Cannes 2023: In this Marathi short film, COVID & menstrual taboo served a Kolkata man a female story

FTII, Pune, alumnus Yudhajit Basu’s diploma short film ‘Nehemich’ was India’s only official entry in competition, in La Cinef, at Cannes Film Festival 2023. (Photo: Stephanie Cornfield)

If Jim Morrison said “the appeal of cinema lies in the fear of death”, the pull of both immense and inexplicable, it took COVID-19 to make us see the uncanny contrast of “beauty and death” co-existing, the macabre of human deaths on the one hand, and the rewilding of cities, with fauna taking over the streets as humans were locked indoors, on the other hand. That contrast Kolkata boy Yudhajit Basu has been able to evoke with his short film, Nehemich, a thematic juxtaposition of two kinds of isolation: a non-discriminatory, beyond-human force causing death (COVID-19 quarantine) and a discriminatory human force/practice pausing life (menstrual huts), both morphing the sense of time, both faced by the undying will to live and love. Atmospheric, empty vast exterior spaces (like we saw in The Banshees of Inisherin) contrasted with claustrophobic, crammed interiors of a hut, like a fort-prison cell from medieval period pieces. At the Jio MAMI Mumbai Film Festival (October 27-November 5), the 23-minute film will have its Asia Premiere in the Focus South Asia segment.

A still from Yudhajit Basu's Cannes-premiered FTII diploma film 'Nehemich'.

WATCH: Nehemich Cannes trailer

Basu recalls a funny incident. His diploma film took him into Maharashtra’s villages to research on COVID-19 and menstruating women, among the grave anecdotes being relayed to him was a funny one. Once, a government Jeep arrived to vaccinate the villagers only to find the village deserted. The villagers had fled the day before. They knew the air was harmful but feared the vaccine more. Superstitions work in uncanny ways.

A newspaper article opened Basu’s eyes to death by starvation of menstruating women in an enforced seclusion in a village hut in Gadchiroli. Although he knew that menstruation is considered taboo in parts of India — besides the lack of awareness about it, a brother recently killed his sister assuming her period blood to be a sign of her being sexually active — Basu was appalled by his newfound knowledge of Gaokor Pratha. An age-old practice in some parts of rural Maharashtra and Konkan region and in Nepal (called Chhaupadi, where it exists despite being outlawed) of isolating women on their period in dingy huts away from the village. They have to cook on their own or some female family member will bring them food. A mawkish short film A Period House on it showed to Basu the vulnerability of women sequestered. He wanted to find out for himself, curious to know what happened to menstruating women in these parts during the national lockdown.

But Gadchiroli was far from his Film and Television Institute of India (FTII) campus, he instead headed into Bhor, Satara, and Patan village. He also found that it’s practised in the city of Pune, where some women are isolated in a room, their food kept at the door’s threshold. Exactly like how COVID patients were quarantined. And so, the pandemic lockdown didn’t hold a candle to their fortnightly punishment.

These women have a code phrase for periods: kaorali sheela, which translates to “I’ve been touched by a crow or a crow has touched me”. Phonetically close to kavala shivne, when a crow eats the thaali offered on the 10th day of someone’s death, for the dead to attain moksha (salvation). In Hindu mythology, if you are touched by a crow, you die. The bird analogy reminded Basu of another.

A still from Basu's FTII diploma film 'Nehemich'.

Of a surreal, foggy day at a windmill. From his car, he could only hear a peculiar whooping sound of the wind, as the fog cleared, he saw a huge turbine blade rotating. He had chanced upon a windmill farm in Chalkewadi in Satara district. He met some of the windmill guards, most of whom, he learnt, are migrants. On enquiring about the engineering term “bird shattering”, he was told that when a bird goes through the blades, it dies and the blades stop working. The birds touch render the turbine blades expendable, much like the women when “touched by a crow”. The parts of a gestalt were gravitating to form the sum, Basu’s next film.

