284. Indian director Payal Kapadia’s 2nd feature film “All We Imagine as Light” (2024) in Malayalam, Hindi, and other Indian languages: An honest, sophisticated perspective of real India, intelligently presented

 

"There is always a feeling that I have to leave." -- an off-screen remark on the cloud of impermanence faced by an Indian immigrant to Mumbai, the Indian metropolis 

"Desire, love, religion, class, gender, and social structures--all come under director Payal Kapadia's close and sensitive gaze. The ensemble's tender and unadorned performance also deserves special mention"--Special Mention by the Jury of the Denver International Film Festival, 2024

Very few Indian films have been able to pack in considerable realistic socio-political details and cinematic styles as Ms Payal Kapadia accomplished in All We Imagine as Light, comparable to similar contemporary cinematic works made elsewhere.  Further, her modest film is bereft of high-cost special effects or an alluring star-cast value associated with commercial cinema. While it appears simple and ordinary documentation of real life, it merely blankets the well-structured conceptualization that made it a remarkable work, providing a fresh, wholesome treat for a perceptive viewer.

The Realistic Details

Few film viewers and critics distinguish the difference in value between films perceived as great works that were essentially the adaptation of existing creative materials (novels, plays, short stories, etc.)  or true historical incidents when compared to films built on an original screenplay conceived and written by the director of the film. All We Imagine as Light belongs to the latter group. When Ms Kapadia chose to make a film on the lower-middle class population in a city, which is also a home to some of the world's richest billionaires, her choice to build her film around two nurses, among all possible professions she could have chosen to build her tale of compassion and camaraderie was most appropriate. Care-givers are often invisible wall-flower cinematic characters, while doctors are more likely to be hogging the spotlight. Kapadia's Florence Nightingales are strengthened mentally to deal squeamish situations. The main character in the film deals with a dementia patient who imagines conversations she had with her husband in the past. That very sequence prepares the viewer to link it to the somewhat similar sequence much later on in the film. 

Kapadia's choice of nurses as principal characters become strategic in the development of her film.  A nurse becomes empathetic towards a worried cook she interacts with at her workplace and discovers her problems--fleshing out her screenplay as it unfolds. Kapadia's choice of Malayalee nurses is again commendable as these professionals from the state of Kerala have spread their wings far and wide to distant lands gaining appreciation and goodwill. Not many will note that Kapadia is not a Malayalee from Kerala making a film that is predominantly in Malayalam language.

Kapadia's film, which is considerably Mumbai-centric, is different from the two Kolkata-centric Indian  trilogies, made in the Seventies, by the acclaimed Indian directors Satyajit Ray (Pratidwandi; Seemabaddha; and Jano Aranya) and Mrinal Sen (Interview; Calcutta '71 and Padatik) because all those six films were adaptations of well-known written works in Bengali language. The closest comparable work to Kapadia's film would be Satyajit Ray's Mahanagar, which won the director a Silver Bear award at the Berlin Film festival in 1963; but that film too was an adaptation of a literary work of  Narendranath Mitra. In comparison, Kapadia's work is truly original.

The world of Mumbai and the ever present camaraderie and goodwill of its immigrant Indian population with all the folks they rub shoulders with over time is infused into the screenplay. Indians are often inquisitive when they encounter someone they know who appears to be under stress or heading for trouble, bypassing their social pecking order, unlike their Occidental counterparts who insist on respecting privacy of others.

Prabha (Kani Kasruti, left) receives a surprise gift from
her husband working in Germany, while her roommate
Anu (right) inspects details of the gift

Prabha (Kani Kasruti), a married senior nurse, craves for her husband's physical and emotional presence after he left for Germany seeking greener pastures soon after her hurried marriage, arranged by her parents. Surprisingly, Prabha's husband, who sparingly communicates with her after his departure, sends her a surprise gift--an electric rice cooker. Prabha's longing for her husband is visually communicated by a brief sequence of Prabha, hugging her unused gift, when she is alone in her room, which she shares with her younger colleague Anu. Anu (Divya Prabha), another Hindu nurse, in contrast is unmarried and is having a surreptitious affair with a Muslim man, which is likely to be frowned upon by their respective families and friends in contemporary India with its increasing Hindutva intolerance and the fear of "love Jihad," realistic trends rarely touched in frothy commercial Indian cinema. Parvati (Chhaya Kadam), the hospital cook, is widowed and possibly childless, and is forced out her 2-decade-old dwelling by uncaring land developers because her dead husband either never had or never chose to share with her any document of ownership or tenancy. Kapadia's social commentary on the rich getting richer at the expense of the poor is underscored when two principal women characters in the film pelt stones in the night at a land-developer's hoarding to attract real estate buyers of a new housing project built on acquired land that once belonged to the poor. The hoarding has the ironic and magnetic words: "Class is a Privilege. Reserved for the Privileged." Even flooding of parts of Mumbai leading to stoppage of local trains are cleverly weaved into the script. Casual viewers are likely to miss out on the critical socio-political commentary that dot the film, if they were merely concentrating on the story.

Anu (Divya Prabha) is lost in happy dreams while having
a respite from dealing with patients
at her hospital counter, where she soon
gives helpful advice to a lady patient on birth control

Similarly, Kapadia developed Prabha and Anu to be different, yet complementary and seemingly inverse of the other. Prabha is married, mature, true to her spouse and rejecting the overtures of a qualified doctor also from Kerala but accepting her destiny of being married and living alone. Anu is young, adventurous, and rebellious enough to test the social and religious prejudices of the day. Parvati's character seems have a limited role of merely presenting the unpredictability of Mumbai for the less educated immigrants. 

