A Short Film with a Long Story

My Mumbai Mirror column:

Karishma Dev Dube's memorable 'Bittu', about two little girls, their friendship and a fateful day, makes it to the 2021 Academy Awards shortlist for Live Action Short Films

Last week, even as India's official entry to the 2021 Oscars -- Lijo Jose Pellissery's much-talked-about Malayalam drama Jallikattu -- dropped out of the fray in the Best International Feature category, a 17-minute film by a young Indian filmmaker slipped quietly into the final shortlist in the Live Action Short Film category. Set and shot in Koti village in Uttarakhand's Dehradun district, Karishma Dev Dube's Bittu is a fictional reimagining of the accidental poisoning at a Bihar school that killed 22 children in 2013.

Bittu's entry into the Oscar race owes nothing to Indian officialdom. In 2020, after a great run at prestigious film festivals like Telluride, BFI and Palm Springs, Dube – then a graduate student at New York University -- entered her film for the 47^th Student Academy Awards. Bittu competed with 1,474 entries from 328 educational institutions worldwide to win a Silver medal. That win also made it eligible to compete for the Oscars this year, where it was up against 174 films in its category. Having made it to the current shortlist of ten, Bittu now awaits the announcement of the final five from which the eventual winner will be selected in April.

I first watched Bittu in November 2020, when it was screened online as part of the Dharamshala International Film Festival (DIFF)'s line-up of shorts. At DIFF 2020, I was also in conversation with the film's cinematographer, Shreya Dev Dube, who has worked on Ronny Sen's Cat Sticks and Mira Nair's A Suitable Boy, and happens to be Karishma's older sister. One of the first things I remember asking Shreya about is the almost 'documentary' quality of Bittu's memorable opening sequence, in which the two eight-year-old protagonists, Bittu and Chand, perform snatches from Bhojpuri songs.

Speaking to Karishma on the phone this week, I found myself remarking again at the wonderfully natural performances the film draws from its child actors, particularly Rani Kumari and Renu Kumari, who play the two friends at its core.

Shot over six days in February 2019 as her NYU thesis project, Dube's film has been much longer in the making. She first started writing it in 2014 from what she calls “a place of anger”, not just at the systemic negligence that leads to tragedies of this sort (“It's happened before and it's happened since,” as she put it), but at the kind of unquestioning relationship to authority that is expected of children in India, especially in a rural school setting. She set it aside for some time to make Devi, her second year NYU film, about a young woman who disrupts her upper middle class domestic set-up in Delhi by pursuing an attraction to the household maid.

When she returned to the school poisoning, she found herself writing the script as much around the two girls as around the tragedy. Two substantial filmmaking grants – the first of which, the inaugural Black Family Prize, enabled her to come to India and work to raise more money via a Kickstarter campaign – helped her make the film the way she wanted to. That included working with the children for two and half months in pre-production.

Gender and sexuality isn't foregrounded in Bittu as it was in Devi, but Dube mentions visualising Bittu as a bit of a non-conformist, a girl who doesn't quite fit her traditional gender role: something that the more feminine Chand, for instance, does perfectly. There's also something disturbing about a crowd of adult men tossing coins at two little girls to perform quite raunchy adult numbers with their own gendered politics. “College ki ladkiyan/ maarti hain dhakka, Nahi diya mukka, toh kehti hain chhakka,” goes one, which Bittu embellishes in her unique fashion by pretending to bowl a cricket ball. Chhakka means six, but it's also Hindi slang for a gay/transsexual man. The film's English subtitles correctly press home that latter association, but you do lose some texture in translation. Does Bittu's sporty gesture reveal a gap between the words she uses and what she understands? Or does her gap-toothed grin suggest that she knows why the men are laughing?

As this first scene suggests, Dube's film is subtle, lively and full of layers. It's shot in Uttarakhand, in a classroom full of largely local children, but the two girls at the centre are the children of Bihari migrant labourers who come to work in these hills. The other cast is also a mix: the schoolteacher is played by a professional actor, Saurabh Saraswat (who was so marvellous in Kranti Kanade's underwatched film CRD), but the principal is played – wonderfully -- by Krishna Negi, whom Dube met because her daughter happens to run a local beauty parlour.

