Raam Reddy: ‘Film itself is a character’

My interview with the filmmaker Raam Reddy, as published in Mint Lounge on 3 Mar 2024.

Raam Reddy on his second feature, ‘The Fable’, and why the setting always comes early in his outline and feeds into everything.

Raam Reddy was 26 when his directorial debut Thithi (Funeral) premiered at the 2015 Locarno Film Festival, winning several awards on the international film festival circuit and the national award for Best Kannada Film in 2016. A marvellously deadpan tragicomedy about three generations of men responding to the death of a patriarch, Thithi was set in co-writer Ere Gowda’s village of Nodekopplu in Karnataka’s Mandya district.

Now 34, Reddy has made a second feature strikingly different in terms of cast, language, setting and tone. The Fable features Mumbai-based actors like Manoj Bajpayee, Deepak Dobriyal and Tilottama Shome, has dialogues in English and Hindi, is shot on 16mm, and unfolds in the shadowy glades of a fruit orchard in Uttarakhand. Set in 1989, it’s about an English-speaking business family not dissimilar to Reddy’s own—except that the man of the house (Bajpayee) spends a lot of time surveying his surroundings, wearing a pair of wings. The Fable substitutes Thithi’s gentle philosophical realism with the surreal and mysterious, exploring the family’s transformation after fires begin to break out on their estate. 

Lounge spoke with Reddy at the recently concluded 74th Berlin International Film Festival, where The Fable had its world premiere. Edited excerpts:

The settings of both your films are very different: a chaotically busy Karnataka village and a vast, quiet Himalayan estate. What role does place play in inspiring your work?
A huge role. Place always comes early in my outline and feeds into absolutely everything. My novel It’s Raining In Maya (2011) is set in a fictitious town inspired by my years in Delhi University’s North Campus. I lived in Malkaganj. For Thithi, it was the village. Here it’s the mountains, because they have an inherent magic in the air.

In ‘Thithi’, there was a real village. But in ‘The Fable’...
It’s fictional.

So, was the germ of this film the setting?
Actually, it was genre. The magical elements I have experienced in very moving ways in literature, I wanted to translate them into cinema. Then the setting: I spent three months in the mountains. The narrative structure comes from what story the place wants me to tell. Thithi was very... humorous? This time I was excited by the challenge of holding attention through mystery.

‘The Fable’ combines a real world with the surreal. How did you decide what those magical elements would be?
I would love to clap on a pair of wings and fly. Or be able to communicate without words. I always wanted to be part of that heightened reality. It gets a little indulgent, but I wanted to abide a little in these dreams, in a very pure way.

Do your scripts start as novels?
My novels look more like films scripts: I think in cuts. But yes, this screenplay was quite literary. I used language to create moods that had to be executed in the audiovisual domain. Quite hard to do if you have a lot of specifics.

Talking of specifics: why fires?
When I was in the mountains for the first time, I went to fight a forest fire. And I like allowing life to guide my storytelling hand.

You mean, it’s like magic: the fire happening while you were there.
Exactly. Fire was also exciting at the narrative level: it’s the perfect crime (there’s no way to know where a spark fell in a pine forest) as well as the perfect capsule to see how an unknown accident affects a social ecosystem. Fire also signifies many things, like regeneration. Destruction is not always negative. It also brings forth the new.

You have two songs, which seem crucial to the mood.
Not just mood, but meaning. The lyrics move me to tears each time, even in the edit room. Shivoham says you are not your body, or your mind: you are pure consciousness. This is the deepest part of our philosophy and I connect with it deeply. As does the family. It takes them into a spontaneous meditation. The purity of that space, from which the song comes, is why the family were worthy of this story. Naiharwa is about reaching the land of the enlightened. Both have been sung by my sister-in-law (Hindola Aguvaveedi). She would sing these to us after she married my brother.

How much does the film draw on your own life?
I have spent time in a coffee estate, I have seen those relationships as a child and I wanted to question them. So the soul of the film is personal, it’s my voice as an artist. But the body—the north Indian setting, the narrative elements, those are my craft as a filmmaker. I almost don’t want to be over-familiar with the place. Like in Thithi—it wasn’t my village.

In ‘Thithi’ you worked largely with non-actors. Here you have well-known actors.
Unlike in Thithi, where we wrote roles based on real-life characters, here I wanted to write and then find actors who could inhabit those key roles, who could transform. But there are many non-actors: the villagers, the army men, the gardener, the maid. They served different purposes within this tapestry.

Was the combining of actors and non-actors ever a challenge?
These are the challenges I love. That dynamic was exciting to me: having a veteran like Manoj-ji do scenes with Ravi Bisht, who is a Pahadi villager, is talented but never acted before. Or Tilottama (Shome) going into the non-actor world and playing a villager. But mostly we had an actor schedule and a non-actor schedule.
I tried with this film to bring opposites together. So it is realistic but also magical; it is 16mm, 1980s in look and feel, but it’s also VFX-heavy. (The fires, but also a lot of the nature is VFX.)

Why did you want to shoot on film?
Multiple reasons. One, it was the medium in use in 1989. Making it look like it was shot then, that authenticity was exciting. I also believe in a kind of transference of consciousness in art; I think film carries our emotions in a tactile way, more potently than the digital medium. Film itself is a character, the grain dances from frame to frame. I do still photography on film, so that was the entry point.

Creating this visual world was a beautiful collaboration with debut cinematographer Sunil Borkar, and debut production designer Juhi Agarwal. I love working with first timers in key roles—it’s not like I am so far away from being one—because their visions are so uncoloured, coming straight from the hearts.

Would you speak a little about the film’s politics, and class in it?

