Why you can't watch these films while cooking

My Mumbai Mirror/TOI Plus column:

A bouquet of independent films at the 2021 New York Indian Film Festival doesn't leave us smelling of roses, but takes a wry, gentle and honest look at our lives today

A still from Arun Karthick's wake-up call of a film, Nasir (2020).

What do you want to see on your screen? What you watch on your television screen, your computer screen or your phone screen is inextricably connected to what you're willing to play on the most important screen of all – the mind's eye.

Since the Covid-19 pandemic struck India last year, those who can work from home and still earn a living have been the lucky ones. But we have been robbed of what was once our daily life. As our live interactions with the outside world recede into the distance, those who have access to a screen of any sort spend more and more time on it. And yet, simultaneously, the degree of attention people give to what's on the screen in front of them, seems to decrease every day – and I don't just mean their long-distance girlfriends.

We all know people who watch only foreign TV shows, or only old movies, or only comedy these days, because the Indian here and now seems too grim to engage with. That desire to screen out the darker parts of Indian reality extends from the middle class consumer to media producers: I was recently told that international funders are very keen on fresh documentary content from India, but it needs to be light and preferably humorous. I speak anecdotally here, but I know more and more people who keep a film or a web series running on a phone or tablet screen beside them, while they proceed with the work of the day – sometimes on another screen. I suppose it's no different from keeping the television on for company, as people of an older generation have done for years. But it means that the 'content' you're watching shouldn't need your full attention. And what does that mean for how you engage with the world?

The films playing as part of the New York Indian Film Festival 2021, however, demand your full attention – and they're worth it. The festival is being held virtually for the second year running, and this year a substantial chunk of the programming is available to view in India. Online tickets to the NYIFF films are available to purchase on the Movie Saints platform till June 13, and streaming until June 20, along with specially-curated interviews and discussions with many of the filmmakers, actors and producers.

The festival line-up includes some of the best films I've seen to come out of India in the last year or so. Several of these are short films - a category tragically under-represented online, with almost no opportunities for a sustainable, commercial-release format, despite the massive jump in OTT viewership in India. 

Pratik Thakare's superb short film Salana Jalsa (Annual Day) is subtle yet completely absorbing.

There is, for instance, Pratik Thakare's debut short Salana Jalsa, made as his dissertation project at the Satyajit Ray Film and Television Institute, which is a stunning exploration of young people straining towards art – and towards their true selves. Set during an Annual Day function at a Marathi-speaking school in suburban Maharashtra, Salana Jalsa moves fluidly and beautifully among its three primary characters, each of them trying to make themselves heard or seen or just treated a little bit better -- in a world where they're expected to merely tick a box, and no one appears to notice if they don't quite fit in it. I could say that it’s about an aspiring poet, a girl who wants to do Western dance rather than Indian, and a boy who is bullied because he's fat. But Thakare's characters have unexpected arcs, and his atmospheric framing and soundscape make the school experience come alive.

Another of the superb shorts is the Bengali film Tasher Ghawr. Director Sudipto Roy, screenwriter Sahana Dutta and actor Swastika Mukherjee together create a portrait of the quirky housewife next door that you're unlikely to forget. Cleverly staged as a conversational monologue with the viewer, the film is about a woman stuck at home during lockdown. It is chatty and quirky and funny – until it isn't. She complains, as so many middle class housewives do, about her husband being home every day now – and we smile at first. But then we see him, the faceless man sprawled on a sofa, yelling for his breakfast, storming out of the house because of a stray seed in his apple juice, or whispering on the phone to his secret girlfriend. And then we start to see her, the dreamy-eyed kooky lady who talks to the mice – and we begin to see what makes the crazy ladies around us crazy.

Among the features, I was charmed by the Telugu film Mail, about the computer's arrival in an Indian village in 2006. “You can write a letter to anybody in the world,” the dubious cyber guru announces to his first wide-eyed shishya. Of course, in the absence of any further teaching, the student's Gmail inbox remains empty, while the teacher receives a daily quarter of alcohol in return for fifteen minutes with the sacred machine. Uday Gurrala's film has an affectionate eye for the absurd, making us laugh at our responses to new technology, while capturing the visual joys of the Telangana rural landscape.

The most unmissable film in the festival, though, is the Tamil feature Nasir. Arun Karthick's film about a sari shop salesman, which won the NETPAC award at Rotterdam last year, is a warm, gentle telling of our current political predicament. If it doesn't change you, then nothing will.

For that to happen, though, you'll have to pay attention.

Published in TOI Plus/Mumbai Mirror, 12 June 2021.

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.

Freeing Films

My Mirror column:

A delightful new online film festival to mark South Asian Women's Day defines feminism as “a politics based on principles of equity, equality, justice and peace”

A still from If You Dare Desire (2017), directed by Debalina.

Anantha Ramanan's short film Ticket Please (Sri Lanka, 2018) begins with an older woman preparing a younger man, who might be her son, on how to get to a particular part of town. “The bus conductor speaks Sinhala only,” she says, speaking from the kitchen where she is washing something at the sink. “Give ten rupees exactly. It's very difficult to get the balance from him... If the conductor asks you again whether you have paid, say “Dhunna”. Dhunna means “I have given”.” Before he leaves the house, she instructs him to carry a newspaper in English, saying it will help. I felt a mild sense of irritation. Wasn't the older lady overdoing the multiple instructions, I wondered? And why force the young fellow to pretend to be something he's not? But from the second the young man got to the bus stop, I started to realise that she had been right. Sometimes when you don't fit in, it just makes it easier to pretend that you do.