Much of Kapadia's script reflects the real India and is obliquely in consonance with the Indian Opposition parties' views on economic conditions of the poor in India. Even the man rescued from drowning states that he was toiling in a job where he could not differentiate between night and day. That comment from the rescued man leads us to the styles employed in the film.

Styles Adopted in Kapadia's Film

Light is a key element not just in the title of the film All We Imagine as Light but equally important in the structure of the screenplay. The man rescued from drowning in the sea speaks of having toiled somewhere where he could not distinguish night from day. 

Very rarely does one see daylight in the Mumbai sequences. When it is day, the characters are indoors with electric lights brightening up their working space. When they are home after work, their small room is lit up by electric lights.  

Sequences outside Mumbai is swathed in sunlight. Here Anu is 
lost in her dreamworld of her future with her lover.

Daylight is reserved for the mid-segment of the film, when Prabha and Anu accompany Parvati to her rural home near the sea-shore after Parvati loses her right to stay on in her dwelling in Mumbai. Even when Prabha enters Parvati's modest house with reduced daylight, Prabha instinctively tries to switch on an electric light switch noticing it but realizes that there is no electricity. Otherwise there is sunlight throughout Prabha's and Anu's stay in Parvati's sea-side village, except when Prabha and Anu await their bus to board for their return to Mumbai, with bright-colored lights decorating the pre-dawn open-air shanty restaurant.

Cineastes familiar with contemporary world cinema will recall Carlos Reygadas' film Silent Light (2007) and its unforgettable opening and closing sequences. In that film, the opening sequence begins with insects chirping in the night until dawn breaks and reverses the gradual changes of light and sound for its end-sequence. That film too, is all about light and darkness, metaphorically used to tell a tale. That film also won awards at the Cannes and Chicago film festivals, the very same festivals that first honored Kapadia's film, 17 years apart. In both films, the respective directors wrote their original screenplays. Darkness and light can indeed be used as parentheses in the ever-evolving cinematic grammar to separate key sections for cine-literate audiences, beyond the limits of the common Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde scenario.

In this film All We Imagine as Light, light could well refer to the aspirations and dreams of immigrant Indians in Mumbai.

Kapadia treads into the world of magic realism as Prabha interacts with a person she had resuscitated after being rescued from drowning in the sea, in a manner used effectively by Italian director Ermanno Olmi in The Legend of the Holy Drinker (1988) in a magical sequence in a bar where the protagonist assumes an elderly couple sitting across his table are his dead parents communicating with him.

Kapadia might have upset the current Government in power with her films and implicit commentary. With her mother's (the talented painter Nalini Malani) genes in her blood, she is already stealing a march over the best of Indian film directors over several decades. 

All We Imagine as Light is not just a film that has won the Grand Prix at Cannes and the Silver Hugo at Chicago in the annals of Indian cinema or the first Golden Globe nomination for an Indian director. It is a film that transcends Bollywood that makes films in Hindi, and regional cinema that limits language to small geographical areas of the Indian map. The film has gone beyond the late Bengali director Karlovy Vary film festival award-winning Mrinal Sen's film Oka Oorie Katha (1977) in Telugu language, adapting Munshi Premchand's Hindi literary work Kafan, with actors from Karnataka and West Bengal states. Payal Kapadia's effort will go a long way in introducing the concept of an Indian film that unifies India with a mix of Indian languages and cultures. 

P.S. This critic values his brief encounter as a journalist in the early-Eighties with Payal Kapadia's mother Nalini Malani at the Lalit Kala Akademi, New Delhi, and the impromptu discussion on one of her paintings on exhibit. All We Imagine as Light is now on this critic's list of best Indian films and one of the best cinematic works of 2024. Ermanno Olmi's film The Legend of the Holy Drinker  (1988) was reviewed on this blog earlier. Similarly, Carlos Reygadas' film Silent Light was also reviewed earlier on this blog. (Click on the name of the film in this postscript to access the review. ) 

231. Indian director Praveen Morchhale’s third feature film “Widow of Silence” (2018) (India), based on his original story: A lovely tale woven by the director’s observations on the no-win situation for the women in Kashmir

There is always an unusual distinct flavour when a director makes a film on a tale that he or she has written from scratch. Praveen Morchhale’s three films are such films and have shown an ability to highlight positive bonding of people in ordinary situations and as well as in extraordinary situations.

In his debut film, Barefoot to Goa (2013), Morchhale highlighted two unusual bonding situations. The first was the love of two kids for their lonely grandparents, a wistful look at the large Indian family being gradually replaced by a more impersonal nuclear family due to economic compulsions.

The second was contrasting the humane attitude of poor rural folks towards kids and strangers compared with the uncaring attitudes of the urban rich.

In his second film, Walking with the Wind (2017), Morchhale chose to write a film on a school boy of modest means living in the high elevations of Ladakh, in Kashmir, trying to repair his chair in his school classroom that he inadvertently broke and desperately attempting to procure a bottle of ink critical for his sister to write her forthcoming school examinations. Nobody tells the young kid to do these acts: these are conscientious decisions taken by the school kid to act proactively without the knowledge of the school authorities or parents.  Morchhale’s ability to magnify the maturity of the kid in taking responsibilities without being told to do so and ensuring his microscopic school-centred world of writing examinations remains Utopian is commendable. The family in the second film was essentially reduced further from the first film to a caring brother-sister relationship, with the parents/grandparents having much lesser roles. Morchhale’s second film recalls the early works of the late Iranian maestro Abbas Kiarostami such as The Bread and Alley.  (The film was formally dedicated to the maestro in the film’s credits.) Walking with the Wind has been subsequently rewarded with recognition in India and elsewhere. 

