visual storytelling. Before completing his debut feature-length film Tingl Belku (The Light for the Rest of the Walk) in 2024, he made six short films which were selected and awarded in various short film festivals. Three of his short films, Mehnat, Bennigelliya Kannu and Parallel Lines, were finalists in three editions of the Bengaluru International Short Film Festival.

Contact

nareshandfilms@gmail.com | YouTube | Facebook | Instagram

Filmography

  • Feet & Patience (2012), 4 min., mobile phone
  • Three Boxes (2014), 12 min., digital
  • Feathers (2016), 20 min., digital
  • Mehnat (2017), 17 min., digital
  • Samantara Geregalu (Parallel Lines) (2018), 10 min., digital
  • Bennigelliya Kannu (Uncover) (2020), 23 min., digital
  • Tingl Belku (The Light for the Rest of the Walk) (2024), 108 min., digital.

Showcase

Teaser for The Light for the Rest of the Walk (2024)

 

April 21, 2025

Spotlight: MK Abhilash

Posted by Just Another Film Buff under All Posts, Cinema of India, Curator's Corner | Tags: , , , , |
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[Part of Curator’s Corner, a section dedicated to showcasing work of emerging and marginal filmmakers.]

Pseudo Emotions: the banner under which Bangalore-based filmmaker, music composer and poet MK Abhilash produced his earliest shorts gives a glimpse into what one can expect from his quirky and original body of work. Abhilash’s three recent short films revolve around highly melodramatic situations — infidelity, childlessness, terminal illness — set in recognizable everyday reality. But they derail our expectations of the premise through the introduction of a limited number of uncanny, bizarrely incongruous elements.

Take Kuuk Aah? (2024). A sleepyhead husband, living off his wife’s income, brings home a chicken that he rescues from a sadistic friend. As this idler roams the city looking for public places to sleep in, his long-suffering wife becomes emotionally involved with the fowl, now living in the house in a semi-human form, dressed like a butler. The basic dramatic situation is utterly familiar — marital strife, emotional neglect, extra-marital affair — but the plot unfolds with an otherworldly logic and texture that are anything but familiar.

The primary inspiration for his stories, Abhilash says, comes from the lives of those around him; in the case of Kuuk Aah?, the spontaneous lament of a neighbour whose wife eloped with a domestic help. But the films transmute these experiences, turning real human emotions into parodies – pseudo emotions – that work against conventional dramatic structures of viewer identification and empathy. Something is always ‘off’, keeping us at a distance while drawing us into a plausible world that resembles our own.

Break through their humorous exterior, you find darker undercurrents. Moda Moda (2025, awaiting premiere) centres on a childless couple comprising a chauvinist husband who doesn’t want to adopt and his dismayed wife. Things take a turn when the man’s pregnant sister comes home following a domestic dispute and persuades her brother to let her stay in his body. Lo! The ill-tempered husband is now pregnant himself and develops a loving bond with his wife. That is until the sister’s alcoholic husband arrives to take her back.

If Moda Moda overlays its atmosphere of inchoate dread with dark humour, Dictionary Mohan (2022) is positively bleak. Having befriended the last survivor of a whistle-speaking tribe, Mohan embarks on a whistle-to-Kannada dictionary to help his alien mate integrate into the society. Alas, Mohan is diagnosed with a terminal disease, leaving him incapable of completing the dictionary. Everyone around Mohan is self-absorbed, isolated, locked up in the silo of their mind, unable to communicate, doomed to incomprehension. The film would be unbearable if it weren’t funny.

The dissonance between subject matter and tone of Abhilash’s films is amplified by the non-naturalist acting style that swings between TV-soap hysteria and cartoonish flatness. Aashith, who plays the lead in all three films, has an expressive, comic earnestness at odds with the ironic nature of the film; the lazy husband he portrays in Kuuk Aah? might as well be a stick figure. Reactions in these films are exaggerated, gestures are isolated and amplified, and the dialogue is insistent and overly enunciated. The excessive politeness of the characters towards each other is undercut by bursts of unexpected nastiness.

Dictionary Mohan

Kuuk Aah?

Moda Moda

Compared to Abhilash’s earliest work, which are heavy on concept and denser in their writing, these three shorts attest to a conscious formal simplification. Set mostly indoors, the new films are shot on digital monochrome with a largely static camera, from oblique or frontal angles, and sometimes with overly dramatic lighting. The dialogue and the plotting are sparser and demand less effort of assimilation from the audience. Abhilash makes striking use of music and animation: 8-bit electronic loops, doodles and symbols overlaid on live-action footage and occasional use of saturated colour to offer visual relief, all of which are present in Moda Moda. In Dictionary Mohan, the whistle language is given a distinctly musical quality rather than the prosody of Kannada or English.

Abhilash currently produces his work as part of the Neelavarana Collective, a heterogeneous group of Ambedkarite artists from Bangalore who participate in each other’s projects. Mahishaa, the founder of the collective, shot Moda Moda while two other members, Naveen Tejaswi and Ajay Tambe, feature in the cast of Kuuk Aah?. Abhilash lends a helping hand in Mahishaa’s films and music videos, composing, for instance, the propulsive score for Babasaheb in Bengaluru (2024). Where the other works by the collective tend to adopt a style closer to realism and a more direct mode of engaging with real-world politics, Abhilash’s films and poems have a more whimsical, inward-looking quality, like the visions of someone staring dreamily out the window.

An intriguing aspect of Abhilash’s films is their curious emphasis on bodily transformations. In 8th Day of The Week (2017), a “human shadow” is anxiously waiting to become fully human, while A Mute’s Telephone (2018) features gender reassignment and voice transplant surgeries. The moribund lexicographer of Dictionary Mohan turns into an apple tree, just as the chicken of Kuuk Aah? transforms into a chivalrous gentleman. In Moda Moda, the human body is fully mutable, capable of hosting other bodies and their characteristics.

Some of these elements, particularly the taste for physical mutations, may have to do with Abhilash’s fondness for anime ­— he cites Satoshi Kon and Masaaki Yuasa as inspirations — as well as folk tales and local beliefs found across India. There seem to me to be few immediate precedents to Abhilash’s films, but in their shaggy-dog storytelling and their gleefully silly scrambling of the social code, they share something of wackiness found in the work of another musician-filmmaker, Quentin Dupieux. Like the Frenchman’s one-joke odysseys, Abhilash’s shorts come to embody a kind of vernacular surrealism that employs and explodes the codes of domestic melodrama in quaint and refreshingly absurd ways. Whether or not there is any greater significance, any hefty subtext, to these baffling stories, the films’ entertaining, provocative quality is beyond doubt. The result makes you wince and laugh out at the same time.