The FTII alumnus’ diploma film, which had its world premiere at this year’s 76th Cannes Film Festival’s student-competition La Cinef (formerly Cinéfondation), opens in night-time, a girl speaks in whispers about a man who works “where the wind howls all day long”. The camera cuts to three people wearing PPE suits carrying a body to a pyre, and returns to the insides of a dingy hut, lit by a flickering lantern. Two women speak in hushed tones. The queer undertones are distinctive. One plans to elope with a male lover, a windmill guard, who’s not from Maharashtra but a “faraway land”, the older one warns her of not crossing the path of a man or to step out when on her period. The younger one tells the older to get her food from home the next day, for she doesn’t want her mother to know that she’s run away. The women are in a menstruation hut, or gaokor in Marathi.

Shot on real locations despite an art director in the crew, the interior scenes were framed in an abandoned hut belonging to a villager in Bhor. Basu, however, didn’t get permission to shoot in the government-owned Chalkewadi windmill farm, the private company Suzlon came to his rescue. “Their windmill farm is even more beautiful,” says Basu, who gave his sound designer, Utsav Ghosh, one brief that he doesn’t want the sound of the windmill, and instead wants an onomatopoeic whoosh sound, like the moan of a very old musical instrument.

A still from 'Nehemich'.

There are no crow/birds shown in the film, and yet it symbolically ties up the narrative. The reality of bird-less windmill farms, a hand-me-down myth around menstruation, and the protagonist seeking to escape and live like a free bird. There’s a donkey though, a creature considered stupid, stubborn, and auspicious. “Generally the nomads always have a donkey or a mule as a source of livelihood and for transportation. I wanted to signal that these girls belong to a nomadic tribe, to suggest that the nomadic traditions have not been eradicated completely. Besides, the eyes of a donkey are very telling,” says Basu. In the film, before eloping, the girl climbs down a step-ladder and whispers into the donkey’s ears: “Don’t forget me.” In another scene, in one of two dream sequences in the film, she hallucinates and sees the other woman, in a nomadic heirloom wedding dress — very Rajasthani in its mirror patterns — walking away with the mule. The beauty of interspecies’ co-habitation is a glimpse the world recently got in the Oscars documentaries All That Breathes (2022 Cannes’ L'Oeil d'or winner) and The Elephant Whisperers.

Basu, 30, is the third FTII student and fourth Indian student, after Payal Kapadia, Asmita Guha Neogi and Pratham Khurana, to participate in the La Cinef competition. Guha Neogi, whose film CatDog is, perhaps, the last FTII student film to be shot on celluloid, remains the only Indian to win the top prize in the category in 2020. This year, 16 student films, out of 2 000 entries from 476 film schools, made the cut and Denmark’s Marlene Emilie Lyngstad’s Norwegian Offspring bagged the top prize.

Nehemich was shot on Arri Mini digital camera, with old kooky and spherical lenses. Shot on 1.66 (European standard) aspect ratio, which is a little tricky to compose. It’s between the 4:3 (classical) and CinemaScope widescreen, both of which “have some logic, some grammar,” says Basu, “(Argentine film director) Lucrecia Martel loved this aspect ratio a lot. I wanted to try it because I was shooting in dingy interiors as well as very vast exteriors while being very close to the characters.” His approach was mostly to “change the look from my other films, not to use wide and long shots, where somebody’s walking, and there’s a hill in the distance, but to shoot human faces. Shooting a human face is the most difficult in cinematography than shooting landscapes.” Ingmar Bergman would have concurred, for whom, “the human face is the most important subject of the cinema”.

Cinematographer Rachit Pandey’s stunning shot compositions are to talk home about. The half frames or frames with just half the faces of the women, one eye visible, in a mirror, or in looking outside into the world from between the shut door of the hut, have an uncanny resemblance to Nutan looking out from behind the jail-window bars in Bimal Roy’s swansong Bandini (1963). “I wanted to create a sense of tension, of her fear, which drives the conflict,” says Basu. She (Sakshi Dighe) has lost the sense of time, she’s heard of a death, hopeful that it’s not the death of the promise of her liberation. Nehemich translates to eternal, or for all the remaining time, or every time. And editor Gourab Kumar Mullick ekes out the morphed sense of time adroitly.

The shots are choreographed such that they remain static but there are some movements within each, such as light flickering on the wall. In the crammed hut, Pandey couldn’t use heavy lights, and instead went for sky panels, with a little bit of high contrast. The exterior was shot in natural light.

A still from Yudhajit Basu's Cannes-premiered FTII diploma film 'Nehemich'.