The pensive "widow" silently washing clothes.

In Widow of Silence, the third film, the writer/director further reduces the family size under the cinematic microscope, either intentionally or unintentionally. Here unlike small kids of the earlier films, there is only a single major figure—a married woman making a living working as a nurse. Her husband is missing for 7 years, and is therefore called a half-widow, as he is technically missing and not dead. She supports, from her meagre earnings as a nurse, two other members in her family: her 11-year-old school-going daughter and a semi-paralysed mother-in-law who can’t speak. As in Morchhale’s first film there is a bond between granddaughter and grandmother but the communication in this film is one way. The daughter’s presence is minimal uttering a few lines to express her loss of paternal presence and that classmates taunt her for being the daughter of a “half-widow”, who cannot pay her school fees.

The "widow's" 11-year-old daughter returns home from school

The "widow's" mute and semi-paralyzed mother-in-law has
to be tied up to a chair when she is alone in the locked house

The main story of Widow of Silence deals with the plight of half-widows where husbands go missing after they are abducted by security forces or militant groups. The lack of a death certificate creates economic and social distress for the wives. If they are attractive and young, they have to fend off suitors and predatory men. The film ends with a stunning and thought provoking action that might surprise the usual Morchhale watchers. To the director's credit, the ending is well executed and credible..

The 7-year "absence" of of the widow's husband (in the torn photograph)
causes anguish to the widow's daughter

Morchhale’s film Widow of Silence rings true in the context of the #Metoo social upheaval unsettling the rich and the powerful.  It rings true of the problems faced by the average peace loving Kashmir denizen who is not taking political stands. Who can give succour to the families who are bereft of male members to protect them and earn sufficient, steady income for the family in a unjust male-dominated Islamic society?

Morchhale’s first two films were on love and innocence; his third is on an anguished cry from the upright and marginal individual for justice and protection from predators in a democratic republic. The creation and introduction of the poetic taxi driver (Bilal Ahmad) serves as a chorus in a Greek tragedy mourning the lack of humanity and love in the once beautiful and tranquil Kashmir. It is very interesting to note that the very credible adult performers in the film are not Muslims (if one goes by their names), except for the very charming actor who plays the taxi driver.

The three films of Morchhale prove a few undeniable facts.  Directors and screenplay writers don’t have to look far for good ideas; the best subjects for a film can come from a keen sense of observation. Morchhale’s gambit of following the style of Kiarostami’s cinema and seeking the collaboration of the Iranian cinematographer Mohammad Reza Jahapanah for both Walking with the Wind and Widow of Silence have paid off. Jahapanah has worked for Iranian directors of repute such as Jafar Panahi as the cinematographer in his film Closed Curtain. Jahapanah recreates the Kiarostami-like visuals in the two Morchhale films shot in Ladakh and in Kashmir—the exterior long winding road shots reminding the viewer of Kiarostami’s Taste of Cherry and the driver and co-passenger in an automobile's front seats recreating images of Kiarostami’s Certified Copy, while one of them is talking.

A long shot of the taxi in which the widow travels:
a visual touch reminiscent of Taste of Cherry

The widow sits in a taxi with flowers grown in her garden:
a visual touch reminiscent  of Certified Copy

Morchhale’s gambit in investing on a talented crew for sound management and editing has made a difference. He is able to make low-cost films of international quality which his contemporary filmmakers in India have not been able to do because those directors prefer invest on famous actors instead of compact and talented production crews. Morchhale brought a breath of fresh air to Indian cinema just as Anand Gandhi did by investing on a Hungarian sound designer for his remarkable Indian debut film Ship of Theseus (2012). Indian directors have lagged behind their international peers because they never saw value in acquiring talented production crews with their modest budgets. Morchhale and Gandhi did see the value and they reaped their rewards with national and international recognition. Both have made films with titles in English.  Both these young directors are likely to gain further recognition in future if they trudge on the same trodden path and not deviate. Widow of Silence is a film that will count as one of the major Indian films of 2018.

P.S. The film Widow of Silence has already won the Best Indian feature film at the Kolkata International Film Festival. Morchhale’s earlier films Barefoot to Goa and Walking with the Wind were earlier reviewed on this blog. So also were other films mentioned in this review:  Certified Copy and Ship of Theseus. (Click on the coloured names of the films in this postscript to access the individual reviews.)

224. Indian director Rahul Jain’s debut, long-documentary film “Machines” (2016): Hard-hitting and real perspective of modern India

India produces some of the world’s most attractive textiles that contribute to making lives in India and elsewhere colourful and comfortable-- whether it be the clothes one wears or the cloth-based furnishings in one’s dwellings. Few realize the oppressive conditions in which textile printing workers in India toil to make the lives of billions of diverse people across the world happy and content. Machines and human beings together contribute to those lovely printed textiles. The contribution of human beings in the process is rarely in the limelight. Toiling within dingy factories, these human beings gradually become dehumanized and mechanical in their actions in their sheer desperation to earn a regular income to keep themselves afloat above the abject line of hunger and poverty. They become machines not out of choice but more from a lack of choice.

