In search of creative pastures

Saibal Chatterjee

Filmmaker Dar Gai, who moved to India from Ukraine seven years ago to teach drama and the German language in Gwalior’s Scindia School before venturing into the Mumbai movie industry, is a woman at home in the world. New, unusual stories come easy to her. Her second directorial outing, Namdev Bhau — In Search of Silence, which was the opening film of the 7th Dharamsala International Film Festival, is nothing if not fresh and unconventional.

The director’s name, a considered abbreviation of Daria Gaikolova, is not only gender-neutral, it also serves in a way to conceal her nationality. “I am a filmmaker, everything else is secondary,” says the Kiev-born writer-director whose first film, Teen Aur Aadha, immediately marked her out as a unique voice in Indian cinema. It premiered in the International Film Festival of Kerala last year and then travelled around the world.

Teen Aur Aadha is an experimental film set in a Mumbai building in which three separate stories unfold in three different eras over a period of half a century. The first homes in on a pre-pubescent boy, the second on a sex worker preparing to receive her first customer, and the third on a deeply-in-love septuagenarian couple.

Each segment of the film, unified in terms of time and space, is shot in one long take. In functional terms, this was a huge challenge for an independent film made on a shoestring budget, but actors — Suhasini Mulay, M.K. Raina, Jim Sarbh and Zoya Hussain — helped Daria pull it off without any major slip-ups.

Dar Gai’s new film is no less experimental, but unlike Teen Aur Aadha, it rests principally on the shoulders of a non-actor. The titular character, a 65-year-old chauffeur who is driven to despair by the cacophony of Mumbai, is played by Namdev Gurav, a driver in real life. In quest of peace, he flees to Silent Valley, Ladakh, which a newspaper clipping that he has carefully preserved for a while has listed among the five most silent places in the world.

But does silence equal inner tranquility? That is the question that the film seeks an answer to. In Ladakh, where honking cars, noisy trucks and thunder claps often break the serenity of the stunning landscape, Namdev runs into a 12-year-old boy Aaliq (Arya Dave) who never stops talking. In contrast, Namdev Bhau, wrapped in his own world, rarely utters a word. The boy believes that he is a knight on a mission to find a king in red robes in a Red Castle.

The boy’s strange obsession, his chirpiness, Namdev’s unwavering reticence and the manner in which a shocking revelation impinges upon the uneasy relationship between the two characters lie at the heart of a diligently crafted film about two separate quests that intersect each other assume tragic undertones.

Its easy narrative flow and languid rhythm give the film its distinctive feel, which is enhanced by both evocative nature of cinematography and sound design. “I was mindful not to make Namdev Bhau — In Search of Silence resemble an NRI film,” says Dar Gai, who is now prepping for a full-on Bollywood film.

“It will be a comedy set in Uttar Pradesh,” she reveals. Zoya Hussain, who played a key role in Teen Aur Aadha and was seen in last year’s Mukkabaaz, is already on board as a woman looking to discover new sides of herself in a conservative, small-town setting. Rajkummar Rao is likely to join the cast.