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.

At MAMI: Surround Sound

Last Sunday's column for Mumbai Mirror:

Visiting Mumbai, the Delhi film-festivaller finds a metropolis in which the cinema seems more brute reality than dream.

I live in Delhi, where international cinema buffs have been left somewhat bereft in recent years. In 2004, the IFFI (International Film Festival of India), which used to be held in Delhi every alternate year, was whisked away to Goa. For a while, we had the Cinefan festival of Asian cinema, started by the indefatigable Aruna Vasudev and her Cinemaya magazine team in 1999. Taken over in 2004 by businessman and cultural impresario Neville Tuli, it ran for four exciting years under a new and expanded team, including the celebrated experimental filmmaker Mani Kaul as creative director. After its tenth anniversary in 2008, the Osian's Cinefan Festival of Asian and Arab Cinema was faced with a funding crunch, and went into hiding. It made a brief reappearance in 2012, but that's the last we've seen of it.

As a film columnist, I have the unfair advantage of being able to list film festivals under "Important Work Trip". So over the last few years, I've begun to make an annual pilgrimage: I've been twice to Trivandrum for IFFK, and twice to Panjim for IFFI. This year, for the first time, I went to Mumbai for MAMI. Mumbai is a much bigger city than Trivandrum or Panjim. And sure enough, the distance problem hit me on the very first day. I'd put down Phoenix Mills as the pickup location for my MAMI delegate card, but later found myself shacking up at a friend's in Versova. Arriving by train, I couldn't get off at Andheri Station. I had to sit tight all the way to Mumbai Central, get out and take a taxi back to Versova: just so I could pick up my MAMI card on the way! "Woh film festival chal raha hai, uske liye pass pick up karna hai," I said to my baffled cab driver, who was clearly wondering about someone wanting to stop at a mall with her luggage still in the car.

Dubey ji, a bespectacled man with an air of the benign patriarch about him, seemed satisfied with this explanation at first. But for the next hour and a half, as we drifted slowly through the morning traffic, he emerged as a man of strong opinions. "Film festival Bambai mein hai, ki Hyderabad mein?" he demanded first, making me wonder if he might remember a time when the IFFI rotated through Delhi and the state capitals, often finding its way to Hyderabad. Then he asked what the venues were. Other than Regal, they were all multiplexes. Would they show Hindi films, was the next question. And how much did it cost, was the next. The sum of Rs 1,500 for a weeklong delegate pass had him shaking his head. "Hmm, sure, they may show movies all day, but an ordinary person can't watch all day, can they? So it is very expensive. There should be some free shows, or at least cheaper."

And with that Dubey ji launched into the familiar sad lament one hears so often: "I used to watch a lot of movies, but who can afford to go to halls these days? Now we watch them on TV. Which is fine, but you watch for a little while and then go to sleep. Anyway I don't understand the movies they make now." He didn't need much urging to tell me what he still watches in the cinema: Salman and Aamir films. Bajrangi Bhaijaan was good, said Dubey ji, and PK -- "jis mein Aamir Khan joker bana hai" -- was great. This predicament of Hindi cinema, its having been taken away from the poor, who were once a major constituency, is by no means limited to Mumbai. But there was something particular about having this conversation in a city which is still the home of filmi dreams.

The closeness of its ties to the film industry makes MAMI unlike any other Indian festival. Along with film critic Anupama Chopra as festival director and Kiran Rao as chairperson, MAMI's new Board of Trustees includes Farhan Akhtar, Zoya Akhtar, Karan Johar, Vishal Bharadwaj, Vikramaditya Motwane, Dibakar Banerjee, Riteish Deshmukh, Deepika Padukone, Ajay Bijli of PVR, Siddharth Roy Kapur of Disney, and Manish Mundra of Drishyam Films, new patron saint of independent cinema. Nita Ambani's coming on board as co-chair meant an opening dinner was hosted at the Ambani residence. I wasn't invited or anything, but by Day 2, when I got to MAMI, the world seemed awash with shared images of Antilla's chandeliered corridors and giant Vishnu statues. (Put that down as Filmi Dreams 2.)

I spent the week watching four or five films a day, mostly in the Juhu and Andheri venues, mostly with reservations but sometimes without. The online booking system gave the young and internet-savvy a definite advantage. Standing in the snaking queues, I heard some confused grumbling from older folk about how every show they wanted to book seemed always already full. Barring some exceptions like Cannes Palm D'or winner Dheepan, or films with particularly well-known directors, like Paolo Sorrentino's Youth or Noah Baumbach's Mistress America, the shows always fully-booked in advance and the longest queues seemed to be the Hindi indies. Especially the ones that came with some advance buzz: Vasan Bala's Peddlers; Ruchika Oberoi's Island City; the Nawazuddin Siddiqui-starrer Haraamkhor had many devoted queuers-up, who stayed in line long after it had become clear that the hall was packed. More so than any other fest in India, the indie-watchers here are also the aspiring indie-makers. Whether you got into a screening or not, you could always hang about eavesdropping on the unrelentingly contrary dissection of every film by Mumbai's avid aspiring filmmakers. (I present Filmi Dreams 3.)