Film director Rahul Jain’s honest perspective is not focussed on the machines that manufacture and print the textiles but more on the faceless tens of thousands of workers, exploited and dehumanized to work like machines for extended work hours, deprived of basic rights of hygiene, medical safety, statutory limitations of working hours and legal age and, of course, fair compensation for their time and toil. The film Machines underscores the no-win situation of migrant workers within India caught between poverty and survival, in the clutches of heartless contractors and factory owners, who spin profits for themselves sitting in contrasting distant cosy comfort.

Cinematography ( Rodrigo Villanueva) picked up two
important international awards

Machines has won several accolades worldwide.  Apart from winning the Golden Eye award at the Zurich Film Festival in 2017 for the Best International Documentary Film, it picked up the cinematography award at the Sundance film festival, the Silver Gateway award at the Mumbai film festival, the best cinematography award of the International Documentary Association and three awards/prizes at the Thessaloniki documentary festival.   What is it that makes Machines tick?

Diegetic sound recorded and mixed by the Indo-German crew
is laudable

Machines could have been made in diverse ways.  Mr Jain could have opted to make a film contrasting machines and human beings with music matching the visuals on the lines of the Dutch maestro Bert Haanstra’s 11-minute Oscar-winning wordless sublime film Glass (1958) on the Dutch glass factories. Jain’s film consciously does not use music—his attempt was not to capture the beauty, but the sweat and grime of the workers much in contrast with the workers in Europe. Machines could have been made without words to mirror the French director Louis Malle’s Humain, Trop Humain (Human, all too human) (1974), which is roughly the same length as Machines. That French film looked at the Citroen automobile factories in France and compared the human workers with the machines on the assembly line without words spoken except for brief pitches of the sales staff selling the cars.  There are commonalities between Jain’s and Malle’s film: same length, human workers who appear and work like machines, and no music. The big difference in Machines compared to the two European filmmakers is that the punch of the Indian film comes from the honest spoken lines of the workers captured by the camera replacing the silence of the European works. Malle probably thought that he conveyed a lot by choosing as the title of his film to be same as Nietzche’s last book which appeared to revise all his earlier written works. But little did Malle realize that all filmgoers need not be as well read as he was to make the bigger connection beyond what was obvious within the film’s visuals and sounds of the factory.

Spoken words matter in the film

Words when spoken in Machines sock you on the jaw. The workers have fled their villages because incomes from crops are undependable compared to grimy, sleep-deprived, and low-paid work that in sharp contrast can be depended on as steady income.   It is steady as long as you don’t upset the apple cart by protesting the raw deal meted out by the contractors and the factory owners.

 

The few spoken words are stronger than the visuals. The workers state they have never seen the factory’s owners—but the owners watch them on closed circuit TV in comfortable offices.  The workers can’t afford to buy cigarettes and instead ingest the cheaper semi-dry mix of raw tobacco and slaked lime locally called khaini while the factory owner ironically justifies the low wages as being more than double of what it was 10 years before, especially when workers were comparatively more committed to their work than today, casting a blind eye to the rising costs of living. (Khaini is proven to be injurious to health as much as it is to work with chemicals and dyes without adequate physical protection.) Equally disturbing is the logic of a teenage boy (it is illegal for children to work in factories in India) who claims that working at his age would develop him into a superior and sharper worker when he grows up compared to others who didn’t have his experience.  Or of another boy who reaches the gates of the factory each day and wishes soon after entering it that he could run out of the factory from another gate but chooses not to. More disturbing are the statements of a worker that any potential unionist seeking better compensation and hygienic conditions would be knocked off, while fearfully looking over his shoulder if someone heard him make that statement.

A factory worker reminiscent of a
Thomas Hardy novel

The critical decision that goes in the favour of Machines is that the spoken words are not preceded by questions.  Questions don’t matter.  Those have to be imagined.  When the workers do ask inconvenient questions of the filmmakers, the answers too are not heard.  The film as the finished product is the answer.  The brief silence before the end credits is loud and punchy.

After hard labour, a brief nap in the factory

The crucial bit beyond making of the film was revealed by the young talented director—the film having won all the global awards is yet to be widely seen within India because it is awaiting a Censor Certificate from the Government.  Few can deal with truth, fewer with injustice. Economic growth for those who matter is the mantra of the day. If the film is indeed seen widely, the question asked by the workers at the end of the film would be answered. Nietzsche could be smiling in his grave.

P.S. Director Rahul Jain, who grew up near a family owned small textile mill in India  and studied in the US will soon be teaching at a prominent US University and hopefully continue to make hard hitting films. Terrence Malick used to teach at MIT. Both wear similar hats.

214. Indian director Praveen Morchhales’s film “Walking with the Wind” (2017) (India) based on his own original screenplay: Recalling the cinematic footprints of the late Iranian maestro Abbas Kiarostami

Director Praveen Morchhale is an emerging noteworthy filmmaker from India making films based on his own original scripts that use children in pivotal, non-controversial roles.  His films certainly cannot be classified as children’s films as these works, while tugging at the hearts of adult viewers, are essentially humanistic and philosophical in content that is relevant for viewers of all ages. His films are different in many ways from the average contemporary Indian cinema. The titles of his two films Barefoot to Goa (2013) and Walking with the Wind (2017) are in English, while the films are not in that language.  Spoken words are minimal though important, while visuals and documentary-like performances dominate.  Family values are underscored indirectly in both films. Both films exude positive thoughts, providing viewers with a breath of fresh air, not unlike the early works of the Iranian filmmakers Abbas Kiarostami and Amir Naderi. Director Morchhale, who has been influenced by the former’s works, dedicates the film to him as he passed away while the film was in production. Kiarostami’s evocative short film The Bread and Alley (1970) has a similar treatment of a different story.