 

Bio

Born on January 5, 1997, MK Abhilash is a filmmaker, music producer, and poet. He earned his Bachelor’s degree in Engineering from MS Ramaiah Institute of Technology, Bangalore. He is part of Neelavarana, a Bangalore-based counter culture collective, which showcases Dalit-Bahujan aesthetics and narratives of the region. 

Contact

muran3.athma@gmail.com | Instagram

Filmography

  • Vaaradha Entané Dhina (8th Day of the Week), 2017, 13 min., digital
  • Moogana Telephone (A Mute’s Telephone), 2018, 19 min., digital
  • Dictionary Mohan, 2022, 28 min., digital
  • Kuuk Aah?,  2024, 30 min., digital
  • Moda Moda, 2025, 20 min., digital

Showcase

Dictionary Mohan (2022)

Kuuk Aah? (2024)

 

 

May 24, 2024

Showcase: It’s All in Your Head (Dhruv Solanki, 2023)

Posted by Just Another Film Buff under All Posts, Cinema of India, Curator's Corner | Tags: , , , |
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[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.

Contact

dhruvsolanki.1719@gmail.com | Instagram | Facebook | YouTube

Filmography

  • Hashim Khan (2018), 26 min., digital
  • Parichay (2019), 2 min., digital
  • Love (2021), 1 min., smartphone
  • Scenes from a Room (2021), 5 min., smartphone
  • Drink (2022), 10 min., smartphone
  • My India (2022), 3 min., smartphone
  • It’s All in Your Head (2023), 84 min., smartphone
  • Blah! Blah! Blah! (work-in-progress, co-dir. Bonita Rajpurohit), smartphone
  • Writer, The Rebels of Shakambhari (unproduced)
  • Writer, Home (unproduced)
  • Co-writer, Qualia (dir. Devankur Sinha), 2021
  • Actor, What a Difference a Day Made (dir. Devankur Sinha), 2022
  • Actor/co-writer, Pankhudiyaan (Petals in the Wind, dir: Abdul Aziz), 2024
  • Producer, If You Know You Know (dir. Bonita Rajpurohit), 2024

Showcase

Trailer for It’s All in Your Head (2023)

Love (2021)

Scenes from a Room (2021)

 

May 7, 2024

Showcase: The Orchard and the Pardes (Renu Savant, 2024)

Posted by Just Another Film Buff under All Posts, Cinema of India, Curator's Corner | Tags: , , , |
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[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.

Contact

renusavant@gmail.com | Instagram

Filmography

  • Darkroom (2008), 16 min., DV
  • Airawat (2011), 10 min., 35mm
  • Aaranyak (2014), 22 min., 35mm
  • Many Months in Mirya (2017), 230 min., HD digital
  • Mod Bhaang (The Ebb Tide) (2019), 60 min., HD digital
  • Brave Revolutionary Redubbed (co-directed with Kush Badhwar) (2020), 20 min., HD digital
  • Crime and Expiation by JJ Granville or How to Shoot an Open Secret? (2021), 10 min., HD digital
  • Bageecha aur Pardes (The Orchard and the Pardes) (2024) 116 min., HD digital

Showcase

Excerpt from The Orchard and the Pardes (2024)

Mod Bhaang (The Ebb Tide) (2019)

Aaranyak (2014)

https://vimeo.com/92515193/7efea486c9?share=copy

Airawat (2011)

https://vimeo.com/94201873/33371e96bc?share=copy

 

 

 

March 19, 2024

Spotlight: Abdul Aziz

Posted by Just Another Film Buff under All Posts, Cinema of India, Curator's Corner | Tags: , , , , , , |
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[Part of Curator’s Corner, a section dedicated to showcasing work of emerging and marginal filmmakers.]

When I remarked earlier this year that South Asia is currently a hotbed of exciting cinematic work, one of the filmmakers I had in mind was 24-year-old Abdul Aziz, an alumnus of Whistling Woods International, Mumbai, who has already three feature films to his credit. A digital native, Aziz’s foray into filmmaking was in the form of short VFX exercises, tongue-in-cheek takes on popular cinema with homemade CGI. Following his graduation in 2019, he set out to make a two-part fictional film exploring romantic relationships across age groups, but as the project took shape, the Chennai-born filmmaker came to the conclusion that it may be better served if each part were a feature in its own right, to which was added a third film. The result was a trilogy of riveting and wholly refreshing works: the Tamil-language Window Flowers (Jannal Pookkal), the Telugu-language Monsoon Breeze (Ruthupavanalu) and the Hindi-language Petals in the Wind (Pankhudiyaan).

Watching the films together, several commonalities surface. All three stories take place over an emotionally eventful evening and culminate at the crack of dawn. They begin indoors, take long detours outdoors and feature extremely low-light sequences illuminated by computer screens or electronic trinkets. Shot quickly over a few days, the films contain no more than two or three characters and typically pivot around a single dramatic revelation, flanked by other events of quotidian drama involving objects such as a plastic bag, a wallet or rose petals. There is a great deal of food banter — preparing meals, discussing menus, talking recipes — but hardly any sight of food. Other subtler crosscurrents unite the trilogy, but Aziz is conscious not to overwhelm individual films with an overarching conceptual design.

Window Flowers (2023, world premiere at International Film Festival Pame, Nepal) begins with a young man (Ajay Serma) knocking at the door of someone who wouldn’t open. After kicking about for a while, he rides back home on his motorcycle to his Mumbai apartment, which he shares with two other men, to spend an evening of disappointment and low-grade heartbreak. Until the funny and spectacular final shot of the film — running for over half an hour — we don’t know what’s eating the young man, but the film works up an inchoate atmosphere of bachelor pad melancholia that is raw and unrelenting. With a bold mid-film excursion into loosely related archival footage, Window Flowers reveals a curious filmmaker working out the poetics of smartphone cinematography — low-light, auto-focus, optical image stabilization, vertical format, long durational — which find fuller expression, formal unity and technical control in Monsoon Breeze.

The second, and in my view the strongest, film in the trilogy, Monsoon Breeze (awaiting world premiere) hits the ground running in setting up scenario of high domestic drama. Deepu (Deepshika Dinapatti) has moved with her mother to Mumbai for her master’s studies. Just when the two prepare to spend an evening shopping, Deepu learns that her estranged father (T.B Naidu) has come home to visit them after nearly a year, right on her parents 25th wedding anniversary. In the cut of the film I saw, this confrontation is staged in a single shot of over an hour, in which we share the father’s barely veiled discomfort in visiting his family, his pretence of normalcy, his forced sense of paternalism, but also his streaks of grace and genuine affection. But the film is centred on the mother, played superbly by Latha Naidu with a reserve, wile and toughness no doubt intimate to Indian viewers but seldom seen on screen.

