A sea of life lessons

Sarika Sharma

A rough English sea, a girl on a break from her IT job in London, a parolee, who has been in the prison for the past eight months, and a Punjabi boy, who finds himself in the midst of the most intense conversation as he tries to capture the wild waters... A Conversation by the Sea is about that train journey from Exeter to Plymouth in the UK. The film has been selected for International Film Festival of South Asia to be held in Toronto from May 10 onwards.

It was the end of Gurdeep Dhaliwal’s cycle journey from one end of the UK to another and he was travelling back by train, which runs by the sea. It was for the first time that he was seeing the sea in such a way — through a train window, without any land in vision.

He put his phone against the glass to film it. Then came a tunnel and he saw two other passengers in the reflection on the train’s window. One of them was a parolee, who asked them if they liked seeing the sea. As thoughts flowed, the camera rolled and the story kept building.

Gurdeep, who hails from Barnala, is a big fan of a small movement in American literature, called Dirty Realism. “Bill Buford coined this term in response to the literature being written to depict the seamier or more mundane aspects of ordinary life in spare, unadorned language. My stories, which were published in various magazines in London during my study there, were of a similar nature. I like finding stories in a conversation with hints of objects and the atmosphere that surrounds the characters,” says Gurdeep, a graduate in English literature and creative writing from Kingston University in London.

So, as the young man, out on parole, enjoyed little joys of life like buying himself a drink, and the girl anguished over dead whales washing up the shore, the fiery sea in the foreground and the humane conversation going on in the background, made a perfect match for Gurdeep.

“The English sea is rough with stony beaches at offer. I met the sea at a few points through my journey, at places in Wales and Scotland. I always felt like standing in the middle of a stormy sea while looking at it; it has its own beauty. It makes you go deep down yourself, making all the real-life tribulations look so small,” he says.

Gurdeep’s other projects include photo-documentation of the youth of Punjab as part of an annual scholarship from the Punjab Arts Council and photographing the historical monuments for Punjab Heritage and Tourism Department and Punjab Digital Library. He is also working on another short film project with one of the assistant directors of Bajirao Mastani. “I will keep making more works because that’s the final goal: to learn as much I can and make good films,” he says.