Arriving in Uttarakhand with “a pretty fixed script”, Dube managed to find two girls who brilliantly fitted her Bittu and Chand. In her fictional Uttarakhand setting, she found a real connection to Bihar, where the original incident took place. Serendipity has worked in Dube's favour thus far. As Bittu advances in the Oscar race, we can all hope it will continue to.

Published in Mumbai Mirror, 14 Feb 2021.

The Lord of Light: Robert Richardson

A short Q&A with renowned cinematographer Robert Richardson, for India Today. 

Photo credit: Yasir Iqbal, India Today

Robert Richardson, 63, has won the Academy Award for cinematography three times, for JFK (1991), The Aviator (2004) and Hugo (2011). He received a Lifetime Achievement award from the American Society of Cinematographers in March. We caught up with him on a brief visit to Delhi. 

Q: You’ve been a cinematographer for nearly four decades. The technology has changed a fair bit. Has what makes a good cinematographer changed? 
The techniques have changed. The speed of film altered first. In the studio system, with highlighting, to trying to do no lighting, yet having slow speed so you had to do lighting. And then you moved into digital, which had a higher speed, so lighting started to disappear altogether. It’s more about shading than lighting. Composition altered. You got the handheld shot. All changes created by technology.

Q. Almost all ‘films’ are now shot in the digital format. Do you see this more as a loss or a gain?
I could take both those perspectives. Film has been developed for years as a way to capture human skin tone more naturally. It has a softer resonance. But digital’s moving into a larger space of comfort, a wider range of capture. Also, you have to use less light to achieve the look.

Q. So would one argument for the digital format be about being closer to life, more natural? 
That’s where they’ve gone. But, in a film, you’re telling a story. Even a writer can’t do that in a ‘natural’ manner. Why should a cinematographer?

Q. You’ve had close working partnerships with great directors like Oliver Stone, Quentin Tarantino and Martin Scorsese. Have you ever been tempted to direct? 
I’ve been tempted. But it didn’t fall into the well.

Q. Do you have a favourite film among your own? 
I can never do the favourite film thing! There’s films I don’t like. But the ones I do love, all happened for different reasons: Salvador was my first film, Platoon my most emotional, JFK was what I wanted to move forward to. Between The Aviator and A Private War, how can one be judged better?

Q. You’ve often shot on a grand scale, but you became a cinematographer after watching more intimate work: Sven Nyqvist on Ingmar Bergman’s films, and Nestor Almendros on Eric Rohmer’s films. Does scale matter to you, personally?
Scale is a complicated thing. When you do something on a very large scale, say, a tentpole film like World War Z, that has a more commercial aspect: you have to move within studio requirements. But with, say, A Private War, or Wall Street, the studio makes no demands. A powerful director who can keep control, that’s more important than a film’s scale.

Q. What’s it like to shoot in India? 
I have shot here before. Eat, Pray, Love, and commercials: Microsoft, and now Absolut. Today was 114 degrees F! But I love the concern, the movement. It’s chaotic. The chaos is what’s beautiful.

Published in India Today, 24 June 2019 issue.

The world according to women

My Mirror column, the week of Women's Day:

It’s always a good time to celebrate women who make films, but Frances McDormand, Aruna Vasudev and the Asian Women’s Film Festival make this week especially appropriate.

Film scholar & curator Aruna Vasudev (centre) being felicitated at the IAWRT festival. Delhi, 2018

Even if you’re not one of those people who wake up early in India for the live Oscar telecast from Los Angeles, there’s one acceptance speech this year that’s worth looking up: Frances McDormand, receiving the Academy Award for Best Actress for her performance in the blackly funny thriller Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri. The brilliant McDormand, whose first Oscar win was for Fargo in 1997, over two decades ago, has also been nominated thrice for her performance in a supporting role: for Mississippi Burning (1988), Almost Famous (2001) and North Country (2006). But that’s not why you should watch her acceptance speech.

