What are the odds that a Bulgarian makes an Indian film, in Hindi, with Indian actors, and the film finds its way into the Un Certain Regard category at the 77th Cannes Film Festival and wins its co-lead Anasuya Sengupta the Best Performance award, the first Indian actor to win the award. Konstantin Bojanov’s just-premiered film The Shameless was in the company of British Indian Sandhya Suri-directed Shahana Goswami-starrer Santosh, among others. Steering Shameless is a host of power-packed actors, including Mita Vashisht, Auroshika Dey, Tanmay Dhanania and Rohit Kokate, and it is helmed by Anasuya Sengupta and Omara Shetty as the leads Renuka and Devika, respectively, who are accidental lovers.
The live-action fiction feature film began as a documentary project about 12-13 years ago. It transitioned into an adult animation — Bulgaria is known for its animation films — but the idea was struck down. “To work on a project for 12 years borders on insanity,” says Konstantin Bojanov, who can now have a laugh over it in retrospect.
This is Bojanov’s second outing at the Cannes Film Festival. In 2012, his narrative feature debut Avé (2011) was in the parallel segment Critics’ Week.
But why would a Bulgarian make an Indian film? Bojanov’s relationship with India goes back 20 years. An unstoppable wanderlust turned into a fascination with the country’s culture and north’s Mughal architecture. “Some remarkable films have come out of India in the last 15 years. A renaissance of what used to be the ’70s parallel cinema and late ’60s and ’70s independent cinema. And then there was a big gap, which came to be dominated by Bollywood. What is happening now is very exciting, even in Cannes this year with so many Indian films premiering. At one point, I had almost lost hope that I can make my film in India.”
His project started as a documentary around 12-13 years ago. “At the time, my idea was to cross-reference four stories that were loosely based on four of the stories that comprise William Dalrymple’s Nine Lives (2009). One of these was the story of a devadasi sex worker from northern Karnataka’s Belgaum area. In January 2014, we began shooting that story. The idea was to shoot part of the story and to raise funding for the film. I had previously spent time with Reshma, the woman who was that story’s central character, whose story I wanted to juxtapose with the story of a Jain nun, of a renouncer, who’s constantly on the move,” says Bojanov. It is an accomplishment that he’s made a film in a completely alien language. “It was a difficult, challenging experience, obviously, directing in a language that I do not speak in. Eventually, I had a trilingual assistant on the film but finding someone to translate the dialogue while preserving my intentions and the type of voices that I wanted to have was very difficult in the beginning. I was hitting a wall every time, dialogue was drifting into Bollywood clichés, which I was trying to avoid. And then, it’s also not a realistic social drama,” says Bojanov, who got by with help from friends, journalist Basharat Peer and filmmaker Anurag Kashyap.
During the initial filming of the then documentary in Karnataka, he observed the relationship, the friendship between Reshma and this other woman, another sex worker called Renuka. “There was something so tender, touching and loving about it, amid their background of a fairly harsh life. That sparked the story of The Shameless. I started thinking, what if a woman on the run came to hide in a community and fell in love with a young girl,” adds the director. The Shameless then became a story about this other woman, Renuka, played by Anasuya Sengupta.
“Renuka was always the more active character. I feel strongly attracted to characters that transgress norms and go into criminality evoking the ambiguity of whether such acts as a murder can be justified or not,” says Bojanov, mentioning the how some documentary and fiction films influenced the structure and story arc of his film. One was Miloš Forman’s One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest (1975) and Aileen Wournos’ Monster (2003), a fiction film based on the life of the first female serial killer in America’s modern history.
An Afghanistan-set adult animation film by a friend left Bojanov wanting to make one. Bengali director Qaushiq Mukherjee aka Q and India-based Belgian producer Celine Loop helped Bojanov’s “project” and directed him towards Anasuya Sengupta’s illustrations — which he “liked” on Facebook — for the visual language he was looking for his animation film, which “was struck down by the producers and sales agent”. He, then, decided to make a live-action film and offered Anasuya the lead role through Facebook messenger, not knowing then that she shared a house with Tanmay in Goa, whom he’d already cast for Murad’s role. She took a month to say yes.
“The minute I saw her on screen, I was convinced that I had found the actress who should play Renuka,” says the director, adding, “For Devika’s role, we held auditions in Mumbai with Omara, who came through Paragg Mehta’s casting agency. Hundreds auditioned for her part but there was a kind of an innocence in Omara that I was looking for. I first saw Rohit Kokate (who plays the politician Dinesh) in Lovefucked (Jaoon Kahan Bata Ae Dil, 2018). Mita Vashisht joined the cast relatively late. Despite the low budget, she wanted to work with me. I could imagine Auroshikha as the cold, despotic mother. The secondary parts were played by Nepali actors, some of whose acting style was kind of over the top, bringing that down was a task.”