The strength of Monsoon Breeze lies in the way it plays off an experimental form against a classical dramaturgical outline. The constant threat of the film’s fiction rupturing at any moment, by a stray incident or a technical botch up, is attenuated by the conscious fiction of happy homecoming that the father enacts on his arrival. Among other things, Monsoon Breeze puts a finger on what familial estrangement in an Indian context looks like, every strained moment between father and daughter filled not with uncomfortable silence, but crushingly banal small talk. And when the talk stops, it all comes down like a ton of bricks.

The tension is less familial than sexual in the third film, Petals in the Wind (in post-production), set this time in a tourist-filled Goa. A young couple (Jyotsana Rajpurohit and Dhruv Solanki), dressed like figures in a studio photograph from the 1980s, checks into a secluded guesthouse just after their wedding. They change and go to the beach on a bike, click pictures, take a ride on the giant wheel and return home late without having had anything to eat all afternoon. As they order food online and begin to make love, minor inconveniences snowball into major conflict. Shot (by Devankur Sinha with a digital camera) largely on crowded locations around the beach, the film offers a stark change in scenery from its Mumbai-set predecessors. Crafting a work about the collapse of a honeymoon fantasy, Petals in the Wind offers a perfect midpoint between the romantic frustrations of Window Flowers and the marital disillusionment of Monsoon Breeze.

Window Flowers

Window Flowers

Monsoon Breeze

Monsoon Breeze

Petals in the Wind

Petals in the Wind

Window Flowers and Monsoon Breeze were shot on a smartphone by Aziz himself in real locations and lighting conditions, with live sound and non-professional actors. Although professionally trained, Aziz is inspired by the specific emotional qualities of phone videos. “I would say my usage of the phone camera is more ‘phone’ than ‘camera’,” he remarks, adding that he finds “the emotions evoked by these new-age ‘home videos’ in our phone galleries to be quite a powerful cinematic experience.” The filmmaker had a revelation in college when he revisited a video shot at a party. “I knew everything about the people in it, their relationships and the drama in their lives” he says. Watching the video, he recalls feeling that “there is no film that has ever conveyed more emotional truth than what I’m seeing now.” As a filmmaker, he thought, “you just need to bring your audience to a point where they think I know these people and what’s going on with them.”

There is a pointedly embodied quality to Aziz’s films, both in their hypermobile, handheld cinematography and in the way the films allow viewers to project themselves into their material worlds in an unbroken, video-game like manner. Stylistically speaking, Aziz’s films seem to inhabit an underexplored area of contemporary cinema located between the kind of muscular neo-realism that has become de rigueur in international filmmaking and contemplative slow cinema, dominated by static framing and long shots. Aziz’s work broadly shares with the former a belief in the revelatory aspect of the camera and a tendency to immerse the viewer in a plausible, coherent world resembling ours. At the same time, like slow cinema works, Aziz’s films pay obsessive attention to the minutiae of everyday living, its precise rhythms and its inexhaustibly rich textures.

A lot of this attention develops through exceptionally long shots, often of a labyrinthine choreography, lasting dozens of minutes, that follow the actors from up so close that their features are unflatteringly warped. It isn’t just a question of chaining together stunning long takes — although some of the shots, spanning different apartment complexes and times of the day, are indeed stunning. What gives Aziz’s films their power, I think, is the way they assert the intransigent reality of things taking their own time. These things may be material, like polaroids developing or idlis being prepared over the course of a single shot, or more abstract ones, like the time it takes for the father’s ego to subside in Monsoon Breeze or for the bride to prepare herself mentally for the wedding bed in Petals in the Wind. This insistence on real-time development produces remarkable passages of on-screen poetry, like breaths of a loved one preserved in a balloon.

Then there is the matter of the writing. Aziz’s films are scripted to the last detail, but looking at them, it is hard to believe that they weren’t entirely improvised. What stand out are the filmmaker’s ear for the essential bizarreness of quotidian chatter, his attention to moments that seem so random that they could only have come from real life and the employment of props that are remarkably uncinematic. The persistent mundanity of the dialogue, always compelling but divested of the need to reveal character or impress the audience, isn’t the kind of slick, anti-climactic patter you find, say, in Tarantino’s films. It rather elevates the ordinariness of everyday speech, rendering it interesting in a manner that traditional movie scripts refuse to.

All this turns Aziz’s films into a kind of vernacular urban ethnography that documents the behaviour, body language and mores of a specific social stratum with a precision and candour that is bracing. There is nothing crowd-pleasing about these films, little concession to character types and a whole lot of faith in the audience. In their internal variations, Aziz’s three films become testimonies to the filmmaker’s evolving ideas about screen realism, its limits and its relationship to higher truths. Embracing mistakes and refusing surface polish, they constitute an imperfect, rough-edged cinema that broaches the formal taboos of industrial and academic filmmaking. I can’t wait for the world to discover these films, vivid and throbbing with life.

If you are a critic or a programmer wishing to see these films, please reach out to Aziz at the address below.

 

Bio

Abdul Aziz is a 24-year-old filmmaker from Chennai, Tamil Nadu, based in Mumbai. He passed out of Whistling Woods International (specialized in film direction) in 2019. He was awarded at the 52nd International Film Festival of India (IFFI) in the first edition of their Creative Mind of Tomorrow program for his diploma film Tulips. He has written and directed three independent feature films Window Flowers, Monsoon Breeze and Petals in the Wind. He has also co-written a commercial black comedy starring Swastika Mukherji titled Dead Dead Full Dead and an indie road movie titled Blah Blah Blah.

Contact

abuthoaziz@gmail.com | Instagram | Twitter

Filmography

  • Tulips, 2019, 18 min., digital
  • Trees and Their Loved Ones, 2022, 30 min., digital
  • Jannal Pookal (Window Flowers), 2023, 105 min., digital
  • Ruthupavanalu (Monsoon Breeze), 2024, 120 min., digital
  • Pankhudiyaan (Petals in the Wind), 2024, 103 min., digital
  • Writer, Dead Dead Full Dead (dir. Pratul Gaikwad), 2024
  • Writer, Blah Blah Blah (dir. Dhruv Solanki), 2024

Showcase

Trailer for Window Flowers (2023), password: WF

 

Trailer for Monsoon Breeze (2024), password: MB

 

 

January 14, 2024

Showcase: The Feast (Rishi Chandna, 2024)

Posted by Just Another Film Buff under All Posts, Cinema of India, Curator's Corner | Tags: , , , , , , |
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[Part of Curator’s Corner, a section dedicated to showcasing work of emerging and marginal filmmakers. See here for details.]

