dhrupad:

Maheshinte Prathikaram, Mahesh’s Revenge (2016)

“When I was shooting for Idukki Gold, Syam Puskaran, the writer of the film, and I got talking one night. He told me about Thampan Purushan, a man from Puskaran’s town, who was once hit during a brawl. Purushan took an oath that until he hit the guy who thrashed him, he would not wear slippers. But the poor man had to wait a number of years because his opponent had gone off to the Gulf to resume his job. I thought this was a story worth shooting as an exercise or a short film. A few hours into the night, we then got talking about other such characters and situations we knew – a photographer in my town, scenes I remembered from a funeral once, some of our love stories. By the end of the night, we had decided that we had to make a full-fledged film out of all of it.” 

– Dileesh Pothan interview: ‘If Maheshinte Prathikaram had flopped, I would have quit filmmaking’

dhrupad:

Shaque (1976)

dhrupad:

AHLUWALIA: […] By that point this whole globalization thing was happening with call centers. India was being seen as the next big thing. I thought, “That’s weird because as far as I can see these guys have pretty horrible jobs, fourteen, fifteen hours all night.” And I am reading this very excited, enthusiastic, business press talking about all these people that are going to be liberated by capitalism. I just thought it sounds like a bad dystopian sci-fi. It sounds like all the Hollywood sci-fi I loved as a kid. So I started working on that. And that was much easier to get funding for. Although it was supposed to be about call centers it became more about the psychology of what it means to be a fake American and what does it mean for all of us to become fake Americans?

MAZUMDAR: John and Jane is a documentary, Miss Lovely is a fictionalized narrative yet in John and Jane you use enactment. In Miss Lovely your aesthetic is primarily driven by a documentary that could not be. Could you say something about the tension between documentary and fiction? 

AHLUWALIA: When I wanted to make John and Jane it had the shadow of a 1970s sci-fi film. I said, “What if I made a film which was science-fiction but it’s now, and you use real people to play themselves?” And I wanted to shoot it on celluloid—which meant I had very limited footage. It couldn’t be a cinema verité documentary. It had to be very scripted. The cameraman was like, “It’s like you’re shooting this like Nanook of the North or something.” It’s really old school with a big 35 camera, it’s not “fly on the wall” at all, it’s all composed, it’s all static shots. For me that was interesting: what makes something a documentary, is it just the form? Like, if it’s a hand held digital camera then it’s a documentary but if I shoot it beautifully composed on 35, then it’s suddenly fiction.

– “An Interview with Ashim Ahluwalia” in BioScope: South Asian Screen Studies vol 7, no. 2 (2016).

caughtbetweenspaceandtime:

This Transient Life
1970
Akio Jissoji