When Achal Mishra took his first feature to NFDC Film Bazaar WIP Lab, in 2018-19, he was curious to find another filmmaker also there with his Maithili film. Parth Saurabh’s Gamak Mandir never got made owing to lack of funds and investors but the title lingered. Mishra’s Gaam Ghar became Gamak Ghar and Saurabh its production manager. Mishra would later produce, design and shoot some scenes of Saurabh’s film, Pokhar Ke Dunu Paar (On Either Side of the Pond). This July, when Saurabh’s new work-in-progress film was selected for Spain's San Sebastian Film Festival, he wrote to Anurag Kashyap, who roped in others (Vikramaditya Motwane, Devashish Makhija, Sriram Raghavan, etc.) to fund its completion. It won a Special Mention.
A still from Dhuin
At this year’s Dharamshala International Film Festival (DIFF), earlier this month, Mishra’s sophomore Dhuin and Saurabh’s Pokhar… had a third companion from their hometown Darbhanga. Shishir Jha’s film, Dharti Latar Re Horo (Tortoise Under the Earth), which, however, trains the lens on the Santhals of Turamdih uranium mines in Talsa village, in the neighbouring Jharkhand — he grew up so close and yet so unaware of their existence.
At DIFF, the curiously titled panel “Mofussil Movies: Darbhanga Wave” put the spotlight on these three Mumbai-based men who returned home to make cinema. But three filmmakers from a city, with two films set in the city, don’t make a wave. Mishra agrees. “I wouldn’t call it a wave,” he says, “Shishir didn’t make a film in Darbhanga.”
New voices
Dhuin and Pokhar… work as a double bill. Both have the same actor, Abhinav Jha, as a lower-middle-class, out-of-job, stuck-in-his-circumstance protagonist. Both have to do with migration and how economic crisis affects intimate relationships. Sumit (Pokhar…) could well be Pankaj’s (Dhuin) alter-ego. Both films were going to be part of an anthology which was not to be. Mishra’s five-page draft of a film became a festival misfit given its neither-short-nor-feature duration (50 minutes).
“It was always about the character in both films…not so much about the language or the city, but to see the character in that context,” says Saurabh, 30. The 4:3 frame ratio, which is closer to Mishra’s comfort zone: photography, was best suited for character mapping.
When Gamak Ghar dropped on MUBI, two months into the lockdown in 2020, it came as a bolt from the blue for young Mishra. Then, all of 22. Seen from a 10-year-old’s perspective (who grew up in Darbhanga and would visit his granny’s Madhopur house for family events), the film is coming from a personal space. Its arresting visuals, like vignettes from a vintage family album, and a universal story made the viewer reconnect with their own family memories. With just one film, Achal had stirred a creative hulchul, and made young Darbhanga-ites see the possibility of telling their stories from home turf.
A still from Mishra's 'Gamak Ghar' (2020).
Gamak… was rare. Unlike Bhojpuri, cousin Maithili doesn’t have a film industry to boast of. A Maithili film releases every three-five years. Maithili is spoken mostly by the elderly, the young in Darbhanga speak in Hindi among themselves, as evinced in Mishra’s second and Saurabh’s debut. Four years since Gamak…, Mishra has proved that he isn’t a one-hit wonder. The fluid-structured Dhuin — a gentle despair augmented by Tajdar Junaid's swelling music and colourist Mahak Gupta's moody blues — was made to get away from the pressures that came with the success of Gamak... MoMa (Museum of Modern Art), New York has screened both his films.
Among Dhuin’s many flourishes is the manifestation of the profound in the quotidian, with words, imagery and metaphors. In one scene, three friends sit and deconstruct the late Iranian filmmaker Abbas Kiarostami’s cinema. One among them (Shishir) has just returned — on reel and in real — from a workshop with Kiarostami, having made a short film (Te Amo) in Cuba. Our lead, Pankaj’s (Abhinav) alienation is heightened by escalating sound of flies and a circumambulating learner’s car in the backdrop. In that one moment, Pankaj’s — torn between his dream and duty — realisation is complete. Pankaj is modelled on Prashant Rana, whose story is Dhuin. Rana felt “embarrassed and alienated” when, one winter afternoon, Mishra and Shishir sat discussing Kiarostami’s Where Is the Friend's House? (1987).