While Morchhale’s first film compared and contrasted contemporary urban and rural western India, his latest film is entirely shot in a rural setting of Ladakh, in the northern Indian state of Kashmir, with principal actors playing their real-life roles. Italy’s filmmaking maestro Ermanno Olmi achieved a similar effect in the brilliant Golden Palm winning The Tree of Wooden Clogs (1978). Morchhale spent time over two seasons with the community some 80kms from Leh, while developing the tale and roping in the inhabitants to join the film as non –professional actors in roles close to their own in real life.

The boy and his sister study as their parents prepare dinner in the modest
real Ladakhi rural home

Morchhale’s characters are very ethical. In Walking with the Wind, a school student unwittingly breaks a school chair and goes to immense efforts to get it repaired. (It is not clear whether he has to sit on that very chair to write his forthcoming examination.  In any case, a broken chair would cause inconvenience to some student in his class, if not him)  A school student studies diligently to pass his examinations but realizes that he and his sister have no ink to write it and literally goes the extra mile to procure it from a distant town. Education is important for some children (including girls) when they note that only a few of the adults in the village are educated. Morchhale’s young film characters are all resolute, whether it is to reach a destination (as in Barefoot to Goa) or to achieve a modest aim.

The young Indian director, influenced by Iranian cinema, roped in a young Iranian cinematographer Mohammad Reza Jahanpanah, who had done the cinematography for Jafar Panahi’s acclaimed film Closed Curtain (2013), a Silver Bear winner at the Berlin Film festival. And if there is a single most engaging aspect of the film it is camerawork that captures the terrain, the pathways (roads are few here), and the sparse population compared with the rest of India.

The terrain, the boy, and the broken chair: the camerawork of  Jahanpanah
captures it all

The director is clever in incorporating real life characters from the village into his script thus avoiding high costs he would otherwise have incurred employing professional actors. The performances as in an Olmi film are flawless.  The main character is a schoolboy, the carpenter is a real life carpenter, the poet is a real one, the blind man is a real blind man, and the Japanese painter/documentary filmmaker in the film is a real bona fide inhabitant, married to a Ladakhi man in the village. The director has not used sets—he used the real dwellings.

There are evocative sequences in Walking with the Wind that will not be missed by viewers exposed to good, international cinema. The Japanese lady, busy painting the landscape, looks up from her work to watch the young boy with a chair in the distance. The cinematographer captures the boy’s presence in the vast landscape on the corner of the visual frame accentuating the smallness of the character and the relative importance of the event in the vast land. The open metaphors the film offers are for viewers to decipher and ingest.

The impressive lead actor who like the others
in the film are not conscious of the camera

Morchhale’s filmmaking proves several points for filmmakers in India. You can make good films by investing on good film crews rather than on actors. Writing your own non controversial screenplays is more rewarding in many ways. And more importantly, the world of cinema is growing more international and often more non-verbal. Finally, it showcases the pristine parts of India little known to most Indians, and far less to wider international audiences. It is also a film that does not spoon-feed the audiences—the end sequence of the film makes the viewer think awhile.

P.S. Morchhale’s first film Barefoot to Goa (2013) was reviewed earlier on this blog. The film Walking with the Wind is the first Indian film chosen to compete in the 2017 Cameraimage festival in Poland. Olmi's The Tree of Wooden Clogs has been extensively reviewed earlier on this blog. (Click on the names of the films in this post-script to access the reviews). Subsequent to writing this review, the film has won the top prize at 21st Tertio Millennio International Film in Rome. Rare honour indeed for an Indian film to win a top prize at any international film festival! The film also bagged three awards at the 2018 Indian National Film Awards.

The trailer of the film is at https://vimeo.com/242193105

182. Indian director Anand Gandhi's debut film “Ship of Theseus” (2012): A remarkable thought-provoking, non-commercial film from India

The ship wherein Theseus and the youth of Athens returned from Crete had 30 oars, and was preserved by the Athenians, for they took away the old planks as they decayed, putting in new and stronger timber in their places, in so much that this ship became a standing example among the philosophers, for the logical question of things that grow; one side holding that the ship remained the same, and the other contending that it was not the same.

-- Plutarch (Greek historian, 45-120 A.D.)

Ship of Theseus is an unusual and a philosophical film from India. It deals with an interesting philosophical subject that Plato and Socrates debated, philosopher John Locke postulated replacing the ship with a torn sock, and Jules Verne used in his story Dr Ox’s Experiment.

It is unusual for several reasons.

First, much of the film Ship of Theseus is in English and, that too, in good spoken English, and represents visuals of mostly emerging urban India.  

Second, it is not a big budget film (made with less than the equivalent of US$ 0.19 million as per IMDB, a fraction of what it takes to make a commercial Indian film in Bollywood) and yet has good technical quality--quality that earned it international awards. The sound design  is credited to a talented Hungarian duo who did sound design of British director Peter Strickland’s Katalin Varga (2009) and two of the Hungarian director Bela Tarr’s films The Turin Horse (2011) and Werckmeister Harmonies (2000). 

Third, one segment of the movie has as an actress Aida El-Kashef, an Egyptian filmmaker, who filmed the famous Tahrir Square protests in her country. Her performance in Ship of Theseus won her the Best Actress award at the Dubai International Film Festival, and the Best Supporting Actress Award at the 61^st Indian National Film Awards.  

