‘Pulicat Lake fisherfolk have nostalgia for their changing world and for food’: Short film Virundhu director Rishi Chandna

Antony Janagi as Mary the prawn picker in the Pulicat Lake in a still from Rishi Chandna's short film Virundhu/The Feast, which premieres at Clermont-Ferrand International Short Film Festival, February 2-10.

Not since Kundan Shah’s Jaane Bhi Do Yaaro (1983) have many Indian films tread the dark side of wisecracking. The wise has fallen through the cracks. Humour itself has left our increasingly irascible times but trust Rishi Chandna to lace observational stories of neighbourhood social reality with his touch of allegorical, dark humour, and to find the comical in the most unfunny of places. Humour, Chandna says, “has the power to pull people in, without being heavy-handed or preachy. It disarms a person. Some of the best allegorical films have been told through humour, such as Charlie Chaplin’s The Great Dictator (1940). The serious is in the subtext, in the layers. His films are a stew of absurdity, deadpan humour and high-pitched drama.

The self-taught Chandna is the maker of the delightful Tungrus (2017), about a family trying to reclaim normalcy in a crammed Mumbai apartment by plotting the murder-for-consumption of their hell-raising six-month-old pet rooster, and Party Poster (2022), a satire on political poster culture of India locating it around Ganapati festival during pandemic lockdown in Mumbai. For his latest, the Calcutta-raised, Mumbai-braised and Goa-based Chandna shifts coasts. The Feast (Virundhu), part of an anthology of short features by the maker of short narrative documentaries, is set near Pulicat Lake in Tamil Nadu, will have its world premiere at Clermont-Ferrand International Short Film Festival (February 2-10), the biggest short film festival in the world and second largest film festival in France after Cannes. “I was really desperate for my earlier two films to get in there, but they didn’t. The films that show there, go on to do really well. It is very, very selective, like the rate of selection is .07 per cent. I did the math. The international competition selects 64 films from 9,000 submissions. So, it’s very tough. And they have a wonderful market,” says Chandna, 42.

A still from Virundhu.

In Virundhu, Mary is a prawn picker, whose life depends on the troubled waters she fishes in. But the waters are polluted and dead, blackened prawns surface into her fists. Neither can she sell nor consume. She plans on organising a feast and inviting the local politician Thomas to it. She wades through far into the lake’s waters to procure the choicest seafood. Food will become her act of rebellion, the medium of registering her protest. And she deploys theatre of the absurd to drive home the message.

News reports from December 2023 show how relief-less fisherpeople of 40 villages around Pulicat town are threatening to go on strike if the government doesn’t reassure the public that their fish is safe for consumption. Oil spills from nearby factories have contaminated the Pulicat Lake.

“One of the films that has stayed with me over the years is Honeyland, a Macedonian film. It won both the Best Documentary Feature and Best International Feature Film at the Oscars 2020. That was a real testimony that whether it’s non-fiction or fiction, the power of narrative storytelling is really amazing. I kept that in mind. While making this anthology, I was worried about becoming heavy-handed and pedantic and trying to hammer in some kind of an environmental message. I had to be very careful about that. A film like Honeyland does that beautifully. You are so engrossed in the story that the intent as an auteur just washes over the viewer rather than constantly telling them hey, look at this message,” Chandna says.

In this interview, he talks about shifting format, genre, language and more for his new film/anthology. Edited excerpts:

How did this film come about?

This project is in partnership with Krea University, which is located near the Pulicat Lake. This vast lake (the second-largest brackish water lagoon in India after Odisha’s Chilika Lake), also called Ennore Pulicat Wetland Complex, goes all the way from north Chennai into Andhra Pradesh and opens up into the ocean. In 2021, they were looking to make a documentary on a human-water symbiosis as part of their curriculum on environmental studies. I, having done a couple of short documentaries, was eager to try my hand at fiction. Narrative-driven storytelling has the power to ignite a viewer’s imagination in a more impactful way at times. So, I suggested a series of short films, an anthology on the subject of man-water relationship.

