Curator’s Corner

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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: Bageecha aur Pardes, Many Months in Mirya, Renu Savant, The Orchard and the Pardes |
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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: Abdul Aziz, Jannal Pookkal, Monsoon Breeze, Pankhudiyaan, Petals in the Wind, Ruthupavanalu, Window Flowers |
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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 25^th 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

Monsoon Breeze

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 52^nd 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: Antony Janagi, George Vijay Nelson, Party Poster, Rishi Chandna, The Feast, Tungrus, Virundhu |
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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: Aruna Vasudev – Mother of Asian Cinema, Boys from Hinterland, Main Tenu Phir Milangi, Supriya Suri, We Shall Meet Yet Again |
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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 28^th Kolkata International Film Festival, 2022, for Asian Select category awards.