Cannes picks 'don't belong to Bollywood'

From left to right: Indian director Neeraj Ghaywan, Iranian actress Golshifteh Farahani and Ethiopian director Yared Zeleke arriving for the screening of 'Sicario' during the 68th annual Cannes Film Festival, in Cannes, France. Photo: EPA/IAN LANGSDON

From left to right: Indian director Neeraj Ghaywan, Iranian actress Golshifteh Farahani and Ethiopian director Yared Zeleke arriving for the screening of 'Sicario' during the 68th annual Cannes Film Festival, in Cannes, France. Photo: EPA/IAN LANGSDON

Published May 21, 2015

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A new generation of directors is reshaping cinema in India, breaking away from Bollywood to tell different stories about the change engulfing the nation. But can India’s new wave cinema maintain the momentum?

 

Cannes, France - Bollywood might still dominate India’s motion picture business, but new directors have started to make their mark on the nation’s cinema.

 

“A vision of a new generation of filmmakers is emerging,” Cannes Film Festival chief Thierry Fremaux said at the premiere of New Delhi-born director Gurvinder Singh’s Chauthi Koot (The Fourth Direction), which was one of two new Indian films showcased at this year’s festival.

 

Along with the other movie selected for Cannes, Neeraj Ghaywan’s Masaan, the films represent a dramatic break from the dream world created by the glamour, the music and the stars of big-budget Bollywood productions.

 

Instead, directors such as Singh and Ghaywan have set about focusing on a more social realist cinema that draws on the struggles and joys of the lives of more ordinary people in the world’s biggest democracy.

 

“We do not belong to Bollywood,” Singh told dpa.

 

Both Singh and Ghaywan’s films were screened in Cannes’ Uncertain Regard section, which is aimed at promoting more innovative cinema.

 

The screenings of the two films comes two years after Indian director Ritesh Batra presented her quiet romance The Lunchbox to a rapturous Cannes audience, which helped to give impetus to India’s new wave cinema.

 

While Ghaywan’s film is about a group of characters battling to find a better future in the holy city of Benares amid the clash between India’s drive for change and its traditions and heritage, Singh’s movie is set in the troubled state of Punjab.

 

“India currently is at the behest of change,” said Ghaywan at the premiere of his film.

 

But “we are shackled by our conventions and cultures … of caste and class,” he said. “We want to set ourselves free. We are talking about escape.”

 

Singh’s movie is set against the backdrop of a climate of fear and suspicion in Punjab during the early 1980s.

 

The tensions culminated in the government’s bloody crackdown on the occupation of the Golden Temple in the holy city of Amritsar by Sikh radicals, and ultimately led to the assassination of Prime Minister Indira Gandhi.

 

This is not the first time that India has witnessed the emergence of a so-called new wave in cinema. Similar movements also emerged during the 1970s and 1980s.

 

But this time around the digital revolution is helping to drive independent filmmaking in India, exposing the nation’s new directors to global trends in cinema.

 

“There is a lot of energy in film,” Singh told dpa. “People want to express themselves through cinema.”

 

Chauthi Koot is Singh’s second feature, following his widely acclaimed Anhe Ghore Da Daan, (Alms for a Blind Horse), which was also set in Punjab.

 

Singh’s latest film is about the ordinary people caught between the Sikh militants and the government’s attempts to crush them.

 

To that extent, the film’s story chimes with today’s events as normal civilians find themselves the victims of global tensions from the Middle East through to Ukraine and Africa.

 

“Who knows what might be out there at night”, says one of the characters in Singh’s film as he surveys the eerily quiet fields

surrounding a local farm.

 

Singh’s family fled the Punjab shortly before a portion of it became part of Pakistan following India’s partition by the British in 1947.

 

He grew up in New Dehli speaking Punjabi at home and listening to stories about the Punjab, as told by his grandparents.

 

“There was this sense of the lost homeland,” he told dpa. “I realised that if I was to make films in Hindi I would be just another Hindi filmmaker. I could find a new language of cinema itself through my mother tongue,” he said.

 

Still, Singh is reluctant to be seen as part of any new movement, saying that was up to others to judge. “I’m a filmmaker but I don’t

see myself as part of any wave,” he said.

 

But the real risk for India’s new wave cinema is that it could suffer the same fate as the country’s earlier expressions of independent film-making and fail because of the lack of financing and distribution platforms. For one, India’s art-house cinema network is fragmented.

 

“The big production houses are not thinking about supporting independent cinema,” said Singh.

 

“Why can’t they make one film less and support ten independent films with that budget?” he asked.

 

 

DPA

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