Debutant director Diwa Shah, 27, who is based out of both Mumbai and Nainital, premiered her film Bahadur - The Brave, about the plight of the Nepali migrant worker stuck in Nainital, at the San Sebastian International Film Festival in the New Directors competition category. She became the first Indian to win the Kutxabank New Directors Award in the 71-year-old film festival’s history. The film, with a subject of gravitas infused with light, comic moments, is screening at the 2023 Jio MAMI Mumbai Film Festival in the new South Asia Competition category next week. Shah, and her producers, talk about the making of the film. Edited excerpts:
You are the first Indian to win the Kutxabank New Directors Award at Spain’s 71st San Sebastián International Film Festival, one of the oldest international film festivals in the world. Tell us about the award?
There is a special jury appointed for the Kutxabank New Directors Award, which has the highest monetary prize (€50,000) given at any festival. Japanese director Hiroshi Okuyama had won it at the age of 22, for Jesus (2018). One of my favourite directors, (Korea’s) Bong Joon-ho’s first film, Barking Dogs Never Bite (2000), was an official selection at the festival for the very first time.
You weren’t even planning on becoming a filmmaker and your maiden project bags an international award.
I didn’t intend on becoming a filmmaker and always wanted to write books. I have even written two books that never got published. From that failure to my first film winning an award gives hope to the storyteller in me to never give up, sometimes success comes from unknown places and restores our faith in our creativity.
Was COVID-19 pandemic, lockdown and migrant crisis the driving force for this story?
It wasn’t just COVID-19, the lockdown, and the migrant crisis, I didn’t set out to make a film about COVID. There was a Nepalese migrant labourer who was visiting our house, I knew there was a crisis and the town was hugely dependent on them for a lot of work, he washed his hands with soap and helped us in cleaning the tanks, he was very fussy about money and quoted a price higher than usual, I wondered what made him stay here alone and how lonely it would be because all his friends and mates had left for Nepal, his family was far away and COVID-19 was a lonely and dark time.
How did you develop Hansi, the protagonist's character, who's submissive, hardworking but also a liar and crafty?
Hansi is based on a real-life character, there is a Nepali migrant who came to visit our house during COVID, he was the only one who was left behind in Nainital when everyone had left for Nepal, he was also very popular in the Tallital Bazaar, because he was so hardworking. But he was very shrewd about money, he would get upset when people paid him less, he even complained about an employer at the police station when they didn’t pay him on time. There was many layers to him, people are not just black and white, from there came the complex nature of Hansi’s character.
Why did you think feature film would be the best format to tell the story?
I tried a short film first but when I started researching and got to know that the Dharchula border was shut in the beginning and a lot of migrants tried swimming across the river and had drowned in the process that’s when I realised there was so much more to tell about this story and only a feature could do justice.
Though the film has an almost documentary-like feel to it, where the non-actors make it feel like we are watching a snapshot of real life.
That was very much intentional. I was very conscious about treating it like a documentary, not using music was a conscious choice from the very start.
Did you have experienced hands in the crew? What were the challenges?
The first challenge was to find producers. It’s very tough to find producers to make a film without music, without any known faces, in a country like India. (Producers) Visvesh Singh Sehrawat and Thomas Ajay Abraham didn’t have funds when we were going on the floor since their first films hadn’t sold but, somehow, they pulled it off. My DOP Modhura Palit (Cannes 2019 Pierre Angénieux ExcelLens in Cinematography award winner) was so humble and accommodating about doing this project even though I was a debutant director. My art director Anksuh More did an excellent job in creating the dark ghettos, my costume stylist Komal Rawal held an exhibition in Nainital and gave all the local Bahadurs brand new clothes in exchange of their old clothes that she dry-cleaned herself, and the direction team (Nagma Chowdhary, Anupam Lamba, Vivek Bhagat) worked very meticulously with the non-actors to ease my job.
What kind of numbers did your research throw up?
