The camera opens with a prepubescent girl (Diya Bisht) in a pink dress, walking on a mountain, amid tall welcoming trees that peek into the limitless sky. It is a dream filled with hope, a state of reverie, as we soon realise when the camera cuts to her stark reality in the next scene. She lives with her little sister on a mountain, no adult in sight. A child herself, she takes the mother’s place for her little Kaku (Kavyanjali Bisht), dressing her for school, carrying her in arms up the steep, long walk to school, feeding her, doing the dishes. Her own shoes are torn, hair unkempt. She’s bullied by the boys in class, is called an outcaste and hit with stones, and taunted at by her supposed upper-caste class teacher.
Tarun Jain’s 17-minute tale, Ballad of the Mountain, will break your heart into a million pieces and then put those pieces back like a Kintsugi art piece, gilding the cracked reality. Jain’s first outing with children is also, perhaps, his most mature humanist tales that surmounts the bleak to catch the rays of hope to declare that tomorrow will be better.
After premiering at Chile’s Cinelebu (Lebu International Film Festival), which is both Goya Awards and Oscars qualifying festival, Jain’s Ballad of the Mountain had its India premiere at MAMI Mumbai Film Festival, as part of the competitive Royal Stag Barrel Select Large Short Films segment, and travels to the Dharamshala International Film Festival (DIFF), November 7-10.
After his last short, Kaala (2020), Jain worked on the popular OTT series Kohrra as an associate director (AD) and a second unit director, and shot his new short film, Ballad of the Mountain, in between but couldn’t finish it owing to Kohrra’s post-production. The Kohrra team was “the same group from Delhi that I was with very early on, around 10-12 years ago, when I’d come to Bombay, to work on a project as an assistant and still photographer on Semshook (2010), directed by Siddharth Anand Kumar, written by Sudip Sharma, the creator and showrunner of Pataal Lok. I saw Kohrra develop over the years, the work was going on since 2018. They offered me to work as an associate and eventually gave me the job of a second unit director. I shot most of the background, the ambience shots of Delhi, Punjab and Bombay, the investigations, chase sequences, accident sequences in Kohrra. It was a fantastic learning process. I got exposed to a proper setup and the whole strategy. All my previous work had been indie features,” says Jain, who owing to prior commitments is not associated with Kohrra 2.
In 2020, Jain’s Kaala was a peeled-out, raw look at how Indians see Africans. Rarely do South Asian films talk about racism in their films, Jain’s look at the rampant racism in the national capital, Delhi, won him the first Best Director award at Global Impact Film Festival in the US. At this year’s MAMI, Nepali filmmaker Deepak Rauniyar’s police procedural Pooja, Sir trains its lens on racism, too.
Until now, Jain has been creating apocalyptic landscapes in his short fictions. His Amma Meri (2019) takes a haunting look on an oppressive Haryana, with its agrarian crisis, an old matriarch, a daughter in an unsafe male world, and a man (Anuraag Arora, who played Aamir Khan’s brother in Dangal, and Kaala’s creative producer) at the centre of it. Jain’s road thriller Aakhir (At Last, 2013), inspired by the works of the Coen brothers, travelled to 45 festivals. Both Amma Meri and Aakhir were shot by cinematographer Karan Thapliyal, who has also shot Ballad of the Mountain on widescreen. Two of Thapliyal’s films went to the Oscars. He shot the Oscar-nominated documentary feature Writing with Fire (2022) and Oscar-winning documentary short The Elephant Whisperers (2023).
In Ballad…, Thapliyal takes arresting shots of the town called Kasar Devi, half an hour from Almora, this is also one of the meditation places for Swami Vivekananda (visited in 1890s), also this is the place where NASA had done some research and concluded it to be one of the three sites of Van Allen belts, geomagnetic rings or a zone of radiation that surrounds the Earth. The other two being Machu Picchu (Peru) and Stonehenge (England). “Most of the visual language in the film (Ballad of the Mountain) is Karan’s. I wanted to do more cutaways, I thought these kids are not actors, so we might have to shoot more takes, close-ups, but Karan was confident from the beginning, he said the kids are very good so take one shot and stay with it if you like it, because his theory was that since these are kids, if you do multiple takes, they won’t be able to do it. I agreed, rather than shoot more and not get good content to instead shoot less and be satisfied,” says Jain.