Class, cuisine, Catholicism and climate change intersect in compelling ways in Rishi Chandna’s absorbing new work Virundhu (The Feast), set for its world premiere at the Clermont-Ferrand International Short Film Festival in February 2024. Produced in collaboration with the Krea university, Andhra Pradesh, The Feast is the first of a trilogy of films around the broad theme of water, with a focus on the sociological aspects of the relationship between humans and water systems.

A self-taught filmmaker with a professional background in advertising, Chandna honed his craft making candid, feature-length wedding documentaries for his friends. After a few years of making commercials, he chanced upon the subject of his first documentary, the widely circulated Tungrus (2017). This short, endearing portrait presents an eccentric glimpse into the foibles of human-animal co-existence. Featuring a middle-class family in Mumbai that has a rowdy rooster for a pet, the film draws its energies from the surreal sight of this rustic bird lording over the urbane surfaces of a high-rise apartment until it’s shown who’s the boss.

If Tungrus limits itself to the private realm of a cramped apartment, Party Poster (2022), in my opinion Chandna’s best work yet, is explicitly a work about public spaces. Made during the pandemic, Party Poster trains its lens on the phenomenon of civilian, group-commissioned posters erected during Mumbai’s Ganesh Chaturthi celebrations. Both an aesthetic object subject to meticulous design and densely symbolic field of signs, the poster offers Chandna a chance to examine the city’s fraught class dynamics as well as the contradictions of urban living in general. I’ve written about the film in more detail here.

The observational humour inherent in both these documentaries (which you can watch below) feeds into The Feast, Chandna’s first foray into full-fledged fiction. Set in an impoverished fishing village in the wetland region of Ennore-Pulicat in northern Tamil Nadu, the 25-minute film has two narrative strands. In the first, we follow the efforts of Mary, a woman of about forty, as she sources ingredients for a traditional fiesta she plans to throw: prawns, milkfish, mullets, mud crabs. With the area’s industrial pollution turning the waters increasingly hostile to life, and to fishing as a profession, this is no mean task. Enterprising and resourceful, Mary is obliged to search far and wide to secure her raw material.

The primary (and it turns out, the only) recipient of the feast is Thomas, an affluent politician of some power who was once a boy in the same fishing community. We understand from their interaction that Thomas and Mary were childhood friends who still maintain a cordial if somewhat formal relationship. Christmas is around the corner, and Thomas is dillydallying on an approval he is expected to give for the establishment of a cement factory in the village.

And so, the day of the feast arrives, and the local chapel – which seems both long abandoned and haunted by spectral presence – is spruced up. This place of worship soon turns into a theatrical stage as Mary orchestrates an unforgettable evening for Thomas. The Proustian repast shows him glimpses of a long-lost heaven, while the prayer that precedes it puts the fear of hell in him. The solemnity of the setting, as well as the stateliness of the compositions, are balanced by the wit and the humour of the scene.

The film calls to mind Babette’s Feast (1987), in which a lavish meal thaws the frozen spirits of an orthodox Protestant community in rural Denmark. In The Feast too, food is a repository of shared memories and values, capable of effecting profound spiritual transformation. But the emphasis of Chandna’s film is less theological than political. Mary is a curator figure, and the sumptuous variety of her menu, which has her negotiating with many villagers to get the right kind of fish, speaks of a personal touch. At the same time, it reflects an ecological crisis where the diversity of marine life is endangered by human activity. The film thus zeroes in on the precarity of an extended ecosystem: marine biodiversity, but also the ways of life around it such as food and religious traditions.

The Feast features noteworthy performances by professional actors, primarily Antony Janagi (who is a theatre practitioner) and George Vijay Nelson (who transitioned from television into cinema). But the film’s acute sense of place is entirely a product of the filmmaker’s documentary eye, which makes The Feast a very interesting alchemy of diverse approaches. An alumnus of the 2021 Sundance Screenwriters Lab and the NFDC Film Bazaar’s Co-Production Project, Chandna is currently working on his first feature, Ghol, about a penniless fisherman whose fortunes change when he makes a prize haul of a rare fish.

 

Bio

Rishi’s debut short documentary, Tungrus (2018), was shown at Hot Docs, Visions du Réel, BFI London Film Festival, IDFA and became an Oscar-qualifying short documentary after winning at the Slamdance Film Festival. His second short, Party Poster (2022), showed at Palm Springs International Film Festival, Krakow Film Festival, DocAviv, Glasgow Short Film Festival and others. Both films released online on New York Times’ Op-Docs. Rishi’s feature film in development was selected at the Sundance Screenwriters Lab, Cannes Film Market and Hong Kong Asia Film Financing Forum where it won the top HAF Fiction Award for a non-Hong Kong project.

Contact

rishichandna2020@gmail.com | Website

Filmography

  • Tungrus (2018), 13 min., digital
  • Party Poster (2022), 20 min., digital
  • Virundhu (The Feast) (2024), 25 min., digital
  • Ghol (The Catch) (work-in-progress)

Showcase

Tungrus (2018)

Party Poster (2022)

 

June 4, 2023

Spotlight: Supriya Suri

Posted by Just Another Film Buff under All Posts, Cinema of India, Curator's Corner | Tags: , , , , |
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[Part of Curator’s Corner, a section dedicated to showcasing work of emerging and marginal filmmakers.]

Delhi-based Supriya Suri has made four films, short and long, that could hardly be more unlike each other: an experimental profile of a celebrated filmmaker, a fictional character study of small-time urban criminals, an expositional documentary about a film personality and a diaristic feature about a family pilgrimage. Taken together, they attest to a constantly self-reinventing creativity trying out various subject matters, styles and modes of expression. Professionally trained in film direction, Supriya segued early into film criticism and curation before making works of her own. “I never saw filmmaking as a journey,” she says. “Making one film was the ultimate goal, and I put a lot of pressure on myself to get it right. For the longest time, I didn’t get into direction.”

Supriya’s two documentary featurettes comprise a study in contrasts. Commissioned by the now-defunct Films Division, her debut Maestro, a Portrait (2013) is an oblique, non-biographical profile of Bengali filmmaker Buddhadeb Dasgupta that synthesizes vastly disparate material—poetry, paintings, classical music, film excerpts and archival footage—in its attempt to arrive at deeper insights into its subject. Eschewing exposition or direct interviews, the film presents a silent Dasgupta striking solemn poses in different environments while a cluster of voices reads out heterogenous texts in English, Bengali and even Portuguese.