The young man in Ticket Please is marked by his inability to understand Sinhala; his being a Tamil speaker is cause for irritation. And yet the strapping young bus conductor, so impatient with him for not knowing Sinhala, is only indulgent and excited when an Indian passenger gets on – speaking bad Hindi, gushing about Salman Khan and singing 'Tujhe dekha toh yeh jaana sanam'.

Linguistic politics in Sri Lanka may not seem, on the surface, to have much to do with feminism. But what is feminism really about? Ticket Please seemed to me to make the point quietly but clearly -- it isn't our differences from each other that are the problem, it's whether we've been brought up to regard that difference as either threatening or inferior.

Organised by well-known documentarian Reena Mohan, Aanchal Kapur of the Kriti Film Club and Sangat (a network begun by veteran feminist Kamla Bhasin in 1998), the exciting new South Asian Feminist Film Festival expands the meaning of feminism to make us think about difference and equality in a variety of South Asian contexts. Among the host of wonderful films and panel discussions at the festival (streaming free on http://www.doculive.in/ until 30 November) are Prateek Vats' brilliant debut feature Eeb Allay Ooo!, Vaishali Sinha's Ask the Sexpert (2017), Saba Dewan's Sita's Family (2002), the Ektara Collective's Chanda ke Joote (2011) and Nirmal Chander's Dreaming Taj Mahal (2010).

A good film festival always lets you connect the dots in expected and unexpected ways. From linguistic differences made visible on a busride, I moved to gender difference made visible on a metro ride in Please Mind the Gap (2018), a wonderful short film directed by Mitali Trivedi and Gagandeep Singh. An affectionate documentary portrait of transman Anshuman Chauhan as he negotiates the Delhi Metro, Please Mind the Gap never rubs in its metaphors. Anshuman is an effortlessly engaging subject, though, bringing his wry, laughter-filled gaze to bear upon everything he speaks of. In one early conversation, for instance, he maps his personal sense of space onto the world of public transport with a marvellous lightness. “I instinctually create a gap and maintain it,” he tells the filmmakers, going on to describe how he keeps a distance from everyone, men and women, choosing for himself the space between metro compartments, where the wall has his back, as it were. “Kisi se touch nahi hoge”.

But no matter how much he may want not to be touched, or even just to pass unseen, it isn't always easy. Men who have mistaken him for a man jump up apologetically when they see his face and think they have accidentally touched a woman. Security queues, public toilets, the metro's own Ladies compartment -- every space seems insistent on compartmentalising by gender.

In If You Dare Desire (2017), Debalina's fictional telling of the lives of real-life couple Swapna and Sucheta, their difference is less visible on their bodies -- but that doesn't make it easier. Swapna and Sucheta committed suicide by consuming pesticide together in Nandigram, West Bengal, in 2011, with Swapna leaving behind a six-page suicide note. As the film puts it, “Only this much is fact in the film. The rest, fiction.” The poetic urban interlude Debalina creates for the two young women is no idyll, but it allows us to see how it might have been for them if they had escaped to the city, how it probably is for the many South Asian women whose love seems invisible to the heterosexual worlds they inhabit. Until it becomes visible, is instantly interpreted as difference, and that difference as grave and present danger.

But sometimes when you don't fit in, you can no longer pretend that you do. 

Published in Mumbai Mirror, 29 Nov 2020. 

Short of nothing

My Mirror column for Sun 8 Nov:

Among the hundred-odd films screening till tonight in the online edition of the Dharamshala International Film Festival are a variety of accomplished shorts – Indian, foreign, fiction, documentary, animation.

Aditi Bhande's devastating Ghaziabad-set short film Did You Do It? traces one building's waste as it leaches into the surroundings

There are many exceptional films in this year's Dharamshala International Film Festival, but this column focuses on the shorts: films under 30 minutes. Some of the ones I really liked include:

1) Sudhamayee -- Megha Acharya's observational film is composed of family vignettes that may seem artless, but speak volumes. The film starts with a woman describing how she ended up becoming the primary caregiver for her father: her brother declared he was “scared of hospitals” and couldn't “bear to see those things.” “As if, we like seeing those tubes. We don't,” he voice trails off. There is a momentary lull in the conversation, as though the two women are absorbing these facts of life: the ugliness and pain of hospitals, but also the easily declared inability of so many men to perform the labour that surrounds illness and death. Or any domestic labour at all. As if on cue, a man emerges from the bedroom, retreating when he sees the women. The women, in turn, immediately rise with their plates - the man's entry is a sign that time for real conversation is over, and everyday labour must resume now. Again, later, when the couple discuss the woman's promotion sending her elsewhere, she knows she cannot. The man remains, as always, oblivious.

