Midhun Murali, 36, from Fort Kochi and Greeshma Ramachandran, 28, from Thrissur, have made an epic narrative multimedia film, Kiss Wagon, a sort of a feature-length amination film in Malayalam. Earlier this year, the film won two awards, the FIPRESCI (international federation of film critics) award and the Special Jury Award, in the coveted Tiger Competition section at the prestigious International Film Festival Rotterdam (IFFR). The film is currently screening in the main competition, South Asia Competition, at MAMI Mumbai Film Festival and will screen at the International Film Festival of Kerala (IFFK) in December. MAMI has three screenings of the film from October 22-24 at PVR Juhu.
Kiss Wagon is an epic multimedia film, not an animation, but an abstract, pulp and cryptic epic experimental narrative, about love, civilisation, religion, power, and a lot more, adapting India's epic storytelling style along with its shadow play image system.
The film, replete with Christian religious motifs, starts with the analogy from Paradise Lost, a bite of the apple renders a colourful world into darkness. “If somebody is fighting against system, the system will always make them vanish. But in our film, nobody is getting vanished. When the power suppresses one, another will rise,” says Murali, adding, “This is kind of a dystopian world, showing something that will not happen in the real world, but at least, in the film, we can resolve to that kind of happy ending.”
Ramachandran’s poems have been set into music for the film; she has also voiced for eight characters in the film, “Isla (the protagonist) is so monotonous and she is so neutral. She had to sound robotic and for Rosy, it was quite the opposite,” she says. Isla, the young girl protagonist, tasked with delivering a “kiss”, is quite robotic, asexual, devoid of emotions, just going about her job, like an automaton. While Midhun voices for the villain, the male characters (the film operator Pablo Escobar, etc.) have been voiced by Jicky Paul (from Don Palathara’s 1956, Central Travancore, 2019).
A still from 'Kiss Wagon'.
Excerpts:
You have delivered a near-masterpiece. Do either of you have any training in filmmaking or went to a film school?
Greeshma Ramachandran: I wish I had something like that up my sleeve but unfortunately no. Midhun comes from a family with a little bit of film background. His father and uncles produced and distributed commercial Malayalam movies (with the likes of Mohanlal), under their company Tarangini, back in the ’90s. Of late, there was nothing [no movies they were making], but Midhun had this spark in him. I met him back in 2019, for the screening of his second film Humaniya in Kochi and I was totally gobsmacked by what he’s capable of. I was intrigued by and wanted to know about his technique and then I tagged along.
Greeshma Ramachandran and Midhun Murali, the collaborators on 'Kiss Wagon'.
So, Midhun, did it help to have your father and uncles in the film business for you to develop a cinematic vision?
Midhun Murali: Their approach is totally different from that of mine. They wanted to do some kind of business so they chose cinema as a medium, that’s it, that was not a thing of passion. But I got an opportunity to understand analogue filmmaking. I was totally in love with the 35 mm film format, the projectors, the way you thread the film through it, that drew me into cinema initially. My father had suffered a lot of losses from film production, so he wanted his son to have some kind of profession in his hand. So, I went into sailing. He knew that my idea of filmmaking is totally different from his. I don’t want to make any money out of it. I just want to make films for my satisfaction. From my early childhood days, I always wanted to become a film projectionist. I created a room in my home like a place where I can show films to others.
How did the idea for your film come about and the ‘kiss’, in the film’s title, as an object to be delivered in a hostile world?
Midhun: The seed of this idea came to me as a wall where there are no colours and a totally apolitical central character is running a parcel delivery service, a strange person comes asking her to deliver a parcel to a stranger at an address (North Lookaway East) which doesn’t even exist. This idea came to me when I was a sailor (2007-17) and was doing the night-watches on board. So, I used to constantly develop the storyline, adding more and more characters. This was an epic narrative and we’d never be able to raise that kind of fund to get it into a live-action film. This (animation) is the only way we could narrate this story. But I was totally unsure what should the parcel be. So, this is a girl’s journey with the parcel which she is delivering to the world, which when done, the world will become colourful again. That’s the basic story. Then, immediately, Greeshma asked me, while riding on our moped in Goa, what are the possibilities of that delivery being a kiss? That is the most beautiful thing which she can deliver to the world to make it colourful. By 2021, we had written this script, we made an audio script, gathered our friends to cast in it. We made songs, but it didn’t get anywhere.
You made a feature-length animation before making a short animation? Usually that filmmakers take that route.