In a more radical departure, Maestro refuses to demarcate Dasgupta’s words and images from those by others that are cited; for instance, excerpts from the films of Dadasaheb Phalke, Luis Buñuel and Satyajit Ray are seamlessly woven with ones from the Bengali auteur’s works. What we get in effect is a mosaic of cinematic and literary references in dialogue with Dasgupta’s cinema, arranged into themes of memory, dream and myth—a stream of images and texts that flow into and out of Dasgupta’s films. In its rejection of authorities and hierarchies of information, Maestro registers as an unusual, ambitious study that assumes some degree of familiarity with the subject.

Aruna Vasudev – Mother of Asian Cinema (2021), on the other hand, crafts a relatively more conventional portrait of the eponymous film critic and programmer. Through talking-head interviews, archival material and voiceover, we come to learn about an enterprising individual who significantly contributed to giving Asian cinema an identity as Asian cinema. Quickly covering Vasudev’s years as a student and an apprentice filmmaker abroad, the film devotes more attention to the magazine Cinemaya, the organization NETPAC and the film festival Cinefan, all of which she co-founded with a view to foster and promote Asian cinema.

“I was making a short film in which she played herself,” Supriya recalls. “But I realized that she was old and had started forgetting things.” Supriya, thus, abandoned the short film for the documentary with a view to preserve Vasudev’s stories and experiences. The testimonies in Mother of Asian Cinema capture a sense of Vasudev’s outgoing, friendly personality as well as her astounding capacity to forge lasting links across the globe. At the end, we see Supriya herself in front of the camera, recounting Vasudev’s influence on her own journey and, in some respect, tracing her professional lineage—a theme that finds echo in Supriya’s most recent work, the mid-length feature We Shall Meet Yet Again (2022).

At the centre of the short film Boys from Hinterland (2019) are two men on a bike; poker-faced, clad in black leather and almost comically representative of a strain of brash Haryanvi masculinity. They mug pedestrians and other commuters in a series of orchestrated robberies, only to blow their loot on booze. In lateral tracking shots, we see them cruise the vast, desolate highways around the national capital, high-rise buildings in the background furnishing silent commentary. Yet it is neither sociological portraiture nor genre thrill that Supriya is after. Ostensibly inspired by Robert Bresson, Boys from Hinterland strives to capture the feeling of drifting under the open skies, finding existential freedom if only in criminal behaviour.

Produced by Supriya herself, We Shall Meet Yet Again documents her journey with her mother and grandmother to pilgrimage sites in Northern India. For the most part, the film unfurls like generational road movie around their trip to Haridwar, Hrishikesh and Kashi. The three women revisit the places where they once lived and meet local priests to help them trace their lineage using bahis, pilgrim registers maintained through the centuries and updated whenever a birth or a death occurred in the pilgrim’s family. Between these visits, we witness the women in conversation in guest houses and in trains, speaking reverently of the river Ganga or philosophizing about the ephemerality of life. “I would tell them the beginning, middle and end of a given scene, and they would fill up the rest,” explains the filmmaker. “It was a very improvised process of shooting.”

If We Shall Meet Yet Again presents three generations of women, it doesn’t, however, place emphasis on their differences. There are certainly superficial distinctions: the filmmaker converses in Hindi with her mother, who uses Punjabi with her mother. Serial shots underscore the hair, attire and footwear of the three women. But absent is the kind of friction and clash of worldviews typical of intergenerational narratives. The reticent Supriya hardly speaks in the film, and mother doesn’t seem to have much to disagree with grandmother either. If anything, commonalities—such as a shared interest in spiritual literature and ancestry information—bring out continuities between the three women.

The apparent unity is compounded by the fact that the film offers us no privileged perspective; no voiceovers, texts or instructive moments that tell us how we should interpret the events we see. Even the film’s autobiographical dimension is obscured to the viewer who is unaware that it features the filmmaker and her real family. This absence of a discursive framework keeps us at a distance from the women’s words and experiences, but it also empties the film of an egocentrism that lends it an unassuming, self-effacing quality.

Even so, the film takes matrilineage as its central theme, if only to examine its otherness within Hindu social and religious contexts. Firstly, the notion of women undertaking a pilgrimage by train, all by themselves, runs counter to both road movie conventions and the reality of Indian public transport. But the fact that the ladies successfully trace their lineage or conduct shradh rituals, traditionally male prerogatives, on the ghats of the Ganga attests to changing times and mores.

Times are indeed changing; grandmother’s son (the filmmaker’s uncle), we learn, is planning to emigrate, leaving her alone in the house and under the sole care of her daughter, who lives separately in the same city. Supriya’s film eventually becomes a record of this delicate bond between mother and daughter, who are filmed in two shots side-by-side on the train, often re-enacting fictionalized exchanges. What emerges from this portrait of maternal inheritance isn’t nostalgia or family pride, but a muted sense of patriarchy’s failings. “I’ve always regretted not knowing my paternal grandparents well enough,” Supriya recalls. “So the film was also an excuse to spend more time with my naani.”

We Shall Meet Yet Again is currently looking for a distributor.

 

Bio

Supriya studied film direction with Egide Scholarship at Conservatoire Libre du Cinéma Français in Paris, France. She started her career as the founding member of Cinedarbaar in India in 2009. With her organisation, she has been involved in curatorial practices, film criticism and educational programmes, and has organised several film festivals across India. She co-founded and wrote for a film magazine Indian Auteur and ran a cinema gallery 13BCD in New Delhi. As a film curator, she was nominated by the U.S government for the IVLP to talk about Indian films in the USA. She also runs her production company Maison Su that focuses on international co-production projects. She was a jury member for Cineaste International Film Festival, India, in 2021. She was recently invited by META Cinema Forum, 2022 in Dubai as a speaker on Asian Cinema. She was also on the jury of 28th Kolkata International Film Festival, 2022, for Asian Select category awards.

Contact

info@maisonsuentertainment.com

Filmography

  • Maestro, a Portrait — A Film on Buddhadeb Dasgupta, 2013, 52 min., digital
  • Boys From Hinterland, 2019, 14 min., digital
  • Aruna Vasudev — Mother of Asian Cinema, 2021, 65 min., digital
  • Main Tenu Phir Milangi (We Shall Meet Yet Again), 2022, 65 min., digital

Showcase

Maestro, a Portrait (2013)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SIsDqlTP95k&ab_channel=FilmsDivision

Boys From Hinterland (2019), password: hinterland@watchnow

https://vimeo.com/703848579

Aruna Vasudev — Mother of Asian Cinema (2021), password: vasudev@2021

 

May 8, 2023

Spotlight: Shishir Jha

Posted by Just Another Film Buff under All Posts, Cinema of India, Curator's Corner | Tags: , , , , , , , |
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[Part of Curator’s Corner, a section dedicated to showcasing work of emerging and marginal filmmakers. See here for details.]