Sudarshan Suresh's brilliant 17-minute fiction is a chilling comment on who loses and who gains from the spectre of "love jihad"

 

2) Mizaru -- A young couple in a Mumbai park become a target for a group of unemployed men, but no-one comes to their aid. It is the sort of incident that is stiflingly familiar to any young person who has ever conducted a romance in India. By zoning in on it in film, Mizaru makes us question what we apparently don't in life: what have the couple done to deserve this treatment? Ah, they have displayed physical affection for each other. And since anything sexual in India is automatically shameful, they can be publicly humiliated by a bunch of louts. As self-appointed guardians of Hindu morality, the men feel entitled to bully them in every possible way. We live in a country in which the villains are confident that their actions will find support from society (the members of a laughter club in the park) and the state (the cops who show up and seem quite happy to have been delivered up some easy victims). Shot in one remarkable fluid take, Sudarshan Suresh's 17 min fiction is a searing indictment of everything that is wrong with India.

3) Did You Do It? -- This disturbing, largely dialogue-less film manages to be somehow programmatic and a mood piece. It begins with a characteristically North Indian dust-storm. The strange menacing half-light, the distant flocks of birds, the persistent slapping sound of the rain may have no diegetic purpose, but the aandhi is dark, slow and harrowing, just like the journey the film sets out to trace: a single day's worth of garbage emerging from an apartment complex in Ghaziabad and leaching inexorably back into our water, earth, air.

Aditi Bhande's Did You Do It? forces us to look at the processes we Indians so expertly turn away from in reality: the unsegregated dumping of garbage, the rising mountains of plastic, the barefoot young workers who do the irreplaceable work of clearing our surroundings, the stinking lorries, the overflowing landfills, and the ridiculous vision of middle class citizens in denial, marching against the municipality. Winner of the Best Editing award for Student Documentary at the Dadasaheb Phalke Film Festival 2020, Bhande is remarkably adept at delivering the facts as a quiet punch to the gut. “The water here has high levels of iron, nitrate, fluoride and aluminium,” reads a subtitle, going on to enumerate the diseases caused by such minerals in water, the depleting ground water levels, the pumping of semi-treated water back into the Hindon river. On screen, water continues to flow down the drain.

Vividly shot, with superb sound, the film constantly unravels our increasingly delusional expectations from nature and the natural. The deceptively attractive rushing sound of water takes us not a river but to the swirling pool of the sewage plant; the green piles of bhindi look poisonously greener in the unearthly tubelit glow of the street market. This film made me restart my lapsed composting bin. It might be the wake-up call you need, too.

Other shorts at DIFF that deserve more than a mention: Stray Dogs Come Out at Night, in which we meet a Pakistani sex worker; Irani Bag, a clever 8-minute essay on the purpose women's bags serve in post-revolutionary Iranian cinema; Anonymous, which movingly maps the stark realities of the Indian construction site; and the stunningly animated dystopia of Wade, in which a group of human scavengers navigate a flooded future Kolkata.

If you think an immersive film necessarily means an hour and half of plotted drama, try these out.

Published in Mumbai Mirror, 8 Nov 2020.

Taking the festivities online

With the pandemic raging on, film festival organisers are making the most of the digital space.
 

Gaza Mon Amour, above, is part of the line-up for DIFF 2020. Passes to this year's online film festival: www.online.diff.co.in

Among the many communities barred from assembling by the coronavirus is that of devout Indian film buffs. Movie theatres have been shut for eight months, and even the very occasional new film ‘dropping’ on an OTT platform makes for sad, solitary viewing. Theatres cautiously reopened on October 15, but it might be a while before audiences, and thus filmmakers, risk a Friday release in the cinema. Even worse is the fate of that critical mass of film buffs who eagerly await the annual Indian film festival season, held from October to January, with big and small festivals taking place across the country. Given the new social distancing and hygiene norms, organisers have had to grapple with whether to go digital, cancel, or postpone and hope for the pandemic to reduce in intensity. The bigger festivals, which attract larger crowds and members of an international film fraternity, have almost all chosen the latter two options.

The Jio MAMI Mumbai Film Festival was the first to cancel its 2020 edition, rescheduling to October 2021. Two other highly-awaited festivals, the International Film Festival of India (IFFI) and the International Film Festival of Kerala (IFFK), have postponed. IFFI, organised by the Directorate of Film Festivals and the Entertainment Society of Goa, has been pushed from November to January 16-24, 2021, and IFFK from December to February 12-19, 2021.

The start of the lockdown saw an explosion of energy online with many film archives and commercial sites making selected films free to stream, like Criterion expressing its support for the Black Lives Matter movement by removing its paywall on classic black cinema. In June, when 21 festivals including Berlin, Locarno and Cannes, collaborated on We Are One, a free 10-day digital festival, MAMI contributed three films. Festivals like KASHISH, the Mumbai International Queer Festival and the International Documentary and Short Film Festival of Kerala held successful online editions. The Dharamshala International Film Festival (DIFF) ran an online Viewing Room for months, screening critically-acclaimed Indian and world cinema previously shown at DIFF.