Midhun: Yes, but we didn’t even try that. Actually, we were planning to make a totally different film, a musical with eight tracks, not a commercial film. But we couldn’t do that so we wanted to do something else. So, while making the songs, we made a presentation for it. Just to show that this is how the film is going to look. For it, we took different photographs, overlaid them and made a 30-minute presentation out of it. It wasn’t even a short film but a kind of a music video. But when that couldn’t happen either, because we couldn’t raise the fund for that and the lockdown was announced, we decided among ourselves to turn that into a feature-length film. We used the same method.
As for animation inspirations, we love Satoshi Kon, Pixar and Disney films, apart from that we are not hard-core anime fans. We wanted our film to somewhat emulate the feeling of an anime film, but have a different aesthetics from it.
A still from 'Kiss Wagon'.
The shadow puppet or silhouette animation reminds a lot of the works of Lotte Reiniger or Phil Mulloy. Animation like shadow puppetry, handed down generations, has a long history in India, especially in south India, where you come from. How did you choose this kind of animation for your film?
Midhun: It’s not animation, we are basically making a film using multimedia inspirations. We won’t even call it an animation film, it’s a multimedia film. Actually, we haven’t even done any pixel-level animation. What you are seeing are basically images, photographs. For a time-lapse video, the land is a photograph, the sky is a different photograph, an element you see on the ground is a different photograph. We just PhotoScape it and overlay it to create the look of an animation film. But we would like to call it a multimedia film, our inspirations are totally different.
It looks like a shadow puppet animation, but the puppets you see in the film are actually cut-outs, which we move using stop motion. It had more details in it but we made it look like shadows afterwards in the post-production.
Our inspiration…I’m a hard-core fan of David Lynch, I wanted to make films like him. I like Gaspar Noé, and anyone who makes kinetic kind of cinema. I like the films of (Ryuichi) Sakamoto, Luis Buñuel and Lars von Trier, that propelled us in our journey, not animation films. We don’t want to make one more animation film after this.
Kiss Wagon is a 3 hour-long film with a lot happening in it, the subtext and intertextuality, overlapping or parallel narratives while the visuals are minimalistic. It can get confusing for the viewer. Was it intentional?
Midhun: I’ve said this so many times related to the film is that our inspiration comes from religious books. When you go through them, take the Bible or Quran or whatever it is, it has got a lot of subplots which is very confusing for me. I can’t remember more than five names at a time. Whenever I watch commercial film, at the end, if you ask me the main character’s name, I won’t be able to tell. That’s my brain’s capacity. When my mother asks me to read the Bible, in a paragraph you get to read at least 10 names. That’s very confusing for me. So, the basic conflict is that even in this modern era when everyone is so educated, religions can still convince even space scientists to believe in such theories as life after death. So, we always ask ourselves like how do they still do this in a very modern era. The answer to this question is the larger-than-life things they project on to them, like the big religious books, the rituals, the miracles they portray, pilgrim centres…wherever you go, you will get to see larger-than-life things, big churches, chapels, large crowd. So, such things have got the power to manipulate human brains. As filmmakers, we have got the same power, we can project our idea on to a very large screen with a lot of speakers surrounding them. We can even convince people with our ideas with cinema as a tool. We wanted to make the film to compete with religious books, with something like Bible or Quran. So, we intentionally made a lot of subplots to confuse people. But the basic idea is very simple. Basically, I have made one silhouette into three different characters across timelines. So, it’s basically our fight against religion. We wanted our film to be big and fat. Our initial film was almost 4 hours long, but we cut it short to 3 hours.
A still from 'Kiss Wagon'.
Your film is critiquing religion, society, power, politics…
Midhun: Everything that oppresses, be it religion, caste, or gender. We are critiquing the oppressors. Basic thing is that I don’t like anything that stands against my freedom. That’s what we are fighting against. Like when I was a kid, I was totally subjected to all gender rules, when I went to school, I always wanted to have long hair but my school’s rules wouldn’t permit it. So, I don’t like any of these things. When I knew that religion is the thing that, men said, established all these things in the society, I hated it and wanted to fight against it, so, for my personal freedom, I made the film. Even Greeshma is a victim of religion.
The characters are silhouettes, there are no facial expressions to ascertain their emotions or intent/motivations. Isla comes across as very robotic, very non-human. Why create a character like that?