First of course there’s the colonial hangover. And class has always fascinated me. It is a cross-sectional analysis of a plantation society. There is the family at the core. Then the manager who is loyal to the family but is a local himself, so he mediates between worlds. Then there are the villagers whose livelihoods are based on the estate by choice, or at least within the choices available to them. There is a loving relationship between Dev (Bajpayee) and his workers, but there is an obvious disparity. There is a shot in the film where the workers are walking home, under suspicion—and you cut to the family at a dinner party.That’s just how much of India is. And then there are the nomads: they surrender to nature, they don’t speak.

The nomads seem to represent a different sensibility from your real-world concern with class. They seem almost fictitious.
Totally, almost like elves. They had to stand apart. They are part of the questioning of our rights. Can we inhabit nature, filled with trees and creatures, without being persecuted?

Your shooting schedule was disrupted for two successive summers by the pandemic. What do you do as a filmmaker when something stops a creative process like that?
You stop, internally as well. I make one film at a time. But I am a compulsive creator. I’m into photography, music, philosophy, poetry, songs—not for an audience, yet.

Do you think of ‘The Fable’ as political allegory? 
It is part of the layers, but you can decide what you think is the core. As an artist, that’s exciting to me—to leave room for my art to be inhabited.

Trisha Gupta is a Delhi-based writer and critic, and professor of practice at the Jindal School of Journalism and Communication.

Book Review: The Dark Hours

I reviewed the new translation of a 97-year-old Bengali book, for India Today magazine.

A 1923 bhadralok account of Calcutta's seamy side is sociological and voyeuristic by turns.

In 1842, chief magistrate J.H. Patton drew up an elaborate plan to rid Calcutta of crime. Splitting the city geographically into upper, middle and lower divisions, Patton appointed 300 constables to the police in each. Their daytime duties were not unexpected, “preventing breaches of the peace, arresting persons against whom a hue and cry has been raised, ...drunk and disorderly persons and fakeers, and others making an obscene and disgusting exposure of their persons...” But at night, the constables were instructed to “on no account allow any person to pass along the streets or highways with a bundle, box or package after nightfall, without stopping him and examining the contents of his load...”. Night, it seemed, made everyone a suspect. The just-arrived rural migrant was to be treated as a potential burglar, or, at the very least, immoral. The city after dark was by definition illicit, a place of danger and debauchery.

In 1923, a well-known writer of Bangla detective fiction and children’s literature set out to map that city in words. Eighty years after Patton’s attempted clean-up, Calcutta had only grown in size, complexity and criminality. While claiming literary inspiration from Kaliprasanna Sinha’s irreverent 1862 urban classic Hutum Penchar Naksha, Hemendra Kumar Roy also insisted that his eyewitness account of the city’s seamier side would warn “[f]athers of young boys and girls where and what the real dangers are”. But the fact that Roy published Raater Kolkata under a pseudonym suggests he knew how his “adult male audience” would read it.

Recently translated into English by Rajat Chaudhuri as Calcutta Nights, Raater Kolkata is fascinating as a document of the 20th century city, but also for the tightrope it walks between salacious gossip and moral censure. The level of detail varies, from pure urban legend (e.g. women “from the western or north western part of the country” being sexually serviced by hired men in empty houses “on the banks of the Ganga, in the Barabazar area”) to descriptions that seem to draw on long observation.

Prostitution, for instance, is subdivided by race, class and location, from the Chowringhee hackney carriages that “take you to a white-skinned beauty”, to Jorabagan streets in winter, where poor sex workers stand “when the pye-dogs have also vanished”. The bhadralok in Roy clearly takes pride in his first-person exploits: entering an opium den in old Chinatown, escaping a police raid on a Mechhobazar goondas’ den, watching two sanyasinis fight it out at the Nimtola burning ghat. But it is in his descriptions of urban commingling, Durga Puja processions, or the theatre, that the anxieties of the upper caste male truly come to the fore. This is a book to be read as a sociological comment as much on the city as on its author.

Published in India Today, 1 Aug 2020.

Acrobats of the Upper Canopy

Don’t be fooled by the name or the sharp canines, the endangered lion-tailed macaque

is a shy, fruit-eating primate that inhabits the upper canopy of the rainforests of the Western

Ghats.

Slug: Narr

Don’t be fooled by the name or the sharp canines, the endangered lion-tailed macaque

is a shy, fruit-eating primate that inhabits the upper canopy of the rainforests of the Western

Ghats.

Slug: Narr

Reporting and researching this piece was a joy, though it also made me tragically aware of how we're ruining the earth for other creatures. It's my first piece for the nature and environment website Roundglass Sustain (please click link for all the superb pictures). 

Don't be fooled by the name or the sharp canines, the endangered lion-tailed macaque is a shy, fruit-eating primate that inhabits the upper canopy of the rainforests of the Western Ghats.

It was April 2014, and I was in the Western Ghats to meet an endangered primate. We drove on, the way the man had pointed, our gazes fixed on the tangled canopy. There! A group of monkeys with black faces, black bodies, and light facial hair. But Erinjery chuckled. This wasn’t the monkey we wanted. The Nilgiri langur we’d met has glossy black fur and a striking mane, similar enough to be confused with the monkey we were looking for. But what distinguishes our chosen primate is its shorter, tufted tail.

Fewer than 4,000 lion-tailed macaques — locally known as simhavaala or singavaal kurangu, literally ‘lion-tailed monkey’ — exist in the wild. They are, Erinjery informs me, divided into approximately 47 subpopulations across at least seven locations in the Western Ghats. These wet evergreen forests are also home to an impressive array of endemic plant and animal life, including over a dozen mammals found nowhere else in the world. The lion-tailed macaque, fondly abbreviated to LTM, is one of those: so perfectly adapted to these forests that conservationists are convinced it can function as an umbrella species. Protect it and you protect the whole forest ecosystem.