“At that time, many said [the virtual] was the new normal. Online screenings got huge audiences as people were starved,” says Bina Paul, artistic director, IFFK. “But we are busier now, and the distractions are many. It is harder to take time out for an online festival.” There are also piracy concerns, especially for new films, since India has a particularly well-developed network of hackers. “Most crucially, people are realising that films are only part of the festival experience,” adds Paul. “That sense of community is not there online. For filmmakers, the feeling of the film finding its audience cannot come from a scattered, anonymous viewership.” Subasri Krishnan, curator of the Urban Lens festival (Delhi and Bengaluru) for the Indian Institute of Human Settlements (IIHS), agrees that a festival is a space of validation for independent and documentary filmmakers, and 100 people gathering in a dark room is integral to that. But IIHS is moving Urban Lens 2020 online, to be held over six days in December. “One cannot substitute for the other,” says Krishnan, but adds, “Real spaces can sometimes be exclusionary; an online festival may find new audiences. Also, geography becomes irrelevant.”

For DIFF co-founders Ritu Sarin and Tenzing Sonam, too, the prospect of attracting new viewers across South Asia makes their upcoming digital version exciting. “We love the warmth of the physical festival, but we realised that both for indie filmmakers ready with new films this year, and for viewers, there aren’t many options,” says Sarin. DIFF 2020, which will run online from October 29 to November 4 at Online.diff.co.in, is larger than the previous eight editions, with over 100 films screening over a week. Acclaimed international films include Babyteeth (2019), Air Conditioner (2020) and the Wuhan-set documentary 76 Days (2020). There’s an exciting new section of Indian documentaries and an extended programme of shorts, including Ashmita Guha Neogi’s CatDog, the only Indian film selected for Cannes this year. “Without the logistical constraints of time or venue size, we could accommodate more films. And we’re starting an Audience Award for Best First Film, which seems easier to achieve online,” says Sarin. “Next year’s festival may well be a hybrid of online and off.”

For smaller independent or crowd-funded film festivals, going digital can open up exciting possibilities, says Nitya Vasudevan, co-organiser of the Bangalore Queer Film Festival (BQFF). “There’s the prospect of inviting international filmmakers that we would find impossible non-virtually, while freeing up time and money spent on venue hire, brochures and tech. But as a queer festival, the roles it plays are many,” says Vasudevan of BQFF. But she may speak for all film festival regulars when she says, “People look forward to attending because it’s a space of intimacy: you can dress a certain way, have certain conversations you can’t have outside.”In true community spirit, BQFF is currently contemplating an audience poll of the festival’s regulars to decide on whether the festival should be held online in February-March, or wait until it can be held safely offline. Of course, the poll itself would be online.

Published in India Today magazine, 23 Oct 2020.

Cut to the chase

My Mirror column:

A new crop of Indian short films brims with droll humour, sharp ideas and unusual juxtapositions

A young man wants a Western-style commode in Devvrat Mishra's short film Number Two

Leisure can sometimes make one lazy. When one has the luxury of time, utilising it to the fullest can be a challenge. What’s true of life is also true of film. Especially in a film culture as verbose as ours, where the narrative dictum of ‘show, don’t tell’ is more frequently observed in its breach, the tautness of a short film feels like a welcome change. The form – defined by the Academy Awards as “an original motion picture that has a running time of 40 minutes or less, including all credits” – imposes a certain economy on the storytelling, while also being more playful with form. Indian short films, long starved of distribution channels, are beginning to find place on OTT platforms like MUBI India and MovieSaints, apart from YouTube.

Reflecting the state of the country, the current crop of shorts ranges in tenor from parodic takedown to darkly dramatic. The Wolf of Chawl Street (2017), written and directed by Pranav Bhasin, takes the form of a faux-documentary about a Banksy-inspired Indian street artist called Luv, who claims responsibility for the countrywide declarations of modern love on our ancient and medieval monuments. By scrawling or spray-painting “Rohan Luvz Lolita”(or innumerable other couples’ names) on a wall of the Red Fort, the ‘artist’ not only immortalises those lovers, for a fee, but also manages to include his takhallus: “Luvz”. Apart from sending up a certain kind of rags to riches slumdog narrative (think Gully Boy), the film has a kind of droll humour that works more than scathing criticism: the ‘interview’ with Luvz’s mother, for instance, where she says she was worried about him because he just spent time drawing, ticking none of the recognisable markers of dysfunctional male adulthood: “Woh sharaab bhi nahi peeta thha, toh uski shaadi kaise karne ka?”

Devvrat Mishra’s Number Two, also about a directionless young man who isn’t well-off, couldn’t be more different in tone. Mishra’s camera does not so much follow the film’s teenaged protagonist as let him show us his Lucknow – a city of often garbage-strewn streets, faded pillars and peeling posters, where he goes to school in his faded blue uniform, comes back and irons clothes, which he then delivers to people’s homes. This is a city still slow enough to make a bicycle ride seem fast, with a night dark enough for glowing ice cream carts to seem like islands of imagination. Ritik, awkward adolescent of the toothbrush moustache and unrequited crushes, is quietly besotted with a girl he has never addressed in words, not even when she stands across the ice cream cart from him. His laborious writing of a letter to her – in English – seems of a piece with his desire for the broken WC someone has left outside: the unfulfillable promise of posh modernity. The West, for so many Indians, is a career: a hard one.