The film is shot in Kottakuppam village, very close to Pulicat town in Tamil Nadu, off the banks of the lake, in its last few mangroves. It’s a very delicately balanced waterbody as many lives depend on it and it’s rapidly changing because of industrial and human activity.  On my first visit to the lake, I could see women almost fully submerged, walking with their heads bobbing in water. These prawn pickers are engaged in a very indigenous, ancient form of finding prawns. It’s a very rich world in terms of story.

Tell us about meeting the fisherpeople in their village?

In Pulicat, the fisherfolk would serve me the most generous and delicious seafood and say with pride, the catch was fresh from the morning and only they knew where to get those (respective fish/seafood). On my first visit to Pulicat town, I was told to eat the prawn biryani at 7.30 am for breakfast. Prawns, mud crabs are considered delicacy, but the decreasing size of mud crabs has upset the fisherfolk. To them, the water is the real, secret ingredient for the taste in the dish…I’d never heard of this perspective. I realised that such cultures are still existing where people have an anthropomorphic way of looking at life because they are so connected to the elements (air, water, land). They have nostalgia for their changing world and for food.

Anbarasi's Josie (left) who works in the factory in a still from the film.

I also met people who were fishermen earlier and have roots in these villages but disillusioned with the tough job they left the community for other professions, such as autorickshaw drivers or local area councillors, which is what the character of Thomas is based on. And like him, sometimes, the same people become part of the problem. We, however, didn’t want to give a defeatist message and have shown Thomas as a very nuanced character who has his weakness, his Achilles heel. There’s also the character of Josie (Mary’s daughter), to show a generational conflict. Younger people, who are educated, see no future in fishing and, sometimes, end up working for the same factories that pollute the water. It’s a complex situation, a vicious cycle.

Toxic dead prawns in Pulicat Lake in a still from the film.

What kind of pollution is risking the lake’s ecology?

The fisherpeople spoke to me about fish kill, which means that near industrialised zones, due to oil spilling or chemical effluents, they would see scores of dead fish just floating on the toxic water. The biodiversity of a waterbody is the barometer of its health.

The prawn pickers said something striking. That, 15-20 years back, they would catch X amount of prawns in two hours, now to catch the same amount or less, they have to stand for 8 hours in water, in the sun. The health of the water and underwater life has been affected for several years by human activity. In our film, it is a cement factory, which is representative for anything causing harm to the water. The film is representative of a larger struggle of people across the world. In a changing world, the film is a lament for leaving behind in its wake something very precious.

What about climate change, global warming and changing fish route patterns — are these real concerns for the fisherpeople?

See, they are not able to articulate climate change per se, even if you talk about the water heating up, they have their own way of articulating it in their own language. But we don’t have to be experts to understand that industrialisation and climate change are related. We have another film in the anthology that talks about the oceans warming up and about angry water, how we are seeing floods around the world. In The Feast, we wanted to talk about the health of water and connected it to industrial effluent being discharged into water. There are also other activities such as unabated aquaculture around the region which also discharges a lot of poison into the water. Wherever there is unrestrained human activity…if we don’t see water as a real living entity, we’ll be totally reckless with it.

How did you get your cast?

Chennai-based casting director Sharanya Subramaniam helped get a mix of actors and non-actors. The actor playing Mary is Anthony Janagi, a theatre actor. The girl who plays her daughter, Anbarasi, is also a theatre actor. The actor who plays Thomas, George Vijay Nelson, does television and mainstream films. I mixed them with the non-actors from the region of Pulicat. The old man Mary buys the mullet from or the lady selling the mud crab or who sells her the milkfish…these are all real fisherpeople from the community. My approach was to make fiction as if it’s non-fiction.

A still from the film.

You don’t speak Tamil. How did you overcome the language barrier?