And yet, as I charged purposefully from one multiplex to another, films seemed less and less like a thing of leisure, or even love. The city's dreams of cinema seem to hold it in a vice-like grip.

Published in Mumbai Mirror.

That Sense of Place

Scattered thoughts from film-watching at this year's Osian's Cinefan. In today's Business Standard:

Some 15 years ago, a friend of mine told me with some excitement that someone he’d asked what kinds of films they liked had replied: “I like films with a sense of place.” My friend thought this an exceptionally poetic answer. I grudgingly agreed, silently wishing that I had come up with the formulation myself. Clearly, neither he nor I was yet acquainted with Andrei Tarkovsky, giant of Russian cinema, who had long ago declared that cinema was about sculpting in time.

Despite the huge number of films I’ve watched in the intervening years (including Mirror and Stalker, both evidence that Tarkovsky’s particular genius was definitely temporal), most films I instinctively respond to are still those that have a sense of place. Sometimes the pleasure is in watching a place you know – or imagine you know – recreated on screen, testing it for the ring of familiarity. At other times, watching unseen places unfold before you can feel like cinema’s greatest gift.

I was thinking about all this recently, while at the Osian’s Cinefan Festival in Delhi. Watching four or five films a day – standard practice if you’re a film festival junkie and have managed to take time off – forces you to think about place and time anyway. Emerging into the blinding light of a Delhi afternoon when you’ve just spent what feels like a lifetime in some dark Thai night can feel like a strange travel magic.

The strangest film I saw at this year’s Cinefan was also among the most transporting: Wakamatsu and Adachi’s almost-silent journey through post-war Japan in the footsteps of a serial killer, tracking the places where the young man lived and worked and, finally, murdered. We never see his face, nor his victims. There is nothing in the locations – markets, railway stations, small-town streets lined with shops, the massive ships he tries more than once to stow away on, the naval base from which he stole the gun – that can be said to create suspense, and yet the power of cinema is such that as we float uneasily through these spaces, their crowded anonymity begins to fill us with dread.

The sense of tragedy unfolding in the midst of crowded anonymous streets also animates Ajay Bahl’s Paharganj-set debut, BA Pass. In stark contrast to AKA Serial Killer, which is a lens through which to look at a country I’ve never been to, BA Pass works for me precisely because it recreates Delhi worlds I’m somewhat familiar with — stiflingly quiet drawing rooms with glass sideboards full of dolls, cheerfully seedy bars with loud Bollywood music, hotels whose neon-lit exteriors hide dark grimy corridors.

Bikramjit Gupta’s compelling debut Achal (The Stagnant) is even more immersed in its locale. Gupta, who spent four years on it, shooting a scene whenever he managed a bit of cash, has characters modelled on real people who live and work in Kolkata’s streets — a sex worker, a poster-sticker, a mask seller and a man who makes a living as a human statue: Vivekananda one day, Karl Marx the next. Krishna Bairagi, who plays “Mr Statue” in the film, actually does this for a living (though at functions rather than at street corners). Achal sometimes underlines a point too obviously, but the decision to use silence (Krishna Bairagi never speaks) leads to some marvellously affecting tableaux. The film has a startlingly documentary-like quality, capturing the city’s energy and its poverty without milking it for exotica.

Watching Mr Gupta’s film alongside a film like Prague makes one wonder whether one simply has to live in a place for years in order to be able to capture something of its essence. Prague, an uber-clever, often sharply acted Hindi film about selfhood, sets nearly all its action in that city, even half-convincingly incorporating a Hindi-speaking Czech girl — but barely skims the surface of the place. References to Gypsy antecedents and architectural projects commemorating the Roma cannot compensate for the filmmaker’s seeming inability to transcend guidebook visuals.

Then one watches something like Prashant Bhargava’s Patang (Kite) and it becomes clear that recreating a place does not depend on “belonging” to it. Patang’s sliver of a plot involves a successful middle-aged son and his teenaged daughter making a rare visit from Delhi to their ancestral Ahmedabad home. The US-based Bhargava spent months in the neighbourhood where he shot, finding non-actors to work alongside stellar performers like Seema Biswas and Nawazuddin Siddiqui, and his film consciously plays with the insider-outsider dynamic, often switching perspectives between how it feels to live in the old city and how it feels to visit.

But whether it’s the sense of an unchanging urban poverty that Achal wants to convey, or the kite festival in Patang creating a time of heightened emotion, a window in which unlikely things can happen — each of these places only comes to life in time. Every place ever captured on film is also a capsule of time. Perhaps Tarkovsky was right after all.