And it needs protection. The Ghats run about 1,600 km from north to south, but according to the research of wildlife biologist Dr. Ajith Kumar, forests now cover only about 25 percent of the slopes. The British began felling as early as the late 19th century to create cardamom, coffee and tea plantations. Agriculture, dams and human settlement have only speeded up the depletion. Since about 2004, though, Nelliyampathy’s macaques have benefited from an unusual land use shift: at least three plantations have been reclaimed by the state forest department and begun a slow return to wilderness. By Erinjery’s estimate, Nelliyampathy in 2014 had some 200 lion-tailed macaques living in 14 groups, making it one of the best places to see LTMs in a somewhat natural environment. But LTMs in the wild are shy. As soon as they spied us, they would move deeper into the jungle.

******

Usually found climbing and leaping through trees some 60 to 100 feet tall, the LTM leads its arboreal life with a lithe grace that belies the astounding height of its acrobatics. Its style is poise, not display. It barely ever descends to the ground even for water, managing on fruit sap and dew.

Unlike the Nilgiri langur, whose whooping ‘hoo hoo hoo’ calls are among the most frequent sounds of the jungle, it rarely makes much noise, devoting most of its energy to the search for food. The only thing you might hear as it travels through the upper canopy is a gentle ‘coo’, helping keep the group together.

When Erinjery and I finally found the LTMs, a silent feast was in progress. A group of about 40 was scattered across a clump of jackfruit trees on either side of the road. A large oblong fruit, fibrous yellow inside and ribbed green outside, the jackfruit originated in these forests. So it makes sense that it is one of the favourite foods of the LTMs, the oldest of the Western Ghat macaques. But the jackfruit is the largest tree-borne fruit in the world, weighing up to 36 kilos, while LTMs are among the world’s smaller macaques, reaching a head-body length of only 16 to 24 inches and an adult weight between 2 and 10 kilos. It’s quite a sight to watch: an LTM balancing itself between two branches, using its forelimbs like arms to immobilize a jackfruit larger than itself, then tearing into it with sharp front teeth. I even saw a sub-adult carry one away to eat in peace, climbing with its back limbs while holding the fruit with the front two and its teeth.

Like other primates, LTMs have forward-facing eyes and excellent vision, as well as opposable thumbs dexterous enough to manipulate fruits. Other than jackfruit, they eat figs, spiny green wild durian, elephant apples, and mangoes, supplementing this frugivorous diet with insects: caterpillars, spiders, cicadas and mantises picked off leaves. A juvenile LTM is likely to spend more time foraging for invertebrates than a grown one. Like human children, they need more protein.

Also like human babies, LTMs take time to grow up. The more common bonnet macaque, often found in close proximity to the LTM, has a similar lifespan, of about 20 years. But while a bonnet macaque starts reproducing at age 3 and gives birth every year thereafter, an LTM female is, on average, 6.6 years old when she first gives birth — the oldest among all macaques. And she will have only two or three infants in her lifetime.

LTMs usually live in groups of about 20, with a single dominant male. Where do the other males go? The answer is a fascinating one. While adult females remain in the group they were born into, an adult male LTM must migrate when it turns five or six, and enter another group to mate. An anti-incest rule!

******

Nelliyampathy’s 736 sq. km. of fragmented forest has begun to redevelop the connectivity needed for LTM males to migrate. But a full third of the world’s LTMs now live in privately-owned forest patches crisscrossed by plantations and human settlements. For every LTM in Nelliyampathy, there is at least one living in Valparai, 130 km away. There, I watched in disbelief as two male LTMs ambled across a busy road to investigate a heap of trashed plastic plates for leftover rice and dal. Returning to our jeep, I found another macaque peering out of it cartoonishly, as if to say, “What guys? No food?”

But the state of LTMs in Valparai was no joke.

Like Nelliyampathy, Valparai began as a colonial plantation area. Today, though surrounded by the protected forests of Anamalai Tiger Reserve, Valparai is a much larger urban settlement. Also, unlike the shady half-jungles of coffee and cardamom that play host to LTMs in Nelliyampathy, Valparai is dominated by tea estates, whose greater tree-clearance amplifies the habitat fragmentation that is the biggest long-term threat to these macaques.

Two of the largest Valparai groups, comprising 160-odd LTMs, are living a strange new life: isolated from other groups, hemmed in by human habitation, spending 30-40 percent of their time on the ground instead of the four percent normal for the species, and consuming new foods.

In Valparai, it is tragically common to see LTMs by the roadside, making an easy breakfast off local cultivars like the guava. When a car stops, a daring male can get a still easier snack. I saw three different monkeys show up for their fix of fried, salty processed food.

Ananda Kumar, a scientist at the Nature Conservation Foundation (NCF) in Valparai, suspects that growing construction and tourist traffic has increased human-animal interaction, changing LTM behaviour and causing conflict and roadkill. To help, Kumar and his team had built fire-proof canvas bridges to link the tree canopies on opposite sides of the busiest roads, and hired two staffers to track these two groups daily. Between 10 a.m. and 5 p.m., they held up placards telling drivers to ‘Go Slow’ and tried to persuade day trippers — many from a rising tribe of amateur photographers — not to feed the monkeys.

These are emergency measures. Long-term conservation needs plantation owners to work with the NCF. Restoring forest fragments and planting connecting tree corridors across a nude expanse of tea bushes would help create a self-sustaining habitat, in which migrating males from one LTM group can find a mate in another.

The growing number of LTMs in Valparai can appear a good thing, especially since hunting remains a threat elsewhere. But the larger group has 120 individuals, more than six times the size of an average group in the wild. Both groups have become multi-male, and Mysore-based primatologist Mewa Singh says the biological effects of the inbreeding “will only show themselves in several generations.” And given radically altered diets and exposure to human diseases, a ballooning population could suddenly crash.