Shazia Iqbal’s wonderfully crafted 2018 short Bebaak, award-winner at MIFF, examines westernisation from a different vantage point. A sharp young architecture student called Fatin (Sara Hashmi) finds herself battling her instincts when faced with a conservative cleric (Nawazuddin Siddiqui) whose misogyny comes clothed – literally – in the language of religion. The film’s most haunting moment is not in the battle of nerves between the two. It is the two little madarsa girls who speak in the same breath of how women must wear the hijab to avoid being possessed by djinns – and of their own giggly desire to become English-medium because “English wale scarf nahi pehente”.

Even when not announcing their politics upfront, Indian short filmmakers seem to be responding with more immediacy to the country than most feature filmmakers are. Shubhashish Bhutiani’s Kush (2013), which won Best Short in the Orizzonti section of the Venice Film Festival, points to the present by looking back to the day of Indira Gandhi’s assassination in 1984. A female teacher must make sure that her class gets home safe from a school trip – but one little boy on her bus is Sikh. In an instant, the harmless child becomes a target for the majoritarian mob; for grown men, agents of ‘the law’, go from being protectors to hunters looking for prey. Such a story offers great scope for drama, or even surreal excess – think of Dibakar Banerjee’s segment in a recent ensemble of shorts, Ghost Stories, where the zombie genre allows us to perceive another cop at the head of a newly cannibalistic world – but Bhutiani keeps things simple.

Necrophagy of another sort is at the centre of Prasanth Vijay’s 2013 short Amguleechaalitham (Manipulated by Fingers), in which two young men find themselves addicted to the consumption of a rather bizarre delicacy, one that demands greater and greater physical sacrifice. It is a strange, strange film, and yet unpretentious enough in style to make you stay and wonder: does desire feed on us rather than we on it?

Abhiroop Basu's 11-minute film Meal takes cinematic tension to its limits

The last of the shorts I want to mention here is also about eating: Abhirup Basu’s multiple award-winning Meal, which came out in February 2020 and runs a harrowing 11 minutes without dialogue. Spatially, Meal is a perfectly designed film. Its four characters occupy four rooms, with two adjacent spaces often framed at the same time, a real-life split screen. But there’s no internal symmetry: things are awry, and how. The juxtapositions are deeply unsettling: the family sitting down to eat at a Rexine-covered table on the left, a filthy washroom to the right. Basu strews the screen with clues – a pregnant belly, a bruised face, a bloody gauze bandage, a hissing pressure cooker, a broken clock, a torn sticker – but leaves us to connect the dots how we will. The smaller the canvas, it seems, the sharper the etching.

Published in Mumbai Mirror, 13 Sep 2020.

The ghosts among us

My Mumbai Mirror column:

A new anthology film about the supernatural is a mixed bag, but it does try to point Hindi film horror in consciously critical directions.

A still from Dibakar Banerjee's segment in the new anthology film Ghost Stories.

After first coming together to pay homage to the cinema in Bombay Talkies (2013), and the self-explanatorily titled Lust Stories (2018), the once-unlikely foursome of Zoya Akhtar, Anurag Kashyap, Dibakar Banerjee and Karan Johar are back with a new anthology film: Ghost Stories.

The films vary widely, not just in setting and tone, but in quality. Anurag Kashyap's contribution, starring an awkwardly gangly sari-clad Sobhita Dhulipala as a woman who is both an expectant mother and a surrogate maternal figure to her little nephew, didn't work for me at all (spoilers ahead) despite the effectiveness of the scowling child. The possibility of an uncanny relationship between external visual depictions and real-life transformations – think everything from Oscar Wilde's The Picture of Dorian Gray to MR James 1904 classic ghost story 'The Mezzotint' – has always fascinated me, and it is of course also the basis of certain long-held ideas of magic, such as voodoo. So Kashyap's use of the child's drawing, his repeated scratching-out, and his apparently innate sense of his own power, was for me the most gripping part of the story. But the film stirs in all sorts of other elements – nightmares, superstitions, silent men, shouting mothers, half-human states, crows' eggs, and a whole room full of creepy dolls. If all these ingredients were meant to be a recipe for chills, the dilution leaves us baffled and lukewarm.

Zoya Akhtar's film wins big by casting the brilliant Surekha Sikri as a bedridden old lady attended on by a lackadaisical young replacement nurse (Jahnvi Kapoor). As always with Akhtar's films (including her segment about a maid and her master in Lust Stories), there is an attentiveness to space: the multiple empty rooms that the youthful Sameera dashes through with a token agarbatti, the echoing sound of children's laughter from the stairwell when she answers the doorbell to find no-one there. It's a talent particularly useful in crafting fear, if Akhtar were interested. But she isn't, not really.

What she seems keen on is a juxtaposition of youth and age, sharpness and shutdown– and things aren't as simple as they seem. Sameera's briskness as she cleans up Mrs. Malik is matched by her frequent distractedness. Mrs. Malik, meanwhile, drifts in and out of consciousness, but recites from Wordsworth's apposite 'Intimations of Immortality' with tinny perfection: “Turn wheresoe'er I may,/ By night or day./ The things which I have seen I now can see no more.” And knows more about the fruitlessness of waiting for someone than Sameera can.