Fourth, the film, which does not have any commercial trappings, was released briefly in major theatres in India and subsequently won the country’s top national award, the Golden Lotus, in 2014 for the best feature film of the year. The film also picked up awards for the Best Film at the Transylvania film festival. A dream achievement indeed for a debut filmmaker from India! 

And finally, Ship of Theseus is a rare work of cinema that highlights ancient Jainism as a religion that sprouted in India and continues to be a way of life of millions, even to this day.

Plutarch’s conundrum is placed before the viewer by director Anand Gandhi, and his two co-scriptwriters Khusboo Ranka and Pankaj Kumar, by presenting three disconnected modern tales on human organ replacement to extend the concept of aging parts of the fabled ship of Theseus being replaced with new parts until all its original parts are replaced . Each of the three segments of the film Ship of Theseus approaches the effects of the physical replacement with different perspectives. 

The blind photographer (Aida El-Kashef) capturing urban India
on camera aided by sounds 

In the first  segment, an almost blind photographer (Aida El-Kashef) clicks away with her camera, using intuition, touch and sounds to come up interesting photographs that are eventuially exhibited as art. On regaining her sight, the photographer reviews her blind work. The concept of “good creative“ art, once applauded, is reassessed by its creator, post her critical organ transplant.

Barefoot Jain monks meditating on the sea front captured against the backdrop
of a recently constructed  bridge in Mumbai 

In the second  segment of the film, a well-educated, well-read Jain monk Maitreya (played by theatre actor Neeraj Kabi) spearheads a legal war against the torture of animals for the benefits of medical research of the pharmaceutical industry. The very same medical world points out that Maitreya’s liver has cirrhosis and needs to be treated with drugs or even replaced. As with most Jain monks, for whom the concept of “Santhara” or fasting to death is an option, Maitreya has to choose between what his religion, which he has practised over decades promotes, and an option of modern medication combined with organ transplants. (The concept of “Santhara” has been in the news in recent days as an Indian court ruled it to be similar to abetment of suicide, provoking Jains to point out that it conflicted with their fundamental freedom guaranteed by the Indian Constitution.) The option before Maitreya is not a Hobson’s choice. However, Maitreya’s  final decision in the film makes one rethink about all our own moral stands, not just his. What director Gandhi’s film asks is if a critical organ transplant can change the views of a well-read, ethical person as well.

Wrecked and junked cars are a metaphoric backdrop for a converstion on
the illegal human organ trade 

The third segment of the film Ship of Theseus deals with the growing problem in India where the poor and the uneducated are robbed of their organs without their knowledge by a growing organ transplant villains who sell their spoils to unsuspecting rich clients worldwide who need the organ to survive. In this segment, Gandhi’s film questions the ethics and morality among the world of organ recipients, the organ robbers and the amazing evolutionary changes in the views of morality of those who were actually robbed of their critical organs. A young bright stockbroker Navin (Sohum Shah) stumbles on the larger story of unethical human organ transplants and tries to help a poor labourer, who was robbed of an organ unwittingly. But the outcome of his efforts is even more thought provoking.

Young Anand Gandhi brings all the three protagonists of his film Ship of Theseus together reprising what the famous Polish director Krzysztof Kieslowski had done at end of Three Colours Red (his final part of the trilogy, made in 1993-4) by bringing the critical characters of Three Colours Blue, Three Colours White and Three Colours Red briefly by a seeming cosmic coincidence. Kieslowski showed the characters as lucky survivors of a boat tragedy, but Gandhi shows his varied characters as lucky survivors of the organ transplant medical operations in India. In Kieslowski‘s three celebrated films, a key character always cried at the end. In young Gandhi’s film, no one sheds tears as the characters from the three segments watch a film together on caves and the exploration of the unknown, a visual metaphor of the film in itself.

Anand Gandhi and Aida El-Kashef have won accolades at international film festivals for their respective contributions to Ship of Theseus. Equally creditable is the contribution of cinematographer and co-scriptwriter Pankaj Kumar, whose talents are quite evident. Several handheld photographic sequences of the film such as the sequences  involving extremely narrow and winding approaches to the labourer’s living quarters and the exterior shots of the peripatetic monks against modern windmills and electric pylons taken from another high vantage point, ask questions of the viewer the effect on the rapid changes in Indian society on past beliefs and social views that also relate to the same primary Ship of Theseus conundrum. Pankaj Kumar won awards for his contribution as a cinematographer for Ship of Theseus at the Transylvania film festival, the Tokyo International Film festival, and at the Mumbai International Film Festival. The talented Pankaj Kumar has subsequently moved on to commercial mainstream Bollywood cinema working on films such as Haider and Talwar. Ship of Theseus also brought to the limelight a fascinating stage actor Neeraj Kabi, who plays the Jain monk in the middle segment of the film. Kabi, according to reports lost 17 kg in weight, over 5 months, to enact the starving monk. Actors such as Kabi are rare to come by and he was spectacular in his role. 

The movie Ship of Theseus not merely raised the quality of contemporary Indian cinema but proved that good cinema can be made with low budgets, if truly talented people made the film. Most importantly, it is a rare film made in India that forces the viewer to think about philosophy rather than provide escapist entertainment. Such films do not just win international awards but provide quality entertainment for the discerning viewer. Evidently, it was not considered as an Indian entry for the Oscars because the film is in English, which eliminated it from being considered in the foreign film category. Young Anand Gandhi needs to be congratulated for roping in the rich talent from diverse fields to make his remarkable debut film with a limited budget.