Shishir Jha is a filmmaker from Darbhanga, Bihar, who lives and works in Mumbai. An alumnus of the National Institute of Design, Shishir began making short films to teach himself particular aspects of moviemaking while also holding a job in the advertising industry. He has recently made his debut feature Dharti Latar Re Horo (Tortoise Under the Earth, 2022), a meditative docu-fiction set in an adivasi region of Central India plagued by the ecological repercussions of unchecked mining. While Tortoise Under the Earth is still seeking distribution, viewers can get a good sense of Shishir’s work from two of his short films, The East Wind (2016) and Te Amo (2016), both presented below along with a classroom project, Goodbye and Other Stories (2018).

A monodrama set in a mountainous stretch of Maharashtra, The East Wind centres on an unnamed middle-aged man seemingly mourning the disappearance of his wife. The film, however, only hints at this premise, refusing to spell it out except as visual clues: photographs of the man and his now-absent family, a dream-like tracking shot suggesting a journey away from the protagonist, who gazes yearningly at the photos or off-screen. Images of the man cooking his sorry meal or fetching water from across the valley, and of clothes left unattended to, signal a breach in the routine without putting too strong an emphasis on it. The wind blows, ushering in the first rains. Life goes on.

Ostensibly influenced by Béla Tarr, The East Wind demonstrates Shishir’s taste for elliptical, contemplative storytelling that privileges mood, atmosphere and landscape over character development or narrative detailing. The film doesn’t narrate a story as much as dwell on a state of mind — a kind of static portraiture that characterizes the filmmaker’s other work as well. Even so, it helps that he has a professional actor in Robin Das, whose weather-beaten face and downcast body become the primary expressive vehicle of the film. Shishir has subsequently worked predominantly with non-professionals, which certainly stretches their capabilities even as the films gain in documentary authenticity.

In 2016, Shishir participated in a workshop by Abbas Kiarostami at the EICTV film school in Cuba. Scouting neighbouring villages with an interpreter for possible subjects for a short film, he found an elderly couple living on the ground floor of a housing complex in Pueblo Textil, Bauta. On Kiarostami’s advice, he spent time getting to know them, observing their environment and shooting them in their routine while proposing to them small situations to improvise on. “I don’t speak Spanish, and I developed something intuitively based on my impression of their interactions,” says Shishir.

The result was the film Te Amo, a charming picture of old-age togetherness, routine pleasures and the banality of a contended life, unfolding on a lazy summer afternoon. Arcadio and Nelsa, the couple, have obvious charisma and their endearing chattiness and enthusiastic participation draw Te Amo far away from the laconism of The East Wind. “I discovered the power of language to express emotions for the first time,” says the filmmaker. “I realized that this was magic.” The film was well-received at the workshop and garnered Kiarostami’s appreciation. “The experience gave me confidence that I can make a film anywhere,” adds the filmmaker.

Speaking of his first feature film, Shishir notes that Tortoise Under the Earth was an extension of Te Amo: “With the same approach, I wanted to tell a longer story.” At the time, he was reading Paul Olaf Bodding’s work on Santhali folklore and Hansda Sowvendra Shekhar’s short story collection The Adivasi Will Not Dance (2015). Inspired equally by the play of myth and nature in the films of Apichatpong Weerasethakul, Shishir set out to the district of East Singhbhum in Jharkhand, exploring the area with the help of the activist Jeetrai Hansda. “I realised that Bodding’s Santhal is far away from today’s Santhals,” he says in an interview, ”there are new problems, new possibilities and new issues.” Instead of forcing his experience into a pre-determined narrative framework, Shishir spent his months simply gathering images and sounds from the region.

It wasn’t until he came across Jagarnath and Mugli Baskey that he found his human-interest story. A middle-aged couple who have lost their daughter to unstated causes, Jagarnath and Mugli live by themselves in a spacious house in the village. Like in Te Amo, Shishir recreated their everyday interactions as fiction, partly conceived by the protagonists themselves, giving us a picture of a loving couple living in harmony with the nature around them. Mugli speaks to flowers and sings songs of lament; Jagarnath talks to a bird and buys bangles for his wife. Woven through these domestic scenes are images from an annual festival in which Jagarnath plays percussions and a village fair where the couple have themselves photographed at a makeshift studio.

This soft, rarefied drama of rural idyll is, however, interrupted by environmental threat. We learn that the region has been poisoned by rapacious Uranium mining, the footprint of which hasn’t ceased to expand. True to the understated nature of Tortoise, this invasion first appears as noise — a distant thud of the machines — before we see its material consequences in the form of water poisoning and forced eviction. Jagarnath tries to sensitize the youth of the area, who seem playful and somewhat indifferent to their collective plight, showing little desire for action. Jagarnath is, on the other hand, determined that he will not leave his home. In a beautiful night-time sequence, he stares straight at the headlights of an ominous off-screen vehicle — heels dug into the ground, fists clenched — offering an uplifting note of defiance.

Tortoise Under the Earth is above all a humanist portrait of Jagarnath and Mugli. Shishir does not regard his film as a work of activism. The politics of Uranium mining, says the filmmaker, is not something that he was expressly seeking to address. But having spent time with the couple as their guest, it was something he couldn’t avoid, so much was it a part of their identity and existence. In that respect, Tortoise serves to register that, for people like Jagarnath and Mugli, the business of living is inextricable from their struggles against erasure.

 

Bio

Shishir Jha is a Mumbai-based filmmaker born in Bihar, India in 1988. He graduated from the National Institute of Design (NID), Ahmedabad, with a bachelor’s degree in Film & Video Communication Design. He received a Diploma in Filmmaking at the workshop of the late Abbas Kiarostami at EICTV (Escuela Internacional de Cine y TV) in Cuba in 2016. He has made several short films, and Tortoise Under the Earth is his first feature film.