Genre fiction and film – especially of the scary variety – has long been a vehicle for social commentary. The man-made monster at the centre of the still-popular Frankenstein – a book first published anonymously by a ridiculously young Mary Shelley in 1818 – is an early (and eerily prescient) warning against technological intervention in human life. Twentieth century horror, especially the zombie movie, has been powerfully shaped by George Romero's cult classic The Night of the Living Dead (1968), the first of his triad of 'Dead' films: Dawn of the Dead, set in a shopping mall, and Day of the Dead (1985). Romero onwards, the slow-moving, cannibalistic zombie – a creature whose bite turns the bitten person into a zombie herself -- has more often than not been a powerful metaphor for the horrific things that ail society: racial prejudice, consumerism, militarism, classism. That tradition continues down to Jordan Peele's Us (2019).

Karan Johar's film isn't scary, despite his newly-married heroine walking us endlessly through the candle-lit expanse of her husband's family mansion (going for a cross between K3G and Trikaal) in search of a ghostly grandmother. The only effective presence is that of the forbidding housekeeper Shanti, who guards Dadi's room in a manner clearly inspired by Mrs. Danvers' guarding of Rebecca's in the Du Maurier novel (and Hitchcock film). Johar has moments that invite critical examination: such as the friend who declares the family as “totally legit” based on “community mein izzat” and “thriving business”, forcing us to think about how such an aura of social legitimacy survives the violence pushed under the floorboards. (But you'd do better to watch Parasites.)

There is, happily, a zombie film in the quartet. It is Dibakar Banerjee's, and perhaps unsurprisingly, it is the sharpest of the four – politically, but also in filmmaking terms. Sukant Goel plays a bored, exhausted sarkari official who arrives in a remote village to report on a government school – to find a ravaged, half-burnt settlement where the only living humans appear to be two children. The zombies from the bigger village have eaten everyone from the smaller village, and will eat everyone except those who turn on their own kind. If you speak up, you attract the attention of the creatures. If you join the feasting, you will save your skin – but be blinded for life. Watch it -- and try not to be blind.

Published in Mumbai Mirror, 5 Jan 2020.

Lust, with much caution

My Mirror column:

A film compendium of four tales promises to unbutton our lustful selves on the Hindi screen, but remains tied up in all sorts of knots.

There’s something a trifle odd about Lust Stories. The film, which premiered on Netflix on June 15, is made up of four stand-alone segments by four different directors — but all united in pursuit of a single theme. The directors are the same as in 2013’s Bombay Talkies: Anurag Kashyap, Karan Johar, Dibakar Banerjee and Zoya Akhtar. There, the unifying theme across segments was the power of cinema. Here, ostensibly, it’s lust.


But here’s the thing: it’s not clear to me that these four tales are really about lust at all. Sex, maybe. Sexual satisfaction, sexual deprivation, sexual confusion, sexual jealousy — all of these are dealt with. And while these might seem to be spin-offs of lust, they do not in themselves constitute it. Whether unabashed or guilt-ridden, lust is a full-bodied, carnal thing. But there is very little sense here of that experience, of coveting and deriving sexual pleasure from another person’s body.

The first segment, directed by Anurag Kashyap, stars Radhika Apte as a married college lecturer called Kalindi, who drunkenly hooks up with her student Tejas (Aakash Thosar, the hero of Sairat) and cannot quite handle the ramifications of the act. Kalindi starts by assuming that the younger, less English-speaking and less sexually experienced Tejas will become besotted with her. But as things begin to pan out rather differently, she gets embroiled in a tangled web not quite of her own weaving.


Apte’s on-the-verge performance is fun to watch: her believable air of manic excess lifts the segment above what otherwise might have felt like a mockery of a character. But we never get the vibe of lust from Tejas and Kalindi, or from Kashyap’s direction. It seems as if both have ticked the mental boxes marked ‘adventure’, ‘older woman’, and ‘younger man’ without the relationship producing the slightest bit of on-screen frisson. There’s only social awkwardness, confused power play and avery predictable jealousy that assumes, if anything, romantic form rather than sexual: the feeling of betrayal comes from having had the same song played to another potential lover.
The second segment is a finely wrought one and Zoya Akhtar’s opening sequence does come close to a portrait of mutual lustfulness. The master and the maid we meet mid-coitus look exhilarated. In that moment of pleasure at least, the hierarchies of who must serve and who must be serviced are apparently transcended. Bhumi Pednekar’s superb Sudha is neither put-upon nor coy, and to be lusted after by her upper middle class employer gives her a little licence, social leeway she would not otherwise have. But the intimacy of lust has clear limits, Akhtar seems to suggest, as she delivers Sudha and us, within just a few minutes, from the edge of an illusory domestic fantasy back into the ‘real world’ of marital alliances — where lust is trained to toe the line of social and economic order. What we experience with any degree of depth is not Sudha’s (or her employer Ajit’s) desire, but its erasure into an almost inevitable sense of melancholy.

The third segment, directed by Dibakar Banerjee, deals in another kind of socially censured attraction, that between a man and his best friend’s wife. Again, though, the scenario Banerjee sets up is by no means one of frenetic, passionate or even zestful attraction. In fact, when we meet Reena (Manisha Koirala in a perfectly cast and perfectly pitched performance) and Sudhir (Jaideep Ahlawat), the vibe between them is so comfortable as to make them seem like a long-time couple. They have tea together in a lawn, they lie in bed reading and chatting without any sign of sexual frisson — so much so that when it turns out they’re having an affair, it’s a surprise.