Midhun: What’s happening these days is that people are all after literature and performance when they make cinema. Literature was the first thing that happened and then theatre, much before camera. But even after the invention of camera, people are still going to literature/theatre when approaching cinema, especially for the mainstream audience. Even in film festivals, all the films that get applauded by the public, people’s choice films will be a direct, narrative film that explains everything that’s happening on screen, like literature. And that it should have a three-act structure, should get the emotions through the actors’ faces. I, personally, don’t like that idea, that people are only watching the actors and their performances when they are watching cinema. There are a lot of things the medium can do by itself: emulate all these images and emotions through sound design, specific sort of cuts, camera movements, using music or not, etc. So, we were concentrating on that part of filmmaking, our experiment in this film is that none of the audience can resort to the performances or facial expressions, or the beauty of actors on screen while watching this film, they have to sit through the three-hour length, only watching cinema. They’ll get to see structure, form and composition, and nothing else. That kind of treatment suits this story, too.
A still from 'Kiss Wagon'.
For Kiss Wagon, what software did you work on after you made the sketches and cut-outs?
Midhun: Everything was done on (Adobe) Premiere Pro and (Adobe) After Effects; the only things about animation we used was rotoscoping and tracking, everything else you see in the film are photographs or even videos we have taken with a basic DSLR camera. After the completion of these shots, we have put some layers on it to make it look like animation but we haven’t even made a single pixel. Everything you see are images. The music was created with Adobe Audition and FL Studio. The music production was the biggest part of it. Took one year to complete.
The multi-genre music in the film, are these original compositions?
Midhun: The film took three years, one-and-a-half years for the visuals to complete and almost six months to create the music. We have created only five songs. All other songs were already composed. For some, Greeshma had to rewrite the lyrics. But the composition, the orchestration was already with us. I quite like Greeshma’s poems, which are dark, mostly about womanhood and the ordeal women go through. I made a visual audio adaptation of one of them, on YouTube.
There’s one song in the film that is used when Isla is fighting against the mutant creatures, the security system. That was the only point in the film that the main character resorts to violence, even though the film says that the character has got the physical abilities to break walls and pull out trees from their roots. Even though we have got a central character who is so strong who can defeat anybody, but we had already decided that we should never resort to this to reach the climax of the film. So, the only point where she uses power is when she is breaking the security system, they are not human beings. That’s the only point where Isla is getting agitated and she is using physical power. So, we used the song in that particular portion, that song originated from a voice clip of some random person Greeshma used to work with, who’d sent her a voice note badmouthing about Greeshma, calling her udhapennu (dirty girl). I kept cleaning this particular clip, raised the pitch. That’s how it’s kind of revolutionary.
Do you see, in the future, Artificial Intelligence making a film like Kiss Wagon?
Yeah, I definitely believe so. When we were halfway through the film, AI got developed so much that I used to ask Greeshma and Krishnendu (Kalesh) that if AI can make such a film then why are we spending so much effort. Krishnendu told me that ‘whatever an artist does by hand has value in this world. So, believe in the film.’ He gave us the inspiration to continue with it. But I still believe, AI can make Kiss Wagon in a much better way. We made this film after spending more than two years. So, it’s our baby and we have to believe in it (smiles). But when it comes to live action, the power lies with us. We can beat AI there. If I had got enough funds to make Kiss Wagon into a live action film, it would have been an even better film because I am not an animator.
Malayalam filmmaker Krishnendu Kalesh is internationally presenting your film. In what capacity did you work on Krishnendu’s film Prappeda (Hawk’s Muffin), which also first premiered at the IFFR in 2022 like yours did this year?
I joined Prappeda in its post-production stage, before Prappeda even he was trying to make a different film. So, I was on the writing desk when he asked me if I could sit with him while making the screenplay. I was with him for two months. After that, the lockdown happened and he just went ahead and made it. After the completion of the film, he asked me to make some montages for him. The way I cut fast montages, he wanted to include those in his film. Prappeda was a classic form of film with sustained shots but in between he wanted to play around with the form. So, he sent me a dance footage first and asked me to edit. After I edited it and made a music for it, he called me into a house where Thoufeek Hussain was doing the VFX and I was doing some kind of weird music production. There is an ad film footage montage with which the film opens, I did that portion. He gave me a much more important title of the creative director, I haven’t done that much.
Krishnendu gave me lot of instructions regarding the composition of shots. I have used those compositional elements like the ‘golden rule’. He always wants his films to be more visual than verbal. But in our film, the length of the dialogues is the length of the film. So, I want to minimise dialogues in my next film and make it more visual.
A still from 'Kiss Wagon'.
