It was an offer she couldn't refuse. Irfana Majumdar was mourning the death of her grandmother five years ago when her extended family decided to sell their ancestral home. The sale plan prompted Majumdar's mother Nita Kumar to propose that they must make a movie in the house before it changed hands. It was a good offer. After all, they had a director in Majumdar, who was the artistic director of a major theatre group in Varanasi, an actor in her husband, and a set in the bungalow. Majumdar's mother had a story ready too.
It was a colonial-era house in the Lucknow cantonment that set off the idea for Shankar's Fairies, the only Indian entry at the 74th Locarno film festival, which began on Wednesday. Majumdar's debut feature film, Shankar's Fairies deals with class and social hierarchies as seen through the eyes of a little girl. "The house was a symbol of my mother's and my childhood," says Majumdar, who also acts in the film along with her husband Gaurav Saini, who first trained and later taught at the Barry John Acting Studio in Delhi.
Competing in the Swiss festival's section for first and second feature films of a director, the film is also the family's own story.
Set in Lucknow during the 1962 India-China war, Shankar's Fairies is based on the childhood experiences of Majumdar's mother Nita Kumar, who has written the screenplay. The 88-minute film is a little girl's memories of her parents, brother and their domestic help Shankar. Shankar always tells Anjana stories of fairies in the big bungalow of her father, the district police chief, leading to a strong bond between the two.
"I had written the story some ten years ago and it was just lying there," says Kumar, an academic who has taught history at universities in India and the United States. "I flushed it out and put in more characters. In the story, I was a little girl as an observer. The idea was to go further, along the same lines, while looking at human beings at some depth and focus on human relationships," adds Kumar, who is also the film's production designer.
Once her mother showed her the story, Majumdar encouraged her to develop a script. "My mother wrote a draft screenplay and we both worked on it to come up with a new script," says Majumdar, who studied performance at the University of Chicago. By then, they were racing against time. The shooting had to be completed before the extended family finalised the sale of the ancestral home. Majumdar and Saini cast themselves as Anjana's parents Ramesh and Sudha. Saini, who was given the added responsibility of casting director, rushed to Mumbai to find an actor to play the main lead, Shankar.
Saini's experience as an actor in Mumbai for nearly a decade before he moved to Varanasi worked in his favour. Among those auditioning for the role was his friend Jaihind Kumar. "We had lived in the same colony in Mumbai," says Saini about his acting days in the city. Jaihind was chosen and arrived in Lucknow for the shooting. "One of the things I did was to tell Jaihind to work as an actual domestic help in the house where we shot the film. He stayed in the help's room and worked as a cook for 15 days before we started shooting. The production team didn't know Jaihind was the main lead. They would tell him, 'Shankar, chai laana (Shankar, bring the tea)," he adds.
It was still 2016, and the family only had a few months to complete filming. They did and the house was sold as soon as the shooting was over. "We took a break and started the post-production two years later," says Majumdar. "I made a rough edit myself and our German editor who came to Varanasi too worked on the film but returned to Germany just before the pandemic," she adds. Soon Eeb Allay Ooo! editor Tanushree Das came onboard. "She (Das) couldn't travel to Varanasi, so we moved to (her studio) in Goa. Towards the end of editing, she was tested positive for Covid-19 and we returned home and finished long distance," adds Majumdar.
"My entire working career has been about collaborating with people close to me, often my family," says Majumdar, who is the founding artistic director of the NIRMAN Theatre & Film Studio, an offshoot of the family's research centre in education and art founded by her parents in 1990. Mainly focused on physical theatre, Majumdar directed a documentary, Children Playing Gods, in 2008 about the experiences of children acting and watching Ramlila in their Varanasi neighbourhood.
The whole of collaboration within the family has been towards creativity and research centred on children. The Nirman research centre also runs a school in Varanasi - with CBSE curriculum up to Class X - which believes in art-centred education. "My experiences have taught me that what we all need is to be in touch with our childhood," says Kumar. "It makes us better people."
When Majumdar goes on the stage at the Locarno film festival next week to present her debut feature, she would be missing her close collaborators back home. The pandemic has made it impossible for Majumdar's family to join her at the world premiere of Shankar's Fairies on August 13. "The Locarno selection is very important for us," says Majumdar, who will be vying for a slew of honours, including the Best Emerging Director Award, in Locarno. "We wanted to have the premiere somewhere with serious filmgoers and critics. It is really nice that people will watch the movie on a large screen."
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