I’m not suggesting that lustful sex must be signposted as something unadulterated by other emotions, separate from loving sex, but surely what Banerjee’s film is concerned with is the breakdown of a marital relationship and the need for emotional intimacy and connection as much as to be physically desired? Both the times that we see sex here, there are tears in one person’s eyes. This is scarcely lustful sex. It might be comfort sex or pity sex, or even intense emotional sex, which is fine. But why then suggest we’re watching a film about lust?

The last segment, directed by Karan Johar, changes the tone of the film. From the realist, often sombre relationship dramas created by the other three directors, Johar transports us into his universe of campy, comic excess. But he addresses the question of lust more directly. An all-girls’ school serves as the setting for a romp with a programmatic message about female pleasure. His characters are ridiculous but entertaining. There’s Neha Dhupia as the cleavage-revealing, divorcee sex goddess teacher (slyly named Rekha); Kiara Advani as Megha, her younger colleague, a virginal-looking bride with non-virginal desires she is keen to fulfil; and Vicky Kaushal as her besotted and good-looking but hopelessly bad-in-bed husband.

Looking at the hilariously performative, uber-vocal female masturbation scene(s) in Johar’s segment and earlier in Veere di Wedding, it looks like broad comedy is the register in which Bollywood has decided to present us with the female orgasm. That’s a good enough place to start. It might, however, be a bit of a tragic joke that so many of these lustful heterosexual women are lusting after vibrators — not men.


Published in Mumbai Mirror, 1 July 2018.

Stepping out of story

My Mirror column:

MF Husain’s transporting 1967 short film ‘Through the Eyes of a Painter’ seems to laugh at our desire for narrative, yet teases us with a million possible stories.

MF Husain’s ‘Through the Eyes of a Painter’ won the National Award for experimental film in 1967. It was also shown at the Berlin International Film Festival, where it won a Golden Bear award in the Short Film category. It’s not hard to see why. In the space of barely 17 minutes, it manages to evoke an entire universe. That universe is rural Rajasthan, and it is signposted by recurring visual markers. Husain picks them out of the landscape with such precision that it instantly begins to feel as if these indeed are what makes up life in Rajasthan: a cow, an umbrella, the hurricane lamp better known as laltain, a handmade leather shoe delicately upturned at the toe...

But is Husain really picking these images out of the landscape, or is he populating the landscape with them? It’s hard to be sure. Perhaps both? Everywhere, Pandit Vijay Raghava Rao’s brilliant background score makes the gaze flow in a certain way, and seems to make the image move at a certain speed.

A cow appears to charge in our direction; a hurricane lamp waits in a natural alcove formed in a wall of rock; a black umbrella, a single jooti and another lantern are poised expectantly on a ledge. The camera glides up to the top of the fort walls, the lookout from which the royal inhabitants would look down at the ordinary folk below. And in perfect progression, we start to see the ordinary people. A man hurries through a barren landscape with an earthen pot held aloft; a series of women walking on the street find themselves captured, in succession, in the natural frame created by a door.

Then Husain starts to combine his camera images with painted figures. His almost life-size sketches appear, propped up against real walls, with real people beside them. A man with a moustache and earring is followed by Husain’s depiction of the type. A woman fastens the string of her ghaghra, laughing: the camera is flirtatious but not quite intrusive. It takes in, from a just-decent distance, a row of women bathing and washing clothes, squatting along the edge of a large water tank. The next thing we see is the painter’s brush, using just a few strokes of black on white to conjure up the female body in a choli.

‘Through the Eyes of a Painter’ was made under the auspices of the Films Division, in a time when it had a remarkable director called Jean Bhownagary – credited in this film with “Experimentation” (Husain gets “Creation”). If you watch the film on Youtube, you will see below it the following comments: “I am not understanding this video. is there any one who can explain", followed by “samaj me ni aaya koi bata dega story kya thi plz......”, not to mention a request for “Please English sub”, mysterious for a film with no dialogue except Husain’s brief introduction, which is in English. These comments are made funnier by the fact that the film starts with a disclaimer that could not be clearer: “No story. Impressions of painter Husain as he passes through Bundi, Chitor, Jaisalmer in Rajasthan”.

What is this desperation for story in cinema? In one of those serendipitous sequences that life sometimes offers, I watched Husain’s film on Friday, and on Saturday morning, found myself at a symposium in Delhi at which the filmmaker Gurvinder Singh (Anhe Ghore da Daan, Chauthi Koot) was discussing his relationship with narrative. “There are two kinds of films,” he said. “There are films which record events, and there are films which use the camera to create narrative.”

Singh’s films are meditative and evocative, with the plot and characters often intentionally not foregrounded. He studied filmmaking under the late Mani Kaul, who once described himself in an interview (published in the book Uncloven Space) as having spent all his life “trying to find different ways to do away with a linear narrative”. The linear narrative – which is the basis of all fiction, including the fiction film – puts “a bug in your mind” that “it should start from here and finish there”. But, said Kaul, “the experience of life is not like this. A person tries to say one thing and fifty other things come in the way.” Which is why, Kaul said, he was interested in documentary.