What I’d learned about the lion-tailed macaque in the wild was that they were almost entirely arboreal, uni-male societies, dependent on the fruits of the rainforest and its connected canopies. In Valparai, all of this had changed. But unlike bonnet macaques and rhesus macaques, known to commonly snatch food and act aggressively with humans, the LTM’s forced engagement with the human world has not yet changed their essential temperament. As one of the placard-holding NCF trackers said, “Sometimes they come and touch us gently on the shoulder. They’re soft-type animals. If you don’t disturb them, they don’t disturb you.”

I can only wonder how much further we intend to push them.

Published in Roundglass Sustain, July 2019.

A Place in the Crowd

My Mirror column:

A new film looks at our striving for space in the city — and the solidarities that might help us find it.

Those of us who live in cities spend most of our time being unhappy in them, and about them. Tu Hai Mera Sunday sets out to show us how we might reverse that, if we try. It’s a goal worth striving for — the happiness, as well as the idea of a film that tries to spark city-love in us — and Milind Dhaimade manages to take us with him much of the way.

It's true that the premise is a little too obviously metaphoric: a group of middle class Mumbaikars are aching to play their Sunday football game, but suddenly find all their options closed off. The search for a space where they can play together provides the literal and emotional underpinning of Dhaimade's narrative. And since his intentions are clearly warm and fuzzy, one probably shouldn't grudge him the by-the-numbers representativeness of the all-male gang he places at the film’s centre. There’s one Muslim (Avinash Tiwary), one Goan Christian (Vishal Malhotra), one Parsi (Nakul Bhalla), one Gujarati Hindu (Jay Upadhyay) — and a fifth (Barun Sobti), whom we assume to be Hindu and North Indian precisely because he is presented as unmarked by community or region to the point where he can be coded merely as “accha aadmi”.

The way to watch this film is to stop being cynical, and summon up instead that moment of wonder you have in the Mumbai local or the Delhi metro, when you look around you and see yourself as part of the marvellous mixture that is our urbanity: the sabzi-chopping working women heading to the end of the line, the graceful Gujarati matriarchs with their seedha palla saris, the burkha-wearing young woman on the way home from college, the salwar-kameez-clad officemates venting about their terrible boss. It doesn’t happen often, true, but surely you’ve had those moments, too — in which strangers come together for purposes great or small, and make the city seem, for that infinitesimal instant, a place we all inhabit together.

Dhaimade chooses sport as his unifier across community and to a lesser extent, across class, age and gender — and frankly, it isn't a bad narrative device through which to examine both the possibilities and the limits of our togetherness. It seems quite believable that the Muslim man about- town Rashid, who could never marry his Hindu sweetheart, can have two Hindus (and Parsis and Christians) as football buddies. Or that Gujju family man Jayesh, running from his family, might spend his Sundays with a bunch of unattached younger men. Or even that Arjun, the self-proclaimed “accha aadmi”, might woo a potential love interest by taking her aged dad off her hands and into his football game every Sunday.

But the film is juggling many things, and so at some point the football is abandoned in mid-air, while we follow each of our protagonists into their particular struggles. Some of these individual tracks are spelt out as romantic — such as the sweetly winsome one between Barun Sobti’s Arjun and Shahana Goswami’s hard-to-impress Kavi, or the awkward but heartfelt rescue attempt by Nakul Bhalla’s Mehernosh when his colleague is being mistreated by their asshole boss. Others contain unspoken questions, and are the more interesting because of that: like the connection between the very single Rashid and his mother-of-two neighbour (the sparkly-eyed Rasika Dugal); or Dominic, so used to his mother’s anxiety and his brother’s antagonism that he finds himself confused by the easy warmth of his brother’s new girlfriend.

Spatially, too, the film alternates between private or domestic spaces where class particularities are invariably more marked — the posher variety of cafe that keeps unground coffee beans on the table, a chawl where loud quarrels are the norm, a joint family home overrun with children and rituals — and the sort of gathering-places that would make up an ideal Habermasian public sphere: a city beach, a relaxed Irani cafe, a train station, a dive bar.

Dhaimade's film makes quite clear his attachment to these free or at least not-too-expensive public spaces, sites that also represent the culture of a pre-liberalisation era.

There is nothing wrong, exactly, about such a desire; many middle class people share it, which is why the closure of a Samovar in Bombay or a Volga in Delhi is greeted with a flood of nostalgic reminiscences. But perhaps we ought to look unequal access in the eye: an Arjun can choose to go to the Irani cafe or the expensive new one, a Rashid or a Jayesh Bhai, not so much. And there is something striking and sad about the fact that the search for space in Mumbai must eventually land the characters — and the film — in Goa.

Still, this is fiction, after all, and several happy endings are provided. One of them makes what is, I suppose, a practical suggestion: find a terrace from which to gaze out at the city skyline, and the height might make it seem less oppressive. But well, as Shahana Goswami's character tells us, even to access a building rooftop like that you need to know the name of someone who actually lives there.

Published in Mumbai Mirror, 8 Oct 2017. 

Picture This: Dreaming Delhi, Documenting Delhi

My BLInk column:

A set of striking student films demonstrate that ten sharply-focused minutes can open our eyes to worlds through which we sleepwalk every day.

A child sits in a sandpit, scooping up sand with a small sieve. Some sand escapes each time, but a little gets to its destination — the pot is now almost full. Someone asks what he’s doing, and the little boy’s answer comes unhesitatingly: making tea. “And what have you put in it?” “Sooji!” (semolina) comes the reply.

The scene — from Window’s Hole, one of five 10-minute films made by students of the Creative Documentary course at New Delhi’s Sri Aurobindo Institute of Arts and Communication (SACAC) — can be watched as a gently comic take on how children’s minds work. But it is also wonderfully cinematic.

The unasked question of why the sand is tea is answered by the presence of the chhalni. (If there is a strainer, it must be tea.) And the other unasked question — why semolina in chai? — is answered by the camera coming to rest on the granular texture of the sand. Of course, sand is sooji!

