Eyes on the Oscars
I WENT to a school called life and taught myself cinema. I knew that I wanted to make movies even before I saw my first one at the age of eight. I lived in a very small village in Kathiawad, Gujarat, near a railway junction where trains only stopped to exchange passengers. My village was nobody’s destination. As a child, I sold tea on the solitary railway platform. I would often sit on the rail track, waiting eternally for a train to arrive, staring at the shadows of the five empty teacups dangling from my fingers. I would animate my fingers and imagine all kinds of shadow-play.
Today, I sit before my MacBook Pro in Hollywood Hills, staring at my five fingers on the keyboard. A tiny caret blinks on the screen, keeping pace with my heartbeats. An iPhone vibrates noisily. An air ticket to Tokyo flutters in the wind, beside a few theplas and a cup of tea.
So much has happened between two cups of teas.
A few days ago, the Academy announced its shortlist of 15 movies for the Best International Feature Film at the 95th Oscars, and ‘Last Film Show’ (‘Chhello Show’ in Gujarati) was on it.
There is joy and excitement in the ‘Chhello Show’ family; their love and belief in cinema has broken a two-decade jinx for India. It has been nearly 20 years since any Indian film made the cut. And it seems to have opened the floodgates — there are three other Indian films shortlisted in the documentary and song categories.
I have always enjoyed making both fiction and non-fiction movies.
When I made documentaries, I was seeking realities. I filmed destinies and desires as they are, not how they existed in my imagination. Desire often rises in samsara, the world in which we live. Like all beings, I, too, am living all kinds of desires. My desire to tell the story of ‘Chhello Show’ came from my imagination, and my imagination probably came from what I had lived. In one way or another, we return to reality. We return to life. We return to light.
My first feature, too, was made two decades ago. ‘Samsara’ was a story of the celebration of life. ‘Last Film Show’ is a story of the celebration of light. Between that life and light lives time: the time of hardship, the time of adventure, the time of survival, the time of celebration. Time is Samay in ‘Last Film Show’, and Samay is a nine-year-old kid discovering cinema. Like me, he, too, has surrendered to the power and pull of cinema. He, too, is hypnotised. He, too, is mesmerised. He, too, must sculpt out his own time. His own Samay.
But then, there has been the time of unlearning too. Making global cinema demands honesty. It demands a profound perception of human life. It demands an open mind, an open heart.
I am not bragging, but I have yet to meet a bigger fan of cinema than myself. I watch everything; I am capable of jumping from Tarkovsky to Teshigahara to Tamil flicks to Taiwanese blue underground quickies to Tanzanian TV movies. I ran film clubs and collected about 35,000 movies on discs. I have attended more than 200 film festivals, either as a participant or as a jury member. It is during this course of adventures and while making movies that I realised how much I was changing, and how much movies were changing. I slowly started going back to my roots, thinking about Kathiawad. What was it like growing up there as a kid? And above all, my many notorious encounters with movies and its magic. That introspective churning gave birth to ‘Last Film Show’.
The world is passing through terrible times, an era the likes of which we have never seen before. As a storyteller, I want to share feelings of hope and refreshing air. I want to celebrate the beauty of our planet and show how much simpler our lives used to be. In a short span of just 100 years, what have we done to this earth? What have we done to our souls? For me, ‘Last Film Show’ is a meditation on all these concerns. It is a wake-up call to mindfulness. It is a jubilatory story about the birth, life, death, and rebirth of films. ‘Last Film Show’ is also about celebrating nature and how we can live in harmony with the rains, lightning, lakes, or lions. It is an organic experience. I want people to be moved, uplifted, and, by the end, be drenched in the colourful world of storytellers. ‘Last Film Show’ is a parable, almost like an ‘Ox-herder Zen’ story: searching for the light, sighting the light, perceiving the light, catching the light, taming the light, projecting the light, the light transcended, both Light and Self transcended, reaching the source, and returning to society.
Through my movies like ‘Samsara’, ‘Valley of Flowers’, ‘Angry Indian Goddesses’, ‘Faith Connections’, and so on, I have always tried to return to the source. Because I believe that once the story finds its source, it also finds its spirituality.
Indian cinema will only be global if it takes deep root in Indian soil, and then grows like a banyan tree, sprouting roots in other countries. Then, that’s a giant banyan tree with roots spread all over the globe, but its soil and soul are Indian. A view from the top of any such tree will be universal
— The writer is director of ‘Chhello Show’