P.S. Indian cinema has seen some young filmmakers accomplishing interesting works with limited budgets in recent years. Sudevan’s CR. No. 89 (2013) is one such film made in Malayalam language reviewed earlier on this blog. Another is Praveen Morchale’s Barefoot to Goa (2015) in Hindi, also reviewed earlier on this blog.

166. Indian filmmaker Sudevan's debut film "CR no.89" (India) (2013): A micro-budget Malayalam language movie that is different and refreshing

Malayalam language movies have won prestigious Indian national film awards in recent years but they are rarely ones that stand out as some did, three or four decades ago. 

At last, there is an innocuous debut film from a young director that would make a sleepy cineaste sit up to savour its whiff of freshness. That’s director Sudevan’s CR No.89--a little, big film which premiered in 2013 at the Intentional Film Festival of Kerala (IFFK). It is “little” because it is an 80 minute film made with an incredible shoestring budget of Rs 700,000 (about US$11,000) pooled by the director’s well wishers (read “non-internet” crowd funding).

It is “big” because the film, with its odd title, devoid of sex or participation of mainstream actors, and with minimal violence, has scooped up a slew of regional Indian awards including Best Film of 2013 at the 2014 Kerala State Film Awards, the NETPAC award for the best Malayalam film at the 2013 IFFK, the Aravindan award for the best debut film by an Indian director from the Chalachitra Film Society, the John Abraham award (in memory of the talented late Malayalam film director, not the living Bollywood actor) for the best debut director from the Federation of Film Societies of India (FFSI), the Padamarajan Puraskaram (award) for the best film of 2013 from the Padmarajan Memorial Trust and an acting award for Asok Kumar (for the role of the automobile mechanic)  from the Kerala state film awards. Unfortunately, the only international film festival this film has been invited to, thus far, is the minor Colombo International Film Festival.  Marketing remains the bane of quality Indian regional cinema while what does get showcased in countries  outside India are the semi-commercial films.

What is the odd title of this movie? The title ought to be expanded to Crime (or Criminal) Report no. 89. “CR no.89” is the jargon used in a regular Indian police station.  The title has a subscript as written in Indian police files “under section 323, 324, 379 of the Indian Penal Code, read with 25(1)(b) of the Arms Act.”  It refers to an unsolved criminal report relating to an illicit transportation of deadly weapons in a stolen jeep and other felonies. The weapons, transported in a jeep, are hidden in crates under heaps of tomatoes.  When the law does catch up with such consignments as depicted in this movie, the transporters are rarely caught or brought to justice. Further, the haul of the weapons by the law enforcers is merely reported in the news and subsequently buried in dusty files as a ‘cold case.’

The brevity of the title inadvertently describes the young director Sudevan, who has evidently not considered how a different and more attractive title could have marketed his debut film beyond the confines of Kerala state, but is more concerned about the reality of frequent illicit arms transportation in Kerala, the violence such weapons inflict on innocent rural folk, and the apathy of the law and order machinery to resolve such cold cases.

Interactions and reactions of rural Indian characters

However, the film is not about arms transportation. It begins with a focus on engines in hardly roadworthy vehicles that ply on Indian roads. The movies then gradually explores how five or six Indian rural characters interact with or react to the shady arms transporters by happenstance or when they stumble on the abandoned  vehicle, because the jeep carrying the illicit consignment has broken down on an unpaved, rarely used road, cutting through a hardly inhabited rubber plantation. The illegal arms transporters chose that odd route to avoid detection. What follows is a credible edge of the seat entertainment for the viewers with an unusual ending as a bonus. 

What Sudevan has accomplished, with the help of three cameramen utilizing very basic camera equipment simultaneously, is to realistically depict varied reactions of average Indians to the goons in distress. How Sudevan has achieved this is truly praiseworthy, especially in creating the final sequence, in which the bad guys are absent. The entire concept is Sudevan‘s own, including an interesting credit sequence. The end-product is a delectable mosaic of how Indians behave.

There is wry humor sprinkled throughout the film—a game of rural checkers played with nuts and bolts, odd hairstyles, attitudes towards work by a not-so-busy small-time automobile mechanic, who is quite skilled in his trade, and the intricacies of social etiquettes of distribution of marriage invitations for middle-class Keralites. There are interesting shots of chameleons cleverly edited into the narrative to allude to social parallels. Sudevan ducks the popular lure of spoon-feeding his audience with unnecessary details in the narrative—he forces the linear details to be assembled by the intelligent viewer. That is rare in Indian cinema.

CR No.89 opened a week-long FILCA international film festival in Trivandrum a week ago. Even the noted Indian filmmaker Adoor Gopalakrishnan stayed through the screening to watch the film that he had heard about but not seen. Young Sudevan had a history of persistently following up with film societies, such as FILCA, to enter his short films in competitions and in film society screenings. The quality of his short films and the resulting sales of the DVDs of his short films helped fund each subsequent Sudevan film, culminating in the award-winning low-budget feature film CR No.89. The success of Sudevan is partly due to the role of film societies in encouraging young film makers, an unusual scenario that is alive and laudable in pockets of India, such as Kerala.

CR No. 89 is a film, with English subtitles, that deserves to be widely seen and appreciated by film-goers who hanker for good Indian cinema in India and abroad. Most of all it is amazing that a lovely, quality film could be made with Rs 700,000 by a young man committed to cinema without any compromises or a political subtext. Most importantly, the film makes the viewer reflect on the varied reactions of ordinary citizens to a similar situation. And it is a movie relying considerably on diagetic sounds picked from the natural environment, something quite unusual for soundtrack management in Indian cinema. Sudevan is able to capture rural Kerala milieu without the unrealistic but popular dramatic inflection of tones used by professional actors, often associated with the better Malayalam cinema.