Mishra hopes to be part of a cinematic movement in Darbhanga whenever that is to happen, “I’ll be the producer,” he says. The name of his production house, Achalchitra, came to him back in school, in a dream (chalchitra means motion picture/movie). Pokhar… is Achalchitra’s third production. “There’s another short film, shot in Amritsar.”
Looking within
A still from Mishra's 'Dhuin'.
“Till I was nine or 10 years, I was in boarding schools, though I kept going back to Darbangha for summer holidays. I made a couple of short films in Class XI-XII. My grandfather was interested in theatre; he was a playwright much before my parents got married. My drawing, writing, photography comes from him,” says Mishra, who, after Class XII, got a chance to be an assistant director on Meghna Gulzar’s Talvar (2015). “Govind Sandhu (Gulzar’s husband) had come to meet me in school. I also got a call for Haider (2014), but my pre-boards were on,” adds Mishra, who dropped out of English Literature at Delhi University’s Kirori Mal College to go pursue a course in English and Film at London’s King’s College. “Since I was living quite close to BFI (British Film Institute), books and DVDs were easy access, I was slowly gravitating towards Asian cinema, of Hou Hsiao-hsien and Yasujirō Ozu. And also Iranian and Turkish films. But I was clueless what I wanted to do when I returned to India,” he adds.
If Gamak… was inspired from Hirokazu Kore-eda's Still Walking (2008) and Hou Hsiao-hsien’s A Time to Live, A Time to Die (1985), Dhuin takes from early Hsiao-hsien, The Boys from Fengkuei (1983), the move to big town misadventure, sitting on the tree watching aeroplane… “it all happened unintentionally,” says Mishra.
A still from Parth Saurabh's Pokhar Ke Dunu Paar (2022)
Saurabh dropped out of engineering at IIT Kanpur for a diploma at Whistling Woods in 2014. Pokhar… is a combination of things, “it’s part autobiographical: travelling back to Darbangha, sitting with married friends at a dilapidated house, drinking alcohol while it was illegal”. “Three months into COVID lockdown, when I returned home, I saw so many young people — not a common sight earlier, most would out-migrate for study or work. Now, here were the young, without job, direction or hope. Many would intoxicate on cough syrups, drugs or smoke up. All of that added to this film,” he says.
In Pokhar…, Priyanka stands at a midpoint between her father and her partner Sumit. She can only choose one. On either edges of this pond/society stand two genders, weighed down by their roles and expectations. “I was tired of seeing runaway couples getting killed in the end of films,” says Saurabh, who wanted to show a tragic ending differently.
“COVID’s financial impact is not just on socio-political institutions crumbling but also on love and relationships,” says Saurabh. Sumit’s lack of drive in getting a job could have been a Marxist’s rebuke of capitalism, but it isn’t. While Saurabh embeds Marxist symbolism: red sari; Communist party’s hammer-and-sickle logo on the wall of Sumit and Priyanka’s community lodging; a jobless Sumit sells his friend’s borrowed bike, with some of that cash he buys alcohol for his friends and insists one’s money is all’s money. But Sumit is neither Satyajit Ray’s Siddhartha (Pratidwandi, 1970) railing against capitalism nor Gulzar’s Mere Apne (1971) Robin Hood-esque boys. The adult, good-for-nothing Sumit (Abhinav) needs taking care of. His lightness of being gets unbearable for Priyanka (Tanaya Khan Jha), a forced-to-be mother figure, can she cross over her gender-ascribed role?
A still from Saurabh's 'Pokhar Ke Dunu Paar'.
Theatre actors in the city find work around election time, through nukkad naatak (street theatre) as part of political campaigns (like shown in Dhuin), NGOs hire them to create social awareness (e.g. alcohol ban), but film acting is a far cry. And it’s almost impossible to find women actors in the city, says Saurabh, who found his Priyanka in Patna. “Boys still have the freedom, but families don’t allow girls to pursue it (acting/theatre); those in it will eventually get married and leave it. The only professional female actor in Pokhar… is Priyanka’s friend who’s a real-life radio jockey. And for middle-aged women, acting is a no-go zone. Instagram reels haven’t changed mindset,” says Saurabh, adding, “Thanks to Nitish (Kumar) government, employment opportunity is there for village women (via Anganwadi), but hardly anything for city women.”