The five films screened at SACAC on Dec 19 comprise of what the 18-month documentary filmmaking course calls the students’ ‘Location Project’. Students divide into pairs, exploring a space of their choosing on film. Aviva Dharmaraj and Gagan Singh, who made Window’s Hole, chose to film within SACAC’s own campus. The sights and sounds of the Auro Navakriti playschool become a way of capturing the world as a child might experience it. Some of this is about scale: I loved the last shot in which a serious-eyed little boy carefully places his toy car next to the rabbit hatch — did he imagine it as a getaway vehicle for the rabbits, should they choose to stage a glorious escape?

The others go further afield, but being student films made on presumably non-existent budgets, they don’t stray far. Anuradha Bansal and Aparna Bansal’s is perhaps the most predictable in its choice of terrain — the Indian Coffee House. Hovering above the hubbub of Connaught Place, the somewhat fusty old cafe on the terrace of Mohan Singh Place is where generations of Delhi’s men (rarely women) have measured out their lives in coffee spoons. The filmmakers seem, however, a little awestruck by the history of the institution — for instance, its closure (in its previous location) by Indira Gandhi’s government under Emergency occupies official centrestage in the film, but there is little cinematic content to back up the claim that it affected people deeply. Perhaps we are simply too distant from the events in question to summon up the memories. Even a Coffee House regular’s mention of our current Prime Minister and his undemocratic tendencies does not produce the emotional bridge the film strives for.

Akanksha Gupta and Vasuki Chandak, meanwhile, focus their attentions on an unobtrusive little gate that divides two Delhi localities: the upper middle-class Navjivan Vihar and the less posh STC colony. The filmmakers display a wonderful eye for form, and the power of repetition: the grids of windows in walls, mostly closed, like the blank faces of people gazing out from their balconies. Mapping both the colony’s old-school manual policing — the watchman and his jail-like routine of closing and opening the gate seven-odd times a day — and the new excitement created by a CCTV camera, Looking Through the Fence captures the absurd degree of suspicion that reigns among Delhi’s more monied. But the filmmakers also demonstrate the joyful abandon with which such direness can be circumvented. Two children regularly pass through the bolted so-called chor-darwaza (thief’s door), not looking at all thief-like about it.

The policing of boundaries between spaces is also the subject of my favourite film of the five. The pithy but somehow also poetic Home Ground, by Arunima Tenzin Tara and Sushil, excavates a particular history of Delhi’s present with rare subtlety and precision. Shot in an Idgah-cum-playground that lies between the upper middle-class Saket and the older urban village Hauz Rani, the film draws attention to walls, and how they create the spaces they are meant to demarcate. The walls needed to mark graves (for the ‘empty’ space to be recognized as a kabristan (graveyard) by the powers-that-be) are juxtaposed with the walls that have carved ostensibly more useful space — a sports complex, a multiplex cinema, a superspeciality hospital, a school — out of what was once a forest rich in birdsong. Of course, none of the users of these new spaces intersect with the users of the erstwhile jungle.

The disappearance of Hauz Rani’s mango trees forms a delicate link with the final film here, Waiting for the Flood, which begins with a line from a poem by WS Merwin: “When the forests have been destroyed their darkness remains.” Abhinava Bhattacharya and Mallika Visvanathan have crafted a well-researched piece of work that is also stunning in its imagery. From the watery depths of Qutb Sahib ki Baoli, where Farooq, Zakir and Mushtaq sit waiting for the fish, to the monkey that sits beside a pile of malba (rubble), the film’s visuals contain an appeal to find beauty amid ugliness. The pink bougainvillea flowers reflected in the now sewage-filled nallah, the sunlight glinting off oil-swirled water, and a single red dragonfly examining its options — all allow dreams to bubble up from the city’s darkness. These young filmmakers may still be finding their feet, but their heads are in the clouds for a reason. This is documentary striving to dream other dreams.

Published in the Hindu Business Line, 13 Jan 2017.

Dharamshala International Film Festival: Why it's an unmatched experience for cinephiles

My long-overdue piece on DIFF, whose 5th instalment was held in Nov 2016.

It should be easy to write about the Dharamshala International Film Festival. Started five years ago by the wonderfully matter-of-fact Ritu Sarin and the almost shy Tenzing Sonam (partners in life and documentary filmmaking, whose long-term connection to the Tibetan cause led them to settle in Dharamshala in 1996), DIFF is the sort of experience that leaves you pinching yourself. How could some people you've never even met have created the film festival of your dreams?

The remarkable thing about DIFF, though, is that its dreaminess is real. Sarin and Sonam, Tibet activists for as long as they have been filmmakers, aren't the sort to create some airy-fairy fantasy world. The location this year was the Tibetan Children's Village: a Dharamshala institution that began in 1960 with fifty-one children from a road construction camp and a rug borrowed from the Dalai Lama. The school campus, built by the labour of generations of TCV students, is a 15 minute drive up from McLeodganj's central square, and lends itself well to the festival's well-adjusted local-global vibe. The bigger screenings are held in the school auditorium, with the resonant names of houses — Songtsen, Trival, Trisong and Nyatri — emblazoned on the walls, and its cavernous cement depths oft invaded by freezing draughts that should give potential snuggling couples just the excuse they need.

The films, too, aren't just a list of the Biggest-Coolest-Latest that money can buy, as the bigger festivals are increasingly becoming. What we get instead is a perfectly curated mix of fiction and non-fiction, Indian and international, features and shorts, with a sense of each film being chosen for its own sake, with no kowtowing to 'themes' — and yet a clear political-personal sensibility at work.

The documentary, for instance, gets more play here than it might at a different festival of the same size: this year, for instance, there were as many as nine feature-length documentaries to 17 narrative features. And in keeping with the festival's non-divisive spirit, non-fiction isn't relegated to a separate section like fiction's less-cool sibling. It appears that just this small change in approach — not making a big hoo-ha about documentaries, but simply adding them to the mix in no-fuss fashion — is enough to produce avidly enthusiastic full houses for them. Two of the biggest crowdpleasers I watched at DIFF, in fact, were non-fiction: the British filmmaker Sean McAllister's powerfully personal engagement with a Syrian-Palestinian family (A Syrian Love Story, 2015) and the Iranian director Rokhsareh Ghaem Maghami's documentary about a teenaged Afghan refugee becoming a internet rap sensation (Sonita, 2015).