While quality Malayalam films enjoy widespread viewership within Kerala, it is truly sad to note that well-made small-budget films, such as CR No. 89, and major works of Malayalam cinema, such as M T Vasudevan Nair’s Nirmalayam (The Offering) (1973) and Adoor Gopalakrishnan’s Anantaram (Monologues) (1987), are rarely seen or discussed beyond the borders of Kerala, either nationally or internationally.

(This review was first published at www.dearcinema.com at http://dearcinema.com/review/cr-89-malayalam-movie-different-refreshing/2730#comments)

P.S. This film is one of the author's best 10 films of 2014

152. Indian film director Praveen Morchhale’s film “Barefoot to Goa” (2013) in Hindi: Accomplishing an unintended comparison of real rural India with urban middle class India

Young Praveen Morchhale evidently wrote an original screenplay for his debut film that was pegged on the tenuous relationships of the typical family as larger family structures of traditional rural India are dismantled into smaller nuclear families in their urban contexts. The sweet grandparent and grandchild relationship gets diluted by distance and economic constraints in the modern developing India. Morchhale’s debut film achieves what it set out to achieve—to underscore the importance of the larger Indian family.

Love through sweets

The film is a tale of two school kids who decide to visit their ailing grandmother in Goa without the knowledge of their parents who live in a modest apartment in Mumbai. It is a road movie with a difference. The kids get on trains without tickets and get off trains without any plan of their next mode of transport to their destination. Director Morchhale is not interested in pre-occupying the viewer with details such as their likely encounter with the ticket inspector—he is interested in moving forward with the journey to Goa, train or no train. Conversations are minimal, but interactions aplenty. In fact, the film is unusually populated with key characters who cannot speak or hear, a clever ruse of the screenplay writer and director to add economy and impact to the film’s narrative or perhaps to indicate that one would not listen to those voices if they could be heard.

Seeking love when parents don't have time for them

But more than that, Morchhale achieved another feat: his script is a rare testament to the unbridled hospitality of the rural and small town India towards strangers put in contrast to the unmindful and hurried world of the emerging urban India. Parents in the big cities have little time for their children, urban families traveling in cars buy roasted corncobs from rural roadside vendors but forget to pay for their order, and harried city police station officers have little concern for mothers who are worried about their missing children because they have been unaccounted for a mere few hours. All this is presented without the script appearing to be a sermon on the eroding values of developing India. Morchhale’s film reminds one of the Algerian filmmaker Amor Hakkar’s lovely 2008 road film La maison jaune/The yellow house, which had, like Barefoot to Goa,  reinforced the contrasting worlds of the uncorrupted and considerate world of rural Algeria with the corruption of the richer townsfolk in that country. In Barefoot to Goa, too, there are glimpses of negative elements in society: shoes of the kids being stolen at the entry point of a temple forcing them to travel barefoot and corruption of the police who demand bribes and free meals, which is contrasted with the innocence of children who free pigeons caught by a benefactor who had given them a free ride on his motorbike without realizing the economic loss their well-intentioned action would cause to their benefactor.

This critic appreciates cinematic works that are based on original screenplays a lot more than adapted screenplays. Barefoot to Goa demonstrates the new generation of Indian filmmakers’ attempt at brevity of detail without compromising on quality of the narrative. The film is able to convey the tale without the crutch of the spoken word in many scenes—the spoken lines are minimized. When the children speak, their words are the bare minimal quantum needed to move the story forward. The end of the film breathes a freshness rarely encountered in Indian cinema—it tells a story without spoon-feeding the audience with a little help from clever editing and intelligent photography.  Barefoot to Goa is not the best of world cinema but is definitely a breath of fresh air for Indian cinema, struggling to survive in a cinematic whirlpool where world cinema is progressing by leaps and bounds.

Dictating a letter to a letter-writer through silence

Barefoot to Goa can be described as a children’s film as the main characters that drive the film are two school kids. Yet the film grapples with issues that are larger than those of small school kids—it deals with family relationships (loss of ties with parents after marriage, lack of empathy towards the old, the bonds of small townsfolk, the valuation of a parent’s role by those who miss out on a loving, caring parent). Sweets prepared by a caring grandmother might be devalued by an irate daughter-in-law but they signify a bonding that economic progress cannot obliterate. The sweets (Indian ladoos) are a prop that raises the film from a mere children’s film to a film that reflects on the values of family bonding that go beyond the nuclear family.

Apart from writing a commendable script, director Morchhale’s direction of the two children played by Prakar and Saara Nahar is commendable as they portrayed body movements that were real and believable without resorting to bouts of tears and merriment. Similarly the role of the mother and irate daughter-in-law (Purva Parag) was brief yet credible. The film might not have had the same impact were it not for the role of the editor (Ujwal Chandra) and the sound editor (Bibek Basumatary). The importance of Barefoot to Goa is in the way the story is presented rather than the tale itself. It is a breath of fresh air for Indian cinema accomplishing much more than it intended.

P.S. The film has been entered in competition in the Celebrate Age section at the Mumbai international film festival, 2013. Amor Hakkar's Algerian /French film La Maison Jaune/The Yellow House (2008) was reviewed earlier on this blog.

Barefoot to Goa - Film Trailer with english Subtitle. from Praveen Morchhale on Vimeo.