Contact

rumrainroad[at]gmail[dot]com | Instagram | Twitter

Filmography

  • Meghna, 2009, 2 min., digital
  • Guddi, 2011, 5 min., digital
  • The East Wind, 2015, 15 min., digital
  • Segment in Shuruaat Ka Interval, 2014, 5 min., digital
  • Te amo, 2016, 18 min., digital
  • Goodbye & Other Stories, 2018, 18 min., digital
  • Dharti Latar Re Horo (Tortoise Under the Earth), 2022, 97 min., digital

Showcase

The East Wind (2015)

Te amo (2016)

Goodbye & Other Stories (2018), password: humara123

 

 

April 17, 2023

Showcase: Cocrunda 0.5mg (Agrima, 2021)

Posted by Just Another Film Buff under All Posts, Cinema of India, Curator's Corner | Tags: , , , |
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[Part of Curator’s Corner, a section dedicated to showcasing work of emerging and marginal filmmakers. See here for details.]

Formally trained in cinematography, 28-year-old Agrima (aka Ajrul) is an independent filmmaker from Karnal, Haryana, in Northern India. Besides smaller exercise films, Agrima has made two shorts so far — 2019’s Jee Ka Janjaal: The Prominence of the Unseen and 2021’s Cocrunda 0.5mg (TV iv OTT) — both of which seem to me to be concentrated explorations of feelings of disgust and repulsion; the bibhatsa rasa as Indian aesthetic theory has it. They are both highly subjective works reflecting psychological states dominated by these sentiments. Disorder, decrepit rooms, dead and decaying animals, leftover food, bodily emanations, diseases, caustic colours, high-strung sound effects are some of the prominent elements of the films.

Agrima recalls having watched Emir Kusturica’s Underground (1995) and Black Cat, White Cat (1998) as a child. “I remember I was really fascinated by how deeply chaotic it was,” she adds. Viewing theatrical and film adaptations of Ghashiram Kotwal and Oedipus Rex one after the other while a student of English literature in New Delhi initiated her into a more formal understanding of the two mediums. Further influences came in the form of John Carpenter’s They Live (1988), Harmony Korine’s Gummo (1997), Pankaj Advani’s Urf Professor (2001) and, most importantly, Sion Sono’s Love Exposure (2008).

The seven-minute Jee Ka Janjaal was a direction assignment at film school. “I was still inexperienced to instruct a crew,” says Agrima. “So I ended up doing almost everything myself.” The film begins like a parody of true-crime TV shows, with the camera hovering over a disorderly, nearly unlivable hostel room – a veritable compendium of aforesaid elements. The protagonist (Snigdha) is seated deflated on the floor, surrounded by lizards, a lit cigarette dangling from her mouth. She is sweaty, her breath short and rapid, like that of a reptile. Shortly after, a mute “lizard man” (Varshney) creeps over her on a couch, running his hands under her clothes, causing her to throw up. Unable to confront him, she watches the man defile a doll and suddenly finds herself afflicted with mysterious skin lesions. Her trip to the hospital, however, proves even more traumatic.

Jee Ka Janjaal is ostensibly a personal work born of a sense of vulnerability. “At film school, I was for the longest time feeling isolated,” notes Agrima. “I also had some strife with how things were going on at the school. So I isolated myself. After living alone for a long time with just lizards in my room, I somehow came up with this afternoon reverie of a girl who was thinking of disgust in terms of body fluids, men, sexual activity and all of those things.” A sense of loathing pervades Jee Ka Janjaal, but it is primarily located in male bodies—the lizard man, the doctor’s bobbing Adam’s apple, the compounder’s unusual features—which gives a pointedly sexual dimension to the protagonist’s revulsion.

Cocrunda, in that regard, exercises greater control over its material, sublimating the feeling of repulsion in bodily humour. The threat of contamination is generalized, scattered across characters in this film, which features two oddball schoolteachers and their preteen vlogger daughter named Ozu (G. Maa Hei). In fact, this home-movie turned psychedelic-comedy opens with an exogenous menace. After Romanchitt (V. Armaan), the dubious newspaper guy, gives brash, unsolicited feedback on Ozu’s recent video, we see him lick the day’s edition and toss it into Ozu’s home. This original, biological and psychological invasion of the household gives rise to a series of others: a cockroach that slithers up the kitchen table, the pills that Mother keeps swallowing, the marundas, or sweet rice balls, that Father chomps down despite his diabetes and finally the TV news that suffuses the air with manufactured emergencies.

As her parents go through their routine in a drug-fuelled haze, Ozu films them with her phone camera, turning her life into the film we are watching. Ozu herself is on medication for her mood swings, which may partly explain the distorted nature of the events we see in the film, shot from up close in a warped perspective. A standoff eventually ensues between the three family members, each blackmailing the other with withdrawal of their preferred poison. “Everybody in the film is my family, except for the little girl,” says Agrima. “This is the second time I’ve shot this film. I shot the first version with a niece of mine. She abandoned the film after three days because of the cockroaches. So I had to audition for the role of the girl.”

Queasy-making and possibly anxiety-inducing, Cocrunda obliquely taps into the amorphous dread of life under lockdown in its evocation of different kinds of contamination: viral infection, food poisoning, drug overdose, invasive surgery, media manipulation and the danger of a young girl ‘exposing’ herself to the world through her videos. Instead of locating this dread in particular objects and people, Cocrunda displaces it from one tactile image to the next, thanks to an unnerving chain of subconscious associations: a dead rat, Romanchitt licking the newspaper, Father turning the pages of the said newspaper by licking his fingers; Mother using a pest repellent to protect Ozu, who crushes her tablets to make them look like the pest repellent, which in turn comes to look like cocaine; Father eating marundas, an organ extraction that resembles pest control, Father eating parathas and so on. Given that several of these images involve oral ingestion of some kind, Cocrunda has the power to induce a visceral response in the viewer. Judge for yourself!

 

Bio

Agrima, 28, is an independent short film director, a trained cinematographer and a mixed-media visual artist from Karnal, Haryana. She has done her Masters of English Literature course from Miranda House, Delhi University, and a Post-Graduate Diploma in Film and Digital Cinematography from Satyajit Ray Film and Television Institute, Kolkata. Having fashioned her sensibilities through a diverse range of media, her approach to filmmaking is utterly interdisciplinary. Her formal preoccupations with language, literature and cinema, her spiritual connections to what is considered ‘trash’ for most archives and her phenomeno-political understanding of the world are important to her filmmaking.

Contact

agrima1445[at]gmail[dot]com | Instagram

Filmography

  • (it)Selfie, 2018, 4 min., digital
  • Tumi Keno Chole Gele Debanjan, 2018, 2 min., digital
  • Jee ka Janjaal: The Prominence of the Unseen, 2019, 7 min., digital
  • Cocrunda 0.5mg (TV iv OTT), 2021, 10 min., digital
  • Chronicles of Kanchan and Yunga, 2022, 2:06 min., film

Showcase

Cocrunda 0.5mg (TV iv OTT) (2021)

Jee ka Janjaal: The Prominence of the Unseen (2019)

 

March 23, 2023

Showcase: Searcher (Divya Sachar, 2022)

Posted by Just Another Film Buff under All Posts, Cinema of India, Curator's Corner | Tags: , , |
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[Part of Curator’s Corner, a section dedicated to showcasing work of emerging and marginal filmmakers. See here for details.]