Around 326 Nepali migrants were stranded at the border for more than a day, the Nepali security force did not allow them to cross over and the Indian counterparts did not want them back. They were in no man’s land without food, water or toilet, they were desperate to go home, some even tried swimming across the river (Kali / Mahakali River) and a few of them drowned in the process. This led me to dig deeper into the Nepalese migrants and the COVID crises. They are daily wagers and they earn from about Rs 700-1,000 a day, which may vary depending on the kind of work they get. They are very hardworking and often possess funky gadgets, etc., some of them are educated who come to India to work fund their further studies in Nepal once they return. There is no work safety, a lot of the migrants, especially in cities like Delhi, are exploited because they don’t have proper paperwork proving their living status in India.
Have the porters in the hills and the security guards in the cities (both called Bahadur), the Sherpa in the Himalayan mountain treks, those working the farms in ghost villages of Uttarakhand, the Gorkha regiment of the Indian Army — there is this symbiotic service relationship the Nepalese have with India. Have they resigned themselves to the exploitation that comes with the job?
It’s been happening since time immemorial, so they have clearly resigned themselves to work exploitation. They come from such poverty-stricken villages in Nepal, some of them don’t even have electricity till now, and their paperwork that proves their living status in India is so loose at times that the exploiters take advantage. They are the backbone of our community, the locals are considered lazy when compared to the hardworking zeal of the Nepali migrants, but the Nepali porters are also very addicted to alcohol, it’s a growing problem. Obviously, there’s distress because the exploitation and the racism.
Could you talk about the etymology of Bahadur and why translate it in the title?
So, Bahadur is also a surname in Nepal, people who have fought in the war took up the surname and it was well-respected until the migrants came to India and the locals started calling them Bahadur — perhaps, they wanted to absolve their own guilt of exploiting them, but this exploited the surname further to the extent that people stopped using it; it became very derogatory. We were not targeting those sentiments and, thus, we named our film Bahadur - The Brave to clarify that we are not talking about the cast or the surname but about the bravery, the courage of these migrants.
A number of independent films (Oscar-entrant documentary Moti Bagh, National Award winner Ek Tha Gaon, Shera and Pushtaini) are coming out of Uttarakhand, as well as those focussing on the pandemic-triggered migrant crisis (Utsav Gomwar’s Photo, Bollywood film Bheed). How did you plan on revisiting the same subject differently?
There have been a lot of films on the pandemic but Bahadur - The Brave is not just about the pandemic, we wanted to talk about the Nepalese migrant porters in Nainital and, while talking to them, I realised they would open up quicker when I asked them about COVID. The film is also primarily about Hansi and Dil Bahdur’s bond, their friendship and the universal theme of the migrants echoes more with the audience than the COVID pandemic setting.
There is a crucial, wordless scene in the film that feels like a comment on a world that does not care about the grief an individual felt who lost his own during the COVID lockdown-triggered events such as the closing down of the border and stranded workers who could neither go home nor return to work.
That scene was inspired from this very personal incident that had happened with me during COVID. Someone close to my mother had passed away, she was at the balcony, which had airtight glass windows, she was crying, we couldn’t hear her, she couldn’t visit the family, give her condolences, it was a very helpless situation, we were inside, we hadn’t heard of the death, we were celebrating someone’s birthday or doing our own thing, and that image was so vivid in my mind, I think that defined the helplessness that COVID had brought about in our lives. I wanted Hansi to sit there, not being able to travel anywhere because the news of death was often brought by a phone call to the extent that we dreaded taking phone calls because any moment we would hear of a close one passing away.
Did the film develop at the NFDC WIP (work-in-progress) Lab? What made producers Visvesh Singh Sehrawat (Hardhyaan Films) and Thomas Ajay Abraham (Sinai Pictures) back the idea?
Sehrawat & Abraham: Taking this risk was necessary since we are new to the industry as producers. Both of us fell in love with the story and knew that not making this would be a disservice to Indian cinema. After the first cut, we suggested to Diwa not to stick to the story as was written but utilise the visuals we had in the editing process. Fortunately, the NFDC WIP Lab provided her with the confidence to make those adjustments, and the current cut is undoubtedly the best version we have achieved.
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