Hope in the time of darkness

Saibal Chatterjee

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It is in black and white. Its characters speak English. And it has no stars. But A Billion Colour Story is as compelling a film as any. Written and directed by debutant Padmakumar Narasimhamurthy, it looks at the state of the nation without plunging into negativity. “It represents what I believe in,” says the Mumbai-based director, who funded the film himself.  

Content is indeed the king here. A Billion Colour Story is about an agnostic, open-minded Hindu-Muslim couple grappling with religious prejudice. The emotionally engaging film is hard-hitting and thought-provoking. Upholding the ‘idea of India’ that derives inspiration from the principles of diversity, freedom and peaceful co-existence, it takes swipes at the rising tide of intolerance and hatred.

The film’s protagonist is a sensitive schoolboy Hari Aziz (played by the director’s son Dhruva Padmakumar). Baffled by the conflicting signals he receives from the world around him, he believes that his parents, Imran (Gaurav Sharma) and Parvati (Vasuki Sunkavalli), who met in film school in Australia, fell in love, got married and returned to Mumbai, “are so boho, they don’t belong here”.

Are these characters drawn from real life or are they fictional? “It’s a combination of the two: real people and imaginary figures,” says Padmakumar, who, for 17 years, wrote for ad films for some of the world’s biggest multinationals.

“When I conceived this film, I thought it would be a short. But as I wrote the script, it grew into a bigger, longer film,” says Padmakumar. Completed last year, A Billion Colour Story has been doing the festival rounds with great success. Wherever it has gone — London, Busan, Palm Springs — the film has struck an instant chord.

A theatrical release is now on the cards. A Billion Colour Story certainly deserves a wider audience. It deals with weighty, provocative issues in a simple, light, heartfelt manner.

Hari calls himself a combination of “green and saffron” although the communally charged colours mean little to him. There is, therefore, good reason why Padmakumar chose to film in black and white. A Billion Colour Story, he says, “is about a child’s world. It is un-coloured because a child, unlike adults, does not assign colours to things.”

When the family looks for a smaller apartment so that Parvati and Imran can save money to complete their first film, their identity and food habits become stumbling blocks. Imran is denied a flat first because he is a Muslim and then because he is non-vegetarian. He is forced to retreat to a “ghetto”, a housing society inhabited exclusively by his co-religionists.

A daring film, it delves into the darkness that is engulfing India. Yet it does not abandon hope. Parvati insists that “this is not the India I used to love”, and remembers her homeland as “the craziest carnival in the world, one endless festival, warm, noisy, full of colour.” Imran, in contrast, is steadfastly positive. Ruffled by an untoward incident, Hari, in all his innocence, asks him: “Are we going to move to Pakistan?” The father’s reply is unequivocal: “India belongs to us and we belong to India.” In the course of another conversation, Imran says, “This country has survived much worse.”

“The film went through the censors like a hot knife through butter,” says Padmakumar. In another stroke of luck, actor, producer and director Satish Kaushik, who plays a cameo in the film, came on board as co-producer as soon as he saw the finished film. 

Kaushik is also on board for Padmakumar’s second film, Distant Teardrop, to be shot in Sri Lanka and the UK. Set in strife-torn Sri Lanka, it tells the story of an estranged father and son.