There’s Pablo Escobar running the cinema theatre called ‘Cinema’, which is screening only the first half of a film called Kiss Wagon, an MG (both of yours initials) production, on loop. Talk about the meta-textuality.
Midhun: The rest of the movie is in the basement of that theatre. We are talking films made in the analogue format. Where one film would be, at least, four spools. So, these revolutionaries have got only two spools. The other two have been taken away by the villains, who barge into the theatre and shot everyone who was present. When I say the film was stolen, most of the kids these days don’t understand, because nowadays, a film is a single clip. The entire scene has been designed like they are using cinema as a tool to fight against the system, like we did, so that’s why most of the film is happening inside a cinema theatre. Surprisingly, there’s one more film which uses the same plot element, Karthik Subbaraj’s Jigarthanda. It’s a very good film and we were surprised to see the film. When our film got selected in IFFR’s Tiger competition, Jigarthanda released in theatres, we went to watch it and the basic plot is almost the same, wherein a group of people are using cinema as a weapon to fight against the power. Even Stefan (Borsos, IFFR selector) was quite surprised to see that.
The villain in your film is a paralysed musician, controlling the world with his wheelchair joystick.
The character you are talking about, John, he’s not really the main villain (Col. John Hump, who’s using the musician John as a tool; he becomes Captain Hump’s alter-ego at one point) but is caught between good and bad. He’s selfish enough to sell his own soul to the power so as to build his family, his home, that he’ll be financially stable if he forgets his ideology, and uses his music for the villains. Towards the end of the film, you will get to see a particular scene where both Isla and (musician) John are talking to each other while riding on their wheelchair. By that scene, I’d like to show people that both of them are victims of power.
But what about the character of the little boy Dudo, hasn’t his father, the musician John, been oppressive towards the child?
The system and the captain, they have got a particular wing which creates mutants. Whenever they find a new-born baby with particular kind of genetic structure, they will choose him for their experiments and they will turn him into a beast. That’s what happened with Isla, too, in her childhood.
A still from 'Kiss Wagon'.
Editing is, perhaps, the most crucial part of a film, that’s when the film comes together. Which filmmakers’ craft and editing have struck a chord with you?
Cinema, like music, is a time-bound art form, unlike, say, looking at a painting like (the 16th century) Mona Lisa. You can watch it for 5 seconds or 5 long hours. I believe in the power of editing. In the beginning, you said the visuals are very, very minimal, that’s because we are playing around with the other things like sound design and cuts. To show some visual and a contrasting sound to give another idea to the audience. That’s what we are experimenting with, in cinema. What you have on your editing table is everything prepared for cooking your dish. You start to cook the film on the editing table, that’s when you make the film. Editing is like the act of painting, everything prior to that is preparing the palette. When somebody wants to call himself a filmmaker, he should be the one editing the film. Otherwise he’s just directing others to make a film. Editing is filmmaking itself.
(Andrei) Tarkovsky, (Quentin) Tarantino, (Luis) Bunuel have got a style. But Steven Spielberg and Martin Scorsese don’t have a style, they will choose a style for a particular film. When I’ve tried a particular style in a movie, I want to leave it there and try something else for the next film. I’m sure that even the hard-core (David) Lynch fans, won’t be able to guess a particular scene from the middle of a particular film of his because the style of signature is so strong that every film looks the same, that is not to undermine him. It’s a very good thing about an artist that they have a style. Whenever you see a Vincent Van Gogh painting, you immediately know it’s a Van Gogh painting. The style overpowers everything. We don’t want to do that with cinema, we want to try new things with every film. In this one, we have used very kinetic cuts, no shot is sustained for more than a few seconds. There are 2,160 shots in its 3-hour-long runtime. So, the average shot length will be around 2 seconds. We want to discover more and more. We even want to make an uninterrupted single shot film.
I like the style of Alejandro Jodorowsky, I like (Michelangelo) Antonioni more than (Federico) Fellini. As for a director, it would be (David) Lynch, I watch all his films like a marathon once in a while. My recent crush is Sofia Coppola. I’ve started loving her style increasingly. In the modern era, a lot of female filmmakers are very strong, such as Emma Seligman, Celine Sciamma, and Kristoffer Borgli (Sick Of Myself, 2022). Kiss Wagon is a female-centric film, but I won’t call it a feminine film because it’s very arrogant in its nature, it’s so manly. It’s very dark and it’s so loud. I want to make a feminine film in the future which is elegant and soft, I’m not stereotyping femininity but I love that kind of femininity. I want to become that.
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