Cinema and the city
A still from 'Sasta Jingi Mahag Senur' (1999).
Actor Sanjay Mishra is from Darbhanga, where director Imtiaz Ali was also born, but cinema in this seat of Mithila culture has always been considered lowbrow. The respectable middle-class families would neither go out to watch films in theatre nor allow their children to act. The last time a Maithili film drew people to the theatres was in 1999, with the very popular Sasta Jingi Mahag Senur. “That was the only time my grandmother went to watch a film in the cinemas,” says Saurabh, “Theatres mainly show commercial Bhojpuri or Bollywood (like Hero No. 1) films. There was never a sustained film industry or culture here. The middle-class families avoided the theatre — a place to entertain the lower classes. With tickets priced at Rs 12-15, it catered to young college crowd and rickshawallas. Darbhanga, in the early 2000s, had about five-six theatres. Now, there’s only one multiplex, Rajnish (Cineplex).” Others have been turned into “magic show” halls or banquet halls, like Hotel Ganga Club, where Sumit, in Pokhar…, goes to find a job.
“Inox, etc., arrived in Patna, but Darbhanga is in that liminal space waiting for such theatres. In general, there’s development, an airport has come up, youngsters who returned home during the lockdown have opened little cafés, like those in Delhi/Mumbai, but the demography that frequents them isn’t to be found here,” says Mishra.
There is a Darbhanga International Film Festival, but “it’s an echo chamber, the intent is not right,” adds Mishra. Focussed on red-carpet guests, “it doesn’t serve the two basic purposes of a film festival: create a local cinema culture (empower local filmmakers, bring in audiences from schools and colleges), and bring in global greats, like a Parasite (2019),” he says.
While Dhuin showed Mishra a lot of possibilities, he doesn’t want to limit his films to Darbhanga. “I’m not completely all Darbhanga myself, I have lived in Delhi, Noida, boarding schools…so, my setting may change in the future but the characters might be from Darbhanga,” he says.
Looking without
A still from Shishir Jha's 'Tortoise Under The Earth' (2022).
For Shishir, 34, painting became his ticket to the National Institute of Design, Ahmedabad. Later, Béla Tarr drew him to Sarajevo Film Academy. Growing up, he watched movies on TV but “electricity in Bihar was low. I could never finish a film in one go,” says Shishir, who’d, one day, work as a promo producer for TV channels, and not only be seen, and offered work, by Hansal Mehta (Shahid, 2012 and Citylights, 2014), but would learn from Kiarostami and make a short film in Cuba despite not knowing Spanish. He learnt an intuitive, minimalistic approach, which he brought to his Mostra-screened unscripted, environmental and ethnographical docu-fiction Tortoise..., which is currently screening online at Goa’s ALT EFF (All Living Things Environmental Film Festival) 2022 till November 27.
The phlegmatic pace is just Shishir listening in to the Santhals over a year. “Cinema is all about time…you capture time. At no point was I made to feel I was not a part of them. I knew the responsibility of getting into people’s lives, and at the same time, the intention was not to invade into their lives but to listen,” he says. “The power of the unknown” drew him. When he went to Turamdih, he saw entire families cycling for 25-30 km to earn Rs 60-70, on low-light highways, “I didn’t know how to keep those visuals in my story,” he says. So, he didn’t. He didn’t want to dramatise the story, instead let the locals sing of their sadness as well as their joys.
Equipped with basic research with the books of PO Bodding and stories by Hansda Sowvendra Shekar — gripped by Shekar's evocative prose, magic realism and kadambi trees — and the folk tale of Earth’s creation story became his entry point into the larger tribal story. Similar to that of America’s Lenape and Iroquois people, the folk tells that Earth is the soil piled on the back of a great sea turtle that continues to grow until it’s carrying the entire world. At the foreground is Jagarnath and Mugli Baskey, who have lost their daughter, are tired of being moved constantly, of tearing down and rebuilding homes and lives, are aware of the poison in the tailing ponds, land, and air, owing to uranium mining, and yet choose to live with it because why must they leave their home.
