Jio MAMI 2023: Kashmiri Pandit director sparks a philosophical pause with Varanasi film

A still from Rajesh Jala's debut feature The Spark (Chingari), which premieres in the Focus South Asia segment at the ongoing Jio MAMI Mumbai Film Festival.

Rajesh S Jala didn't have to look far for creative energy when he began writing the script for his first feature film about increasing violence in the society. He only had to invoke the ghosts of his own past.

"I am a Kashmiri Pandit uprooted from my home," says Jala about the militancy in erstwhile state of Jammu and Kashmir that led to an exodus of the minority community in the early '90s. "I have been a victim of violence in Kashmir," he adds.

Filmmaker Rajesh S Jala.

The violence he witnessed first hand as a young college student became a source for a script Jala started writing nearly a decade ago after watching "disturbing videos" of lynching incidents in the country. The film was to be a reminder that India has been a compassionate society for several millennia.

The Spark (Chingari), Jala's debut feature film, is set in the ancient city of Varanasi known across the world for its sacredness and spirituality. "Varanasi was an ideal place to set the film," says the director.

Part of Focus South Asia category of the Jio MAMI Mumbai Film Festival, The Spark is about three individuals separately seeking the purpose of their lives. Kabir, a young filmmaker is making a film on a migrant worker of a crematorium and an elderly pilgrim waiting for her death.

A mix of fiction and non-fiction, the film's two characters — crematorium worker Durga and the elderly pilgrim named only as Amma — are real-life people Jala found in the city. "I discovered Durga (Durga Prasad Choudhary) in a crematorium in Varanasi," he says. "Amma is also a real-life character who lives in Varanasi."

A still from The Spark (Chingari).

The fictional character of Kabir, played by theatre actor Puneet Sarawat making his film debut, is planning the murder of his father's killer in Varanasi with the help of Ahmed (Sanjay Suri), a man mostly heard through his telephone calls to Kabir.

Sparse in dialogue and characters, The Spark is produced by The Elements, Jala's homegrown independent production house, and co-produced by Inquilab Studio, an independent production company based in Amritsar, Punjab. Shot on a shoestring budget, several scenes had to be abandoned by the producers to complete the production.

Jala, who relies heavily on the use of sound and imagery of daily life in Varanasi's famous ghats to aid his experimental cinema style, digs deep into the history and tradition of the city for the essence of philosophy of life and death in the film.

A still from The Spark (Chingari).

Varanasi and its cremation grounds become a surreal character in the film, aiding its philosophical inquiry. "It is in Sarnath near Varanasi that Gautam Buddha gave his first sermon of non-violence after attaining enlightenment," explains the director, who chose to name his lead character after Kabir, the 15th century Sufi poet born in Varanasi who preached religious harmony.

The Delhi-based Jala, who began his film career as a documentary director, merges fiction and non-fiction in his quest for authenticity. "The film has real-life characters in real settings," he says. The film was shot in the cremation grounds in the ghats in 2019 before the coronavirus pandemic disrupted the production. "We had to wait for one-and-half years for the production to resume," says Jala.

Floating Lamp of the Shadow Valley, Jala's first documentary about a nine-year-old boy in Kashmir becoming a ferryman to support his family, screened at the International Documentary Film Festival in Amsterdam in 2006. Two years later, Children of the Pyre, his second documentary set in the cremation grounds of Varanasi, premiered at the Busan International Film Festival.

The Spark, which completed production in April 2022, received the Busan film festival's post-production fund, allowing Jala to complete the film in August this year. The film had its world premiere at the Busan film festival in October, competing in its New Currents section for the first and second features of up-and-coming Asian filmmakers.