You should watch it because McDormand did something remarkable with her two minutes on stage – like the consummate performer she is, she turned speech to action. “I’m hyperventilating a little bit so if I fall over pick me up ’cause I’ve got some things to say,” she began, placing a hand on her stomach as if to steady herself. She then thanked her director Martin McDonagh, the film’s team and what she called her “clan” (McDormand has been married since 1984 to Joel Coen, one half of the Coen brothers filmmaking team). “And now I want to get some perspective,” she said, putting her statuette down on the ground. “If I may be so honoured as to have all the female nominees in every category stand with me in this room tonight. The actors (Meryl, if you do it everybody else will, come on), the filmmakers, the producers, the directors, the writers, the cinematographers, the songwriters, the designers, the composers...”.

It was a sight to behold as women stood up across the length and breadth of the Dolby Theatre, to McDormand’s delighted laughter. “Look around, ladies and gentlemen, because we all have stories to tell and projects we want financed,” she said, exhorting Hollywood’s biggies to seek out these women to discuss their ideas for films.

Closer home, in a much smaller auditorium in Delhi, another vibrant celebration of women in film also took place last week. The 14th Asian Women’s Film Festival organised by the India chapter of IAWRT (the International Association of Women in Radio and Television) began by felicitating Aruna Vasudev, the pioneering writer, magazine editor and festival curator who first got Indian film enthusiasts thinking about Asian cinema.

The 1936-born Vasudev’s first claim to fame was launching Cinemaya, a quarterly journal about Asian cinema, in 1988. As a film-obsessed young person who came of age in the Delhi of the 90s, I remember Cinemaya fondly. It was a rare sort of publication then, and would be if it were around now. It was remarkable to be awakened to the fact that Taiwan and Hong Kong and Japan and China had film industries, and to discover through them a host of cinemas potentially closer to ours than the American, British or European work we’d hitherto thought of as world cinema.

Cinemaya was also rare simply because it was a carefully edited Indian film magazine that was actually about films. We’re so thrilled about being the world’s largest film-producing nation, but where is the sharp, informed conversation about the films we make? Much Indian film journalism remains driven either by industry gossip or box office figures. Those have a place. But we need much more writing and discussion of Indian films that is excited yet knowledgeable about the specificities of each film industry, from its fan clubs to lyric writing to cross-language adaptations. Isn’t it a pity that as of 2018, to my knowledge, we don’t have a single publication that does for the multilingual world of Indian cinema even what Cinemaya did for Asian films: to publish thoughtful reviews, each by a critic conversant with that film’s language, and that cinematic tradition?

Vasudev’s second achievement came in 1990, when UNESCO offered Cinemaya the funds for a conference on Asian cinema. Vasudev managed to use the five-day gathering in Delhi to form NETPAC (Network for the Promotion of Asian Cinema), which is still going strong 28 years later. Under Vasudev, NETPAC was responsible, in 1999, for launching Cinefan, the Delhi-based festival of Asian cinema that later became Osian’s-Cinefan, growing in size and popularity as Asian cinema became a global buzzword.

Sadly, Osian’s-Cinefan was last held in 2012. The IAWRT festival, held on a much smaller scale, is currently the only Indian festival focused on our connections with Asia. But what makes IAWRT doubly unique is the fact that all the films – documentaries, animation, shorts or fiction features – are directed or co-directed by women.

This year’s highlights for me included Gali, Shabani Hassanwalia and Samreen Farooqui’s spirited documentary on the subculture of hiphop in Delhi’s poorer neighbourhoods; Turup (Checkmate), remarkable both for its thought-provoking fictional take on a Bhopal mohalla and for the workings of the Ektara Collective that made it; Clair Obscur, Yesim Ustaoglu’s often harrowing fictional exploration of the domestic/sexual lives of two Turkish women, one a rural teenager and the other her psychiatrist; and the stunningly evocative Up, Down and Sideways, which transports you to the musical world of community farming in Phek, Nagaland.

As should be apparent even from this minuscule list, women making films does not necessarily mean films about women. It just seems that when it’s women producing and directing and filming, the world looks a little bit different from the way we’ve been shown it by the so-called mainstream. Just as ‘women’s issues’ are things that matter to half the world – and therefore should concern the other half, too.

Published in Mumbai Mirror, 11 Mar 2018.