A still from 'Dharti Latar Re Horo'
Tortoise's subject reminds of Saurav Vishnu’s short documentary Tailing Pond (2021), narrated by Cynthia Nixon (Sex and the City actor), on Jadugoda, from where uranium mining started in the country. It is spreading to the cities now. Turamdih in Talsa is 30 km from Jamshedpur. While Vishnu’s film gives a direct picture of the locals, who have no access to clean air, food, water, their children — those on the film are no longer alive — develop rickety legs, get paralysed, asthmatic and die, and are not even counted in the population census. Shishir’s cinema vérité borrows from the poetic, sews the folk tale tradition, songs, indigenous wisdom with the realities of their lives, the tragedy but also their little joys, and how entwined their lives are with nature, evinced in just one dialogue of Mugli’s, “If we dig, will it hurt the tortoise?” The films, like Kiarostami's, tell us of the impossibility of really knowing others' lives even if they tell us their story.
Money matters
“Filmmaking is an expensive medium. Either you have to change your expression, or reduce the budget. I wanted to make a narrative fiction film, but my resources were limited. Even the low budget is beyond my reach. (Producers) Humara Movie gave me the freedom to explore a film without a script. The exposure and recovery from this film would allow me to make my second film. I think, besides film festivals, MUBI is my only option,” says Shishir, as Saurabh quips, “MUBI gets you the audience but it doesn’t pay well.”
Saurabh’s budget was minuscule, “less than that of a day’s shoot on a commercial film”. “Two ways independent films make money is either winning an award at festivals or through a release in arthouse theatres in Europe, as for revenue generation in India, the only channel is the OTT route.” Barring a few success stories (like Prateek Vats' Eeb Allay Ooo! or Bhaskar Hazarika's Aamis, 2019), and MUBI, “rarely one finds any good independent arthouse film on the major OTTs in India,” says Shishir.
Achal Mishra.
“The budget for Gamak Ghar was Rs 20 lakh, which came from my parents. Dhuin was shot under just Rs 50,000, with post-production, it came to Rs 5 lakh, which was self-funded. We haven’t really been able to recover the money spent on Gamak Ghar. It was acquired for a very small amount by MUBI, and we get a little money now and then from screenings, awards, and as royalties from our American distributors (Gratitude Films and Deaf Crocodile). Dhuin, we are still trying to figure out. MUBI pays licensing fees, depending on different terms, such as duration, territory, exclusivity,” says Mishra.
“You use up your goodwill in your first film,” says Saurabh, adding, “I need to recover the money first.”
Paving the way
“A couple of younger crew members from Dhuin and Pokhar… have made their own short films and have consulted me at different stages, of writing, shooting, or post-production,” says Mishra, adding that a boy called Nitin Jha left his Bengaluru job to return and make a short film called Maachh in Darbhanga.
Parth Saurabh.
“The sound recordist for Pokhar…, Ankush Prasad, is in post-production with a short film he has directed which was shot by Prashant Rana, the casting director on Pokhar... and the film's assistant director Sumit Mishra has just completed a beautiful short film. Five of the actors of Pokhar… just acted in another short film. At the end, that's what Achal, Shishir and I want, to help other filmmakers from Darbhanga stand up and make their own films,” says Saurabh.
Mishra, whose next film will be based on a mix of Shishir and his experiences, of a filmmaker returning to his hometown to make a feature, says, they will be steering a nascent movement after Shishir makes a film in Darbangha.
Shishir Jha.
Shishir gets absorbed into his stories and needs to devote, at least, two years to them. Finding producers who’d back that is difficult. Though he’ll make a Darbhanga film one day, “People always wanted to tell their own stories. To tell my own story, I have to return to my village, to my roots. All my childhood memories come from Darbhanga, with every film I try to relive that memory,” he says, adding, “however, my family will consider me a success the day I make a Bollywood film.”
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