In this edition of Curator’s Corner, I’m happy to bring to your attention Searcher (2022), a short film by New Delhi-based independent filmmaker, Divya Sachar. A graduate from the first batch of the television department of the FTII, Divya was convinced early on — thanks to the intense experience at the institute of watching films from around the world, especially those of Ingmar Bergman — that she didn’t want to just find a place in the Bombay movie industry. Her diploma project, titled The Dead (2004), is an intimate, localized adaptation of James Joyce’s eponymous short story.

While working in the field of advertising, Divya made her first film for the Public Service Broadcasting Trust. It was called A Short Film About… (2008), and as that title indicates, it was about a subject around which an awkward silence reigns: breasts. In this half-hour documentary, several teenagers and young women talk about their breasts and how they impact their everyday lives, their relationships and their view of themselves. Woven alongside these highly articulate interviews are clips from popular movies and music videos, a personal voiceover by the filmmaker and an assortment of punning images that evoke the film’s subject.

While insightful and ripe for academic analysis, A Short Film About… derives its value in sticking close to the participants’ lived experience and not theorizing it on our behalf. The testimonies are remarkably candid and grounded in everyday life. Structured in a simple, snappy rhythm, the work defuses a great, perhaps universal taboo with warmth and humour. “It usually makes for good community viewing because it’s quite a funny film,” says the filmmaker, “and laughing alone isn’t as much fun as being among a group of gigglers.”

A Short Film About… is explicitly about the body image, but it is also in some ways about the cinematic image; a film as much about human sight as it is about breasts, which, the interviews reveal, occupy an uneasy space between the private and the public — objects to be concealed but inevitably subject to visual scrutiny. Throughout the film, Divya varies the framing pattern, now photographing the participants chest-up, now in close-up. These variations have the effect of making us aware of our own gaze and reflexively grapple with the problems of filming the female body.

Divya made her next film after a break of over a decade, induced by an undiagnosed health condition. Searcher, a play on Divya’s family name, is framed as a self-interrogation. After an opening title card invokes the neuroscientific basis for the existence of inter-generational trauma, the filmmaker informs us that she was diagnosed with schizophrenia a few years before. The film that follows is an attempt to understand her condition through the story of her grandmother, who migrated to India from present-day Pakistan during the Partition, only to lead a short-lived life of drudgery and suffering.

At the centre of Searcher is a house, an ancestral property, where the filmmaker’s grandmother once lived. The residence looks at once occupied and abandoned; where the thickly furnished interiors give a sense of inhabited space — an impression reinforced by muffled sounds of cooking and chatting — shots of wilting plants, discarded furniture, peeling paint and rusting locks suggest a forlorn site, a haunted bungalow even. The multiplication of mirrors and reflective surfaces, on which we periodically glimpse the filmmaker, amplify the feeling of inwardness, of the filmmaker being locked in.

As the house is surveyed in a mix of roving and static shots, a dialogue ensues between the filmmaker and the jamun tree adjoining the property. The tree narrates the harsh life experiences of the filmmaker’s grandmother. At one point, when the camera encircles a chakki (a traditional grindstone), we are shown Margaret Bourke-White’s photographs of the horrors of the Partition while the soundtrack plays ethnomusicologist Alan Lomax’s field recording of Old Alabama, sung by African-American prisoners. Adding to the implied tyranny of this domestic rigour is a traumatic incident in which, the tree tells us, grandmother was thrown out of the house in a state of undress by her husband.

Grandmother, we are informed, died shortly before the filmmaker was born, making the tree a kind of stand-in for the old lady, a reincarnation; Divya films the tree in tilt shots the same way she films her grandmother in photographs. Searcher articulates the inheritance of malaise across these three figures, invoking the filmmaker’s mental illness in direct relation to her grandmother’s trauma as well as to the blight that the jamun tree is suffering. Each one thus takes on the quality of a metaphor for the other: the Partition is recast as the schizophrenia of a nation torn apart, while the filmmaker views her own condition in terms of the inescapability of the grind of life.

Searcher is a looser, less regimented film than A Short Film About… Its shot composition is more intuitive and the sound mix — with high-volume music and ambient noise sharply cutting into the voiceover — deliberately abrasive. “One aspect of my approach to sound was to be completely unsentimental,” says Divya. “In contrast to dissolves, straight cuts are unsentimental.” What Searcher sacrifices in expositional and structural clarity compared A Short Film About…, it gains in emotional density. It’s a lyrical, reflective work that dwells on surfaces and textures, shadows and forms, the spaces between objects and the inchoate feelings they conjure.

A poetic diary film that is also an oblique ghost story, Searcher hints at apparitions and revenants. The camera has a markedly physical quality, only to be suddenly disembodied by the sight of the filmmaker holding another camera. In the final minutes, we see Divya editing the film seated at a desk in the house. Cut to solemn notes from a harmonium, the image evokes a propitiative ritual, a kind of rapprochement that allows the filmmaker to come to terms with the lineage of her pain. “The idea was to show the process of my recovery,” remarks Divya. “Making the film was therapeutic for me, as was the spiritual intervention of my guru.”

Searcher is not yet available for viewing online, but residents of New Delhi can catch a screening at Studio Safdar on 15 April 2023 as part of reFrame’s G-Fest, with the filmmaker in attendance. Divya hopes that the film can find a wider audience very soon.

 

Bio

Divya Sachar is a Delhi-based filmmaker, photographer and writer. She completed her Masters in English Literature from Delhi University and postgraduate specialization in Television Direction from the Film and TV Institute of India, Pune. Her first directorial work A Short Film About… received critical acclaim and aired on national television. Her second film Searcher has traveled to festivals such as Prismatic Ground, New York, and International Documentary and Short Film Festival of Kerala. She also writes on films and the visual arts, and has taught screenwriting and direction at Bennett University, Greater Noida. Divya‘s photography and creative nonfiction have been published by Fall Line Press. She is currently working on her first photobook.

Contact

culdivsac[at]gmail[dot]com | Twitter | Instagram

Filmography

  • The Dead, 2004, 24 min., Betacam
  • A Short Film About…, 2008, 29 min., digital
  • Searcher, 2022, 20 min., digital
  • Conflict (work-in-progress)
  • Unstory (work-in-progress)

Showcase

A Short Film About… (2008)

 

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