Bojanov wanted to “nestle a love story within a crime story. That was the film’s core. It’s also a revenge story. I wanted to make a fast-paced, dynamic film, because my last film was rather slow-paced. We had a hard time slowing it down in the editing room,” chuckles Bojanov, who was left with limited footage and two and a half takes per shot.
Making the film was “almost like driving through thick fog,” he says, “I wanted to make a neo noir, comic book-style film, by shifting the story away from southern Maharashtra and northern Karnataka to Kathmandu, which is a rather claustrophobic city because it’s one of the most densely populated and it’s all vertical, there’s no space. I used that as my film’s visual vocabulary. That there’s no escape,” he says, “And while the film takes place within a red-light district and sex work, I wanted to stay away from showing explicit sex scenes, very purposefully, to focus more on the coming together of two souls, tap into their emotional closeness rather than the physicality and lust.”
In the film, Bojanov juxtaposes the duality of sex work, on the one hand, there’s the religion-approved devadasi system where women are dedicated to do sex work, on the other hand there are the women in the red-light district, the “common whore”, but it is the latter that gets looked down upon derogatorily. “For both, it’s a matter of survival,” says the director, “It was always a form of exploitation. The British tried to ban the (devadasi) practice only so that it isn’t practised in public spaces, which offended their Victorian morals. From that point on, the practice moved exclusively into Dalit communities. The devadasi system was outlawed in Karnataka in 1987 but is still being practised there. The business is exclusively run by women, out of their houses. Majority of them send their really young daughters to big cities where the exploitation is brutal,” says the 55-year-old.
Reshma, whom the director met in Belgaum, described to him how, at age 13, she was sold to a farmer who brutally raped her repeatedly for days. Because she had a life-threatening accident, hit by a buffalo, and was left with scars and because she was tomboyish, mostly playing with the boys, her family and community took her to be mentally ill and dedicated her. “The practice of dedications is part of Hinduism. I found the system extremely intriguing.”
The film also spotlights a dysfunctional family and generational trauma. Bojanov quips, “dysfunctional families are my forte because I grew up in one. But, in the film, it was very much the clash of generations. The grandmother (Mita Vashisht) believes in the tradition, although she has a change of mind, she still doesn’t judge her own actions. The mother (Auroshikha) is very cruel to her daughter Devika because she doesn’t know better, she represents the tradition, the system. I wanted to show a family on the cusp of a change, in conflict.”
The film mixes various genres and that was “intentional”. “One thing I try to stay away from is social drama, it’s not my thing. And, very often, the approach to such subjects, singularly by Western filmmakers, is that of poverty porn.”
There is a subtle layer of the topical Hindu-Muslim angle. Bojanov says the addition was “very intentional to show the religious tensions in the background”. Renuka is Nadira who kills a client who’s a cop, she’s on the run, and adopts a Hindu name. Murad is her friend helping her to escape. But can Renuka escape a mob?
It is quite a feat to give a sense of space and distance even in congested quarters of a vertical city he shot in. The Swiss cinematographer Gabriel Lobos’ camera is handheld, whether in the static shots indoor — “We couldn’t move around in most of the rooms we shot in, moving out the furniture was very cumbersome” — or the outdoor scenes, where the lens seems to be moving on a trolley, which actually turned out to be, Bojanov says, “primitive sort of devices: rickshaws and vegetable carts. Luckily, we had Ronin, which is not a Steadicam but a similar camera-stabilising device, that could arrest some of the bumpiness. This movie is very DIY. I have certain regrets about it.”
The choice of rap music “brings so much to the film, especially to Devika’s story. Dimitri, the Nepalese rapper, was introduced to me by my location manager and I love her music.” The devadasis are formally dressed when they perform music recitals at rich people’s home, so rap music becomes a break away for Devika, her little rebellion, the assertion of her identity, but in hiding.
Bojanov’s films are about two people, journeys and escaping, whether from a place or situation. It’s a reflection of who he is. “I’ve been on the run from myself for very long but I’m trying to come to terms with who I am,” says the director who’s based between Berlin and Portugal. As for The Shameless’ journey, “Un Certain Regard is the best platform I could have hoped for the film to start at,” he says adding that he’d be happy if Jio MAMI Mumbai Film Festival premieres it in India.
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