The other thing to remember is that DIFF is a compact three-day festival, and the number of films is tiny in comparison with IFFI or MAMI or IFFK. I swiftly began to realise that scale is everything. Unlike larger film festivals, there are usually no more than two parallel screenings, with an occasional conversation competing for your attention. This makes it possible, at the end of each day, to feel as if you've actually shared a substantial chunk of experience with the young whippersnapper who's already screened at Venice and is invariably ahead of you in the bar queue, and with the lovely quirky American lady who mentions her knee replacement surgeries with enviable lightness, even as she matches you step for step down the stone staircase shortcut that connects one screening venue with another. This is it, then — the not-so-secret secret of community: smallness, sharing, and a resolute lack of hierarchy.

But what makes DIFF different, in the end, is not the superbly well-chosen films, the infectious warmth of apple-cheeked children running around in the winter sun, or even the lung- and mind-expanding air up in the mountains, where (as the terribly youthful director Raam Reddy put it so charmingly before the Opening Night screening of his film Thithi), “the soul feels close to your body”. What really creates the vibe of the festival is the people.

There is something particularly freeing about having people — whether new initiates or veteran filmwallahs — congregating all the way from Delhi and Kerala, Bombay and Pune and Bengaluru, to share cinema and conversation in a place which feels somehow unburdened by the weight of Culture with a capital C. There is a great deal of serious conversation, both political and artistic, but it is conducted in the generous spirit of bonhomie and constructive criticism. There are few 'big men' around, and if they are, they don't have the license here — or perhaps the yen — to throw their weight around. I wait warily when Saeed Mirza, whose films I have long admired, is encouraged to pontificate on the state of the nation. He holds forth (as is his wont, and as I remember him doing in a white kurta-pajama, sprawled on the Siri Fort lawns in a Delhi IFFI in the early 90s), but he sounds accurate, as if his own inner bullshit-detector is working better in the mountain air.

All successful film festivals are pilgrimages, and DIFF is no exception. Most vivid proof of this is provided by the veritable army of youthful volunteers who arrive year upon year, contributing their time and spending their own money to participate in the hectic yet orderly shramdaan that is essential to the festival's success. Some volunteers I met had no particular interest in cinema; several others were film-mad. Many of those I spoke to at some length shared a dilemma about the artistic life – can one ever make a living off it, or must one's art be honed independently of whatever what does to make a living?

For one young Malayali man I met, volunteering at DIFF was a way into understanding how to run a film festival someday: “I want to learn, how do you get 200 people to work for you for free?” he grinned. For another — also visiting from Kerala but not a volunteer — DIFF was his first film festival. Engineer by training and entrepreneur by instinct, he's already sorted out a small business; now he's immersing himself in cinema because he's writing scripts for Malayalam films.

The lovely thing that makes DIFF a community, perhaps, is that it isn't just the volunteers who're grappling with that question of independence. Whether by choice or by design, the festival seems to attract filmmakers and writers and artists who're striving to keep creative control of their work — while not being starved entirely of the oxygen of popularity.

Published in Firstpost, 26 Nov 2016.

Picture This: The call of the wild

Forty-five years ago, a British director made a striking, surreal film about the idea of civilisation, shot in the Australian desert.

Sometime in the ’60s, a British filmmaker looking to make his transition from cinematographer to independent director zeroed in on a novel called The Children, by James Vance Marshall. First published in 1959, the book was about two American children stranded in the Australian outback after a plane crash. An Aboriginal boy helps them survive and make their way back to Western ‘civilisation’, but himself dies from the influenza virus he catches from the two.

I haven’t read Marshall’s book, but here’s what I see this narrative as suggesting: that cross-cultural communication in an unequal world is possible, but ends inevitably in tragedy for the colonised. And that white people might fail to communicate their emotions and intentions, but they communicate their diseases effortlessly.

The film, however, dropped the influenza part of the plot. The Children was written for a ‘juvenile audience’, today’s YA. I imagine that Nicholas Roeg — for that was the filmmaker’s name — wanted to retain the childlike excitement of the colonial adventure, but also produce something more open-ended and complex. Working from a screenplay by the British playwright Edward Bolton, Roeg made the children English residents of Australia. He also played with a shift of focus to the Aboriginal side of things: the film starts with this text: “In Australia, when an Aborigine man-child reaches sixteen, he is sent out into the land. For months, he must live from it. Sleep on it. Eat of its fruit and flesh. Stay alive. Even if it means killing his fellow-creatures. The Aborigines call it the WALKABOUT. This is the story of a “WALKABOUT”.”

Having announced this theme, however, Roeg’s camera — and our gaze — stays largely with the white people. Walkabout, released on July 1,1971 — exactly 45 years ago this week — cast Roeg’s own son Luc (credited as Lucien John) and the striking teenaged British actress Jenny Agutter as the siblings, while giving the role of the Aboriginal boy to the extraordinary David Gulpilil (wrongly credited in the film as Gumpilil).

Yet right from the opening scenes, the film is intent on defamiliarising white ‘civilisation’. The uneven, nasal drone of the Aboriginal didjeridoo is overlaid onto scenes from white Australian urban life, emphasising people’s disconnect from their surroundings: a middle-aged man in a suit sits down in a strangely alienating space; a little boy (John) in school uniform looks into a book as he walks. A magnificent shot shows the little boy walking home, framed by the ominous shadow of a gnarled old tree.

