Debutante puts Sikkim on cinema map

Saibal Chatterjee

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For first-time director Paakhi A Tyrewala, Bollywood-Hollywood star Priyanka Chopra’s production banner, Purple Pebble Pictures, has turned out to be a godsend. No less fortuitous has been the company’s stated strategy to promote cinema that goes beyond Bollywood and its favoured language, Hindi.

Thanks to what Purple Pebble Pictures is out to achieve, the Chhindwara-born, Mumbai-based actress-turned-filmmaker could make the film that she believed in without having to worry about interference from the producer. “They backed me to the hilt,” Tyrewala said following the world premiere of her film, Pahuna: The Little Visitors, at the 42nd Toronto International Film Festival (TIFF). “They were hands on, but completely non-interfering. They did come up with helpful ideas but always allowed me to take the final call.”

Priyanka Chopra was present at the Toronto special event, along with her mother Madhu Chopra, who serves as head of the production company. “Making a film in Sikkim, given its lack of movie infrastructure, wasn’t obviously easy, but the risk was worth every step of the way,” the Quantico star said.

Pahuna: The Little Visitors put Sikkim on the TIFF map at a time when the state does not even have a film industry. “I had spent a lot of time in the North-East and in Kalimpong and Darjeeling and had always wanted my first film to be set in Sikkim,” Tyrewala said.

Pahuna is a Nepali-language film that revolves around three children who get separated from their parents as they flee the political violence in their country. They end up in Sikkim, where little miracles help them tide over the dangers they encounter. It is a sweet little film that views larger issues of displacement and religious distrust through the standpoint of children. They do not understand the implications of their current plight and as a result devise the simplest ways to surmount the challenges they face.

At the premiere of Pahuna in Toronto, Tyrewala divulged how a string of Mumbai producers had rejected her script. She was a woman and a first-time director wanting to make a children’s film in Sikkim. Nobody saw any potential in the project until she approached Priyanka Chopra. “She said she would back my film for the very reasons that the others had rejected it,” the director said.

One of the earliest people to come on board, says Tyrewala, was composer Sagar Desai, who had a film in TIFF last year too in the form of Konkona Sen Sharma’s A Death in the Gunj. “We did not want it to be just hill music. We were consciously looking for a global score and that is exactly what Sagar has come up with,” says the debutante director.

“For me, what Pahuna: The Little Visitors means is that the glass ceiling has been broken,” says Tyrewala. “I can now dream bigger.” Although details are under wraps, the director is prepping for an international project.

The cast of Pahuna is made up almost entirely of newcomers. “My mother Veena Mehta, who has worked with the NSD, did a workshop to help the actors ease into the project,” said Tyrewala.

The director does not know a word of Nepali but insisted on communicating with the actors directly, without help from an interpreter. “It is amazing how language ceases to matter when it comes to tapping into the heart of individuals and capturing emotions,” she said.

The principal idea behind the venture, insists Tyrewala, was to prove that the Gurkhas who live in this country are not Nepalis but Indians. “That is why Pahuna centres on a Nepali family, which speaks a language that is widely used in Sikkim.

These little visitors and the director who has brought them to the big screen could be expected to go places, now that they have got a headstart in one of the world’s biggest film festivals.