The landscape defines how the social hierarchies are spread out. This is, after all, Devbhoomi, aka Uttarakhand, where the roads, businesses, infrastructure et al are in the control of Brahmins as the lower castes, the Dalits, the marginalised people live close to the streams below from where they have to climb to reach anywhere. Despite the uphill climb, literally and figuratively, and all the odds stacked against her, our young protagonist doesn’t stop dreaming. She knows there’s a whole new world on the other side of the mountain. The galaxy photo on the pages of a National Geographic magazine which she might have picked up from the school library fuels her unformed aspirations. She makes paper planes, she’s heard them in the sky above, never seen though. In moments of anguish, she can tear her notebook. That’s the most she can do. Diya Bisht, as a non-actor, a local, knocks it out of the park with her assured way in which she stays in her character and emotes. The terrain is such one couldn’t cast actors from the cities, the filmmaker quips. There’s a natural ease between the two children on screen.
“I wanted to work on children’s content and hopeful content because I was feeling stuck writing miserable situations and how bleakly they would end in my films every time. With my partner, we have written around 35 short films, but in all of them, the person ends up suffering. We try to depict what happens in reality. I was trying to find hope for myself as well. Plus, the commercial angle. When it comes to children on screen, people don’t judge who the actor is and they just watch the film. And children don’t have a past. They are living in the present, so, they can change it if they want. They don’t have any baggage which can pull them back,” says Jain.
He further adds, “We thought what could be that one thing that can bring you out of your situation. That depends only on you and your focus. She is not getting distracted by things happening in this story: kids bullying her, teacher is discriminating, this long walk, she has to take care of the sister as a mother, do the household work. She’s a human being as well as a child. She is someone who knows the reality and chooses to continue, only then is there a chance to break out of that (her circumstances). The dream that she keeps seeing is also her happy place, her escape. Maybe she becomes an astronaut like Kalpana Chawla or maybe not, she may end up in a corporate desk job, but she will know that her education got her there and she can help her sister, or maybe her next generation will achieve the dream she once dreamt.” The film does not show her away from her reality, but rather she stays focussed on her journey and dream, and gathers information on her own, for “information is power.”
The cinematography and face shots evoke emotions as the older sister’s serene visage evince desire, weather-beaten but not worn away. If like Nuri Bilge Ceylan’s Kasaba (1997), here, too, we see the world through the eye of this child, her long walk reminds of the one from Abbas Kiarostami’s Where Is the Friend's House? (1987) and the sibling’s mutual love and care, in their parents’ absence, and wearing torn shoe to school are instant hat-tips to Majid Majidi’s Children of Heaven (1997).
“After Parasite (2019) won the Oscars and Asian content and regional content started doing well globally, it has been a good sign for us,” Jain says, “I feel Anurag Kashyap opened the market and the festival circuit for all of us after Ram Gopal Varma and now you see most of the people who have worked with Kashyap are now really controlling the market. For example, Stree-director Amar Kaushik worked with Raj Kumar Gupta (Aamir, No One Killed Jessica, Ghanchakkar), who worked with Anurag Kashyap on Black Friday and No Smoking. Jigra-director Vasan Bala has worked with Kashyap on many projects. Similarly, Imtiaz Ali’s Jab We Met brought a break in how the romcom genre was imagined and opened the gateways for a Woody Allen-style romcom to emerge. Now also, the industry is going through a churn. And it is hard to assess whether OTTs are evolving or going down after a four-year boom and there’s a saturation and one doesn’t know where it is going so one can’t plan for what will or won’t work.”
In spite of the surge in OTT platforms, there is a dearth in children’s content in India now, more than ever before. “Gulzar Saab dedicated a large part of his life and time in working on children’s content, but unfortunately there is no space for that now. I want to do more of children’s content, for it helps take a lot of baggage away from you. Besides, children’s content is universal content,” says Jain, who’s working on a feature film and has written a children’s feature script, and another one on Bombay’s erstwhile dance bars.
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