Strangeness, Roeg suggests, lies in the eyes of the beholder. Interspersed with the Aboriginal instrument are white-people sounds that seem as jarring — a single phrase of spoken French; a classroom full of white girls chanting the vowels of the English alphabet in unison. A woman making dinner in a white-cube apartment listens to a radio programme about the ortolan, a bird overfed in captivity and then drowned in alcohol to create a gourmet French dish.

Then things get really weird. A few minutes into a desert picnic, the father starts shooting at his children, and then kills himself. The girl (Agutter), being the older one, keeps what has happened from the boy. Gathering up the radio, a bottle of lemonade and tins of food, she walks him further into the desert.

Roeg’s cinematographic eye is extraordinary. Panoramic views of windswept dunes, flat red rocks and circling mountain ridges alternate with vivid close-ups of colourful, sometimes dangerous creatures that live in this landscape: frilled lizards, chameleons, scorpions, porcupines. The film pauses its narrative for us to observe these creatures, so comfortably at home here — unlike our hatted-coated protagonists, who are so profoundly not.

The little boy is initially excited to be on an adventure, but in a few days they have reached a state of extreme hunger and thirst. It is then that they encounter the Aboriginal boy. He looks blankly at the girl as she pours out floods of anxious words, but when the younger boy mimes drinking, he laughs and instantly crafts a reed pipe to draw out water from the ‘dry’ ground. He is as much of this world as the animals he kills for food. He can make spears out of branches, sunburn salve out of animal blood, and food out of nearly any living thing.

The white children, now shielded from the harsh vagaries of the landscape, begin to revel in its idyllic freedoms — swinging from branches, swimming in pools, roasting meat on naked fires. But what makes the film particularly intense is an unspoken erotic tension, the web of mutual fascination that quivers between Agutter and Gulpilil. But that fascination is ill-fated, because Agutter’s character is afraid of it, afraid to admit to it.

Before Walkabout, few films had dealt with Australian inter-race relations. Most notable was Charles Chauvel’s Jedda (1955), in which an Aboriginal baby is brought up in a white family. Jedda’s white mother is appalled when the teenager wants to join her Aboriginal age-mates on a walkabout. The tragic climax is framed by a white view of the wildness of the land — and the people.

A few years after Walkabout came Peter Weir’s eerie Picnic at Hanging Rock, based on the bestselling 1967 novel about a group of white schoolgirls who disappear while on a Valentine’s Day picnic in 1900. Weir, too, partook of the mystery and wildness of the Australian landscape — though here, any erotic charge was expressed by young white women, and suppressed by their Victorian schoolmistresses.

Those films could not go beyond whiteness, or the idea of a separation of spheres. In contrast, Walkabout feels startlingly fresh. The white girl and the black boy circle each other warily, their interactions filled with a nervous energy. Dreamlike though his film is, Roeg makes no outlandish claims. Things end badly for the boy. But it is her life that is forever shadowed by the remembered grandeur of the wilderness.

Published in BL Ink, 2 July, 2014.

Inside, Outside

My Mirror column on Phobia:

Pawan Kripalani's smart new horror movie goes the psychological route, but stops a bit short of its political possibilities.

Pawan Kripalani's new film, Phobia, casts the talented Radhika Apte as a young woman who develops a psychological condition called agoraphobia, finding it harder and harder to leave the confines of her home. 

When we first meet Apte's character, an artist called Mehak, she is the centre of attention. A show of her art work has just opened at a gallery, and she is surrounded by friends and acquaintances, chatting and telling ghost stories and generally being the cynosure of all eyes. Within the blink of an eye, though, the mood has changed. Mehak looks into the distance, thinks she sees something strange, then realizes what she 'saw' is no longer there. She is disoriented enough to leave her own opening night abruptly. But worse is to come. 

After having dropped off her friend and admirer Shaan (Satyajit Mishra), she dozes off in the cab, and (in a clear reference to the Uber rape case of December 2014), comes to only to find the taxi driver in the back seat, trying to force himself on her. The film does not dwell on the incident, except to make clear that this attempted rape forms the trigger for Mehak's ailment: her increasingly irrational fear of the outside world. 

A female character's descent into madness has been the subject of a lot of powerful films, from Gaslight to Repulsion to Black Swan, to John Cassavetes' astounding A Woman Under the Influence and Todd Haynes' disturbing Safe. Like several of these films, Phobia suggests that its protagonist's affliction has something of a sexual undertow. But for some reason, Kripalani doesn't put this aspect of things in the spotlight. 

What we get instead is a true-blue scary movie, which has the tropes of a traditional horror flick -- spooky spiders, eerily silent cats, bathtubs and broken mirrors, lamps that crackle and drains that make strange sounds. Phobia is an effective piece of apartment horror. 

Mehak's growing irrational behaviour starts to create problems for her family, and she temporarily shifts out of the house she shares with her sister and little nephew into a Malad apartment owned by Shaan's friend. The place is furnished but empty, since the tenant, a girl called Jiah, has seemingly skipped town, leaving all her belongings behind. In classic horror movie fashion, Mehak starts to see and hear things in the flat, while reading Jiah's (conveniently detailed) diary and gradually becoming convinced that Jiah is dead and her unhappy spirit is wandering around. The agoraphobia now becomes merely a plot device to keep Mehak indoors. 

Having started off in an art gallery, Phobia then shifts to the interior of a moving taxi, followed by an open road, and finally the interiors of two successive houses, from which Mehak's (and the film's) only forays into the outside are virtual. 'Agora' is the Greek term for marketplace, and agoraphobia means 'fear of public spaces'. 

But it was fascinating to me that the 'virtual therapy' device through which a therapist twice tries to get a panic-stricken Mehak to 'pretend-travel' beyond the four walls of her house takes her, both times, into a virtual mall—as if shopping is necessarily therapeutic for women. Of course, the mall is also an increasingly popular setting for horror films (Kripalani's own previous outing was called Darr at the Mall). The director--whose first film was Ragini MMS — also expertly uses CCTV footage to add to the ever-present question: did it happen or did she imagine it? 