Film Festival Deptt.

From my Sunday Guardian column:

Among the ‘unmissable’ sights at the recently-concluded 12^th Osian’s Cinefan festival was that of Anurag Kashyap sitting on the stairs behind Siri Fort III, smiling a little sheepishly as excited fans took turns to be photographed sitting next to him. Dibakar Banerjee, walking down a corridor with a small swarm of young men attached to him, swivelling his head around at intermittent intervals to say “dibakarbanerjee@hotmail.com”, came a close second. 

Banerjee and Kashyap, posterboys for a new off-centre Bombay cinema, were both present at the 11^th Osian’s, too. That was 2009, when Festival Director Mani Kaul first introduced a section called NewStream, involving in-depth conversations with directors who were working within the Hindi film industry, pushing for (and getting) commercial releases, but also producing a slow trickle of work that challenged at least some of the tenets of mainstream Bollywood.

In the two years that Osian’s has been in cold storage, that slow trickle has become a steady flow – the first half of 2012 has already seen films as diversely adventurous as Kahaani, Paan Singh Tomar and Vicky Donor become box office hits. Vicky Donor, Paan Singh Tomar and Banerjee’s Shanghai were screened to packed houses at Siri Fort. Many NewStream sessions were also well attended, with their directors and crew members in tow. The second part of Kashyap’s epic Gangs of Wasseypur, now in theatres, had its Indian premiere at the festival, with the tickets drying up almost as soon as they were made available.

Festival purists might look askance at the queues for GoW 2, which were longer and more committed than for any of the 15 World premieres, 13 Asian premieres and 103 other Indian premieres at the festival this year – none of which were due for commercial release in four days. But the queues did bring in a large number of people who might otherwise never attend a film festival, and some who seemed to have never before entered Siri Fort Auditorium.

One couple arrived to buy tickets with their six-year-old and 10-year-old, and seemed surprised and distressed to find that there were actually film theatres in India that wouldn't let their little darlings in. Little did they know how distressed they might have been if they had stumbled, kiddies in tow, into one of the sexually explicit screenings in the Freedom of Creative Expression section– say Pasolini's unwatchably disturbing Salo or The 120 Days of Sodom – or the much-talked-about but tragically underwatched package of contemporary pink (erotic) films from Japan.

I heard at least one 50-something lady giving unsolicited advice to a younger man who simply couldn't contain his disbelief that GoW 2 tickets were already over: "That you can watch in theatres. Why don't you watch some other films?" The man was unimpressed – he may not have watched any Chinese cinema, but he recognised patronising behaviour when he saw it.

There were the usual festival encounters, too: a documentary filmmaker complaining that PVR Director's Rare was actually sabotaging indies by releasing them in expensive theatres that were too far from her house; young men insisting that the Bangladeshi film, Meherjaan, could not be watched because it had Jaya Bachchan in it and "how can you bear her?"; people sharing shock, awe, rants and raves.

Barring a small core of film festival junkies, though, the crowds at Osian's seemed new and largely young. Many seemed to be media students and aspiring filmmakers, who made their presence felt at screenings, asking technical-sounding questions about kinds of cameras and natural light that might have been annoying if they weren't so utterly sincere.

They may not have been mobbed like Kashyap or Banerjee, but there were appreciative audiences and admiring fans for many other Indian filmmakers. The superb Marathi film Masala, directed by debut director Sandesh Kulkarni (but produced and written by Umesh Vinayak Kulkarni and Girish Kulkarni of Deool fame) had its share, as did cinematographer Ajay Bahl's directorial debut BA Pass, based on Mohan Sikka's story The Railway Aunty, Dhiraj Meshram's Baromas: a Marathi novel about Vidarbha farmers turned into a Hindi film, and Prashant Bhargava's high on atmosphere, low on plot, Patang.

There has been some sniffing about BA Pass winning Best Indian Film, perhaps because its noirish air of deliberate excess is being (mis)read as melodrama. The best Indian films at the festival were either not in competition (Masala) or had been placed in the wider First Features category: Bikramjit Gupta's Achal (The Stagnant), a profoundly atmospheric meditation on contemporary Kolkata, and the more crowd-pleasing Hansa, which won Manav Kaul an Audience Award and a Jury award.

The range of Indian films somehow emerging in the shadow of Bollywood and every-other-wood certainly deserves celebration. But then one looks at a Baromas and wishes it didn't have that lavani item song thrust in. One watches the marvelously unpredictable Modest Reception from Iran or the superbly understated Beyond the Hills and wonders when we'll make films like these. Perhaps, when we stop taking photos of Kashyap and Co and start sitting around in the Siri Fort lawns actually talking cinema.