To take that thought and return to Husain's film is to realise that while there is no story, the possibility of a story is contained in every image. The little girl trailing her mother is shadowing the possibility of a future life. The little boy listening to the old man suggests a cycle of generations. Sometimes the story is contained in forms: the hand swirling jalebis is echoed by a man winding a turban. A black chhatri (umbrella) falls from an architectural chhatri (pavilion).

Tightening the screws on a single story means having to carve out most of the multiplicity of experience. No film can ever hope to contain everything. And all art is artifice. But watching the gentle wizardry of Husain’s 50-year-old film, one wonders: does art really need to step so far away from life as it has done in our time?

Published in Mumbai Mirror, 25 Feb 2018.

Forms Lost and Found

My Mirror column:

Ashim Ahluwalia's film on the artist Akbar Padamsee provokes one to think about half-remembered histories of experimental art and film.

In 1969, Akbar Padamsee was awarded a Nehru Fellowship for a project which he entitled The Vision Exchange Workshop. After some disillusioning experience in Delhi art circles, he moved to Bombay and started work in a five-room apartment on Napeansea Road [sic].” So wrote the poet Nissim Ezekiel in an article entitled 'Padamsee and his workshop: Academic or Avantgarde', published in October 1973 in Z magazine.

The “work” that Ezekiel was talking about was really the setting up of a rare sort of collaborative artistic milieu. The 1928-born Padamsee, who was already well-known as an experimental painter, was keen to establish a space in which conversations might be made possible across boundaries of medium and disciplinary training. “Equipment was provided for experiments in painting, etching and film making. The available space was redesigned to suit a wide variety of technical and human requirements. In a number of tangible as well as intangible ways, the place developed a serious artistic atmosphere. Formalities were kept at a minimum, sociability and companionship were stressed but the focus was on creative endeavour,” Ezekiel wrote.

Formally VIEW, as the Vision Exchange Workshop was called, only lasted about two years, until the Nehru Fellowship’s funds ran out. The artistic and personal camaraderie it created among its invited participants – a group that included sculptors like Pochkanwalla and Davierwalla, painters like Nalini Malani and Gieve Patel, photographers like Navroze Contractor and filmmakers like Kumar Shahani and Mani Kaul – lasted longer. The VIEW space had three 16mm cameras and a projector, enabling artists to experiment with the film form and vice versa. Mani Kaul's Duvidha (1973), an atmospheric adaptation of Vijay Dan Detha's Rajasthani folktale, starring Padamsee’s daughter Raisa, was edited at VIEW. Padamsee himself made two forays into filmmaking, making a film called Syzygy, and another called Events in a Cloud Chamber.

That original Events in a Cloud Chamber, which was first shown at Pundole Art Gallery at the opening of Padamsee's show 'Metascapes', on February 1, 1974, has since been lost. In fact, the whole experience of VIEW was practically erased from public memory until last year, when the filmmaker Ashim Ahluwalia (John and Jane, Miss Lovely) made a 20-minute film -- re-using the title Events in a Cloud Chamber, and like Padamsee, showing it in a gallery space (Jhaveri Contemporary).

Ahluwalia's film, which was shown last week as part of a curated package of films about art and artists at the India Art Fair in Delhi, is a strange, haunting mood piece. It splices together a variety of things: a present-day conversation with the 88-year-old Akbar Padamsee, home movies shot by Ahluwalia's grandfather, and black and white footage from the Third International Film Festival of India. The “found” footage is a somehow apposite way of recovering the memory of a “lost” film.

Padamsee in Ahluwalia's film is an old and frail presence in baggy shirt and shorts, largely confined to a wheelchair, except for a grainy slow-motion sequence in which he is throwing and catching a large ball with a caretaker of sorts. The woman standing with her back to us is a figment in green, the curtains create waves of dark and light: the shadows help create an expressionist mood that is quite painterly.

Using words and images, Ahluwalia offers us a sense of Padamsee's film, but not to actually recreate it. He also gives us a glimpse into Padamsee's other film Syzygy, which was a formal experiment: an animated film with an infinity of patterns, created using straight lines to connect dots that had been placed at regular intervals based on a mathematical code using four numbers. The process was, he says to Ahluwalia, utterly “free, but completely logical”. Speaking to the poet and lecturer at the time, Eunice D'Souza, Padamsee had tried to explain this in another way: “An infinity of possibilities is chaos and the limitation of this infinity through a programme, is ‘order’.”

This sounded almost mystical to me until I remembered an utterance I heard recently from a very different sort of creative person, working in a very different context: the poet Javed Akhtar, being asked at a Delhi seminar about whether the cinematic and musical context – the writing of lyrics – placed restrictions on the writing of poetry. “Zabaan paabandi mein jab jaati hai, tabhi toh shaayari hoti hai,” he said. “When the language is forced to work within certain limits, it is only then that it becomes poetry.” It is a remarkable thought about what creativity really is: one must create a form first, before one can find ways to produce newness within the form.

Published in Mumbai Mirror, 12 Feb 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.