Phobia does many interesting things, and does most of them well. The camerawork and editing keep you on your toes, and the actors -- not just Apte, but also Satyadeep Mishra and Yashaswini Dayama as Mehak's cheeky young neighbour Nikki -- are very good. But as I started looking up agoraphobia, I began to wonder why a film that had decided to take this as its premise didn't do more with it. Because it turns out, the ailment affects many more women than men. 

In the United States, 90% of those with severe agoraphobia are women, and 70% of those with mild symptoms are women, too. Women agoraphobes are twice as likely to experience general anxiety, and three times as likely to have panic attacks. The figures are similar for other countries. Feminist approaches to agoraphobia suggest that the disease needs to be seen in a social context: the fact that women are socialised to think of public spaces as threatening, and often learn to police their own behaviour in public, placing restrictions on their own mobility out of a fear of men. 

The converse of a fear of the outdoors is, of course, a greater attachment to and identification with the home than displayed by most men. The scholars Gelfond (1991) and Fodor (1992) have argued that it might be worthwhile to look at agoraphobic women as representing one end of a continuum -- i.e., as sharing many forms of behaviour with large sections of the adult female population. In being unable to claim her rightful place in public space, Seidenberg and De Crow (1983) have suggested, the agoraphobic woman is a "living and acting metaphor, making a statement, registering a protest, effecting a sit-in strike". 

Phobia could certainly have been a more chilling indictment.

Published in Mumbai Mirror, 29 May 2016

Book Review: Everything is Illuminated

A review of Vivek Shanbhag's Ghachar Ghochar, published in BL Ink:

Vivek Shanbhag’s craft is so good that it’s practically invisible. His novel is a disconcerting, deeply affecting read about the decay of one family’s moral certainty.

To all outward appearance, Ghachar Ghochar is a novel of domesticity, of familial tyrannies. But it opens (and closes) in a space outside the home. It is as if it is only from that distance that the story might have a chance of being told, of escaping the suffocating clutches of the home in which it is unfolding. So we meet our unnamed narrator in the “airy, spacious, high-ceilinged” Coffee House.

Spaces matter to Shanbhag. He is adept at illustrating how they shape our social selves; function as mirrors for our internal landscapes. Coffee House, for instance, is not “one of your low-lit bars with people crammed around tables”, but a place which “makes you feel cultured, sophisticated” if you drink in it. Sitting there, the narrator watches a couple have a public break-up, and is reminded of a long-ago relationship with a woman that he had once broken off within these walls. The Coffee House section also doffs its hat to an older, less cluttered Bangalore — a quick gesture that is one of Shanbhag’s few concessions to obvious big-picture-ness.

The theme continues as the narrative comes into its own: the generous two-storey house in which the narrator and his family now live is contrasted with the cramped space in which he grew up: “four small rooms, one behind the other, like train compartments”. The move from one house to the other is the spatial counterpart to the family’s sudden rise up the social ladder.

“Everything we’d brought from the old house appeared more worn, even unrecognisable in this new place,” observes the narrator. But it is not only objects that have been displaced. The people, too, seem to have lost their moorings. The architecture of the old house created a certain camaraderie that is all but lost in the new house, where everyone has a room to themselves. Where every decision earlier had to be made as a collective one, the family now has enough money “to buy things without asking for permission or informing anyone or even thinking about it.”

But in Shanbhag’s telling, these changes, that could have led to an increase in individual freedom, lead instead to dissolution, to a state of normlessness that the 19th century French sociologist Emile Durkheim called anomie. “Appa’s hold on the rest of us slipped. And to be honest, we lost hold of ourselves, too.” The small-time salesman with his painstakingly accounted-for labour is replaced at the helm of the family by his younger brother, and by a business that makes much more money in a much less transparent fashion. As the existing relationships between them break down, so do the values that had held the family together. The weight of new money is too much to bear.

And yet the family does hold together. In some terrifying way, it is all that it does. In one of the book’s most devastating moments, the narrator voices a seemingly bland, throwaway thought that later seems resonant with meaning. Referring to his new wife Anita, who has just been openly critical of the family’s dubious behaviour, he says, “I didn’t know how to make her see the relationships in our family from the inside. There was no other way to comprehend them.” It is an ominous thought in this political moment, but it is tempting to think of the family here as a metaphor for the nation, and this new compass that no longer measures right and wrong — only insiders and outsiders.

Given its powerful metaphoric qualities and its moral heft, it is tempting to read Ghachar Ghochar as a parable of post-liberalisation India. But while parable it may be, this is not a simple book. Shanbhag has produced a text so immaculately crafted that its craft is invisible, until you go looking for it — and discover that what you thought were asides were actually clues placed there strategically for you to discover. It is a book that draws you in with a deceptively chatty air, and before you know it, you have become privy to its chilling confidences.

Srinath Perur’s stellar translation from the Kannada both preserves the gentle observational quality of Shanbhag’s prose, and allows his aphoristic brilliance to shine through. The storyteller’s skill is such that you might be enticed into hurtling through — but there is much here worth lingering for.

I was especially moved by Shanbhag’s portrait of an arranged marriage, sweeping us up with its potential for tenderness, and the heady, erotic sensation of surrender. And while the book has been justly feted as a portrait of family and class dynamics, it is also a perspicacious account of our relationship to work. The lower middle-class family’s everyday involvement with the work of the breadwinner (which Shanbhag, in an interview with this writer, singled out as the germ of the story) and the inseparable relationship between work and self-respect — these are powerful themes, and the novel deals with them memorably.

There is something unsparing about Shanbhag’s novel. Like Anita, it is a voice from the inside, and it insists on telling the truth, no matter how uncomfortable that telling may make us.

Published in the Hindu Business Line, March 26, 2016.