The other stunningly shot three-and-half-minute sequence is the complex image of the guard’s house, “you can get all the magnifications in the shots,” says Basu, “It begins with a wide magnification (where you see the reflection of him sleeping on a bench, of the windmill turbines in the valley beyond, all of it being reflected on the window glass), then there’s a mid-shot while he’s standing, when he goes out of the frame, you have a mid-long and when he enters inside the house, it’s a mid, and extreme close-up when he comes up to the glass window.” It was sunny day and they used mirrors to project the reflection.

Basu reflects on his previous film, the Marathi ethnographic documentary short Kalsubai (2021), on Mahadeo Koli tribe’s goddess Kalsubai,  feted at International Documentary Film Festival Amsterdam and International Short Film Festival Oberhausen, Germany. Poetically shot, it somehow, unintentionally, adds to the “exotic” stereotype of the Western gaze of the Eastern world. Basu says, in retrospect, “it’s like a photo book, like a template film.” Besides, the documentary format, which was part of FTII’s curriculum, isn’t his preferred medium. The layered Nehemich is close to his heart, he says, “I tried to be a little more into the character and not have an outsider’s gaze completely.” He quickly quips, “the beginning of every film (of his) is like a documentary (collecting audio recordings, interviews) even if it’s a fiction.” His next feature will be in his mother tongue, Bengali, called Kaktarua (scarecrow; in which the crows might be restored), their Khasi-language What We Lost in the Fire will have to wait.

Nehemich has been co-written with Basu’s long-time co-writer, co-director Prithvijoy Ganguly, who introduced Basu to the Turkish master Nuri Bilge Ceylan, with the slow-burn neo-noir Grand Prix-winner Once Upon a Time in Anatolia (2011). Basu, unfortunately, could not meet him at Cannes, where Bilge Ceylan was premiering his latest, About Dry Grasses/Kuru Otlar Üstune, whose female lead Merve Dizdar became the first Turkish actress to win the Best Actress award in the history of Cannes festival.

There’s a certain world-cinema quality to Basu’s early films, the Nepali films Khoji (in the backdrop of the ’80s Gorkhaland agitation) and Quiro. These have a resemblance to the style and world-building of the Turkish auteur. The distant long shots of Darjeeling’s snow-peak landscape, isolated village/family, school-going children growing up in a harsh world will remind of Ceylan’s oeuvre, such as Kasaba (The Small Town, 1997). Quiro begins like Uzak (Distant, 2002). When Basu took Quiro to a festival in Egypt, he was met with surprise: “is that India or abroad? It doesn’t look like India.”

“I like his (Ceylan’s) point of view of the world,” says Basu, “In the world of painting, there’s a saying, ‘try to copy a master and that’s how you learn’.” Ceylan also re-introduced Basu to Russian literary great Anton Chekhov, whose short stories would bore a child-Basu in school, until he heard Ceylan on Chekhov, and how he adapts Chekhov, not full stories, but he adopts a passage of Chekhov that describes a particular mood of the day and adapts it into a shot — a peculiar adaption. “I was very influenced by Russian literature at the time. The kind of places described in Chekhov’s stories, the Steppes of Russia are similar to the kind of places we have in Himachal, in the Himalayas.”

“India is largely represented in films as a city with many people, with a lot of squalor and agitation, which is definitely true in the heartland of India, but there’s also the India of the Himalayas, the highest mountain range, huge areas where you find only one or two villages with one little post-office box, so different from the rest of the plainlands. A part of Tibet actually lives inside India, these Tibetan people find more similarity with the people beyond the border than those guarding it. This side of India is largely unrepresented on screen, and that was my main reason for shooting there,” says Basu.

A still from the film.

All his four films touch upon the female experience, tangentially, or more directly as in Kalsubai, in which “the story of the myth itself was about a woman. For me, she was a rebel. In this one (Nehemich), I was very intrigued after reading the newspaper article,” he says. Being male, his director’s assistant Anjali Mulge helped abate his shock by translating the realities. “In India, no matter how much you talk about the progress and emancipation of women, in the villages especially, things haven’t changed much for the better. The feminist movement has not reached the villages. Talk to a village woman about it and she will laugh it off,” says Basu. With the government paying no heed to the female wrestlers’ protest against sexual harassment, even in the cities, the feminist movement has failed to unite and mobilise.