The process was challenging, frustrating too, at times, people would laugh at me. I remember going to a very remote island where we shot the second film, where, later, one of my assistants told me that they heard some locals saying, ‘who is this bald foreigner who has come to make a film, how will he make it if he doesn’t even speak our language?’ I had a great laugh; I totally embrace language agnosticism in filmmaking. My feature film, which I am hoping to make soon, is going to be in Gujarati. I co-wrote with Rahul Srivastava in English and we got on board a Tamil dialogue writer Veronica, especially for the non-actors. Some actors like Mary (Janagi) spoke and conversed with me in Hindi while it was a bit of a guessing game with her screen daughter Josie (Anbarasi), who doesn’t speak in English.

A still from the film.

The cinematography stays with you but the visual texture is very different from your previous outings, which had a static camera and live action would unfold in front of it.

The toughest choice is to know where to put the damn camera. In the village where they stay, there’s a sense of degradation, and the waterbody where they go prawn picking is rotting and decaying. While the lake is dying, there are remote parts, like its beautiful hidden mangroves, which have so much life still left in them. There are far-flung places where Mary wades through waist-deep water to reach while in the background you can see the big factory chimney. I was trying to juxtapose these worlds visually. It was a really tough location scout; we used both Google Maps and local knowledge to discover places. I was really worried about walking into quicksand, I have a bit of a phobia, but the visual choice was to get the camera into the water. It was crucial to show the water’s murkiness, when you see a hand emerging from the darkness, searching for life.

For the underwater shots, cinematographers Sraiyanti and Premkrishna Akkattu (who shot the Tamil feature Gargi, 2022 and some documentaries) rigged up an aquarium and submerged it into the water with the camera on a tripod. The lake is very shallow, so the technique worked. Besides that, we shot digital on a normal cine camera, minimum lighting and minimum crew of 40-50 people. Everything was blue, from the overcast sky to the water, from the blue-painted boats and buildings to the Chapel.

The chapel in a still from the film.

The climax in the film is the prayer scene before the feast. Mary’s serious execution of a tongue-in-cheek sermon-like prayer is hilarious, as if she’s been possessed by some spirit. Talk about building that momentum.

Well (laughs), that kind of humour is the most effective way to talk about something that is really serious and important. But that’s a very interesting perspective. She’s possessed by the ghost of the lake in a way. And she cannot deliver this sermon or protest in a very official way because she and Thomas also go back in history, they both probably grew up in the same village. He’s now a senior politician or a bureaucrat. She has to do it tactfully and prepare him for the feast. So, the prayer is a way of softening him up, putting the fear of God in him.

(From left) George Vijay Nelson's Thomas, Antony Janagi's Mary and Anbarasi's Josie in the prayer scene from the film.

The material had cues for the humour. For example, when she says, ‘we thank Thomas for being here’, we are obviously being sarcastic. I did not give Mary much direction for that, she came prepared and gave a take. I’d just told her that I’m going to be taking this entire prayer on one camera in a single take and that she should do something different and crazy. She kept escalating the tenor and the spectacle became quite theatrical.

Such a feast is a ritual in the village?

This is set a bit close to Christmas. The fisherfolk told us that they have big Christmas feasts. This particular village has a history of Dutch colonisation and it has a massive 400-500-year-old church, where they have an annual feast and the local politicians are invited, etc. Mary has invited Thomas, who comes thinking that there will be other people, but he finds he’s the only one there. Eventually, it is the food that wins him over because the power of food — a repository of nostalgia — lies in evoking memories. If we are to realise any change, we have to go back to the ways of our past, to remember where we come from.

Independent filmmaker Rishi Chandna

What will the other two films in this anthology talk about?

The second film, The Prediction, is about angry water, how we are angering our waterbodies with our climate change-inducing activities. And the third film, The Cure, deals with our anxieties around climate change. It is about eco-anxiety and inequality of access to water, set in Chennai.

Will your debut full-length feature film also be about the environment?

Yes, it will be about fish, too. Ghol (The Catch, mentored at 2021 Sundance Screenwriters Lab) is about the very rare eponymous species of black-spotted croaker, it’s a story of how a fisherman catches that fish and his life changes thereafter.