Gandu's director on movie-making, frontal nudity and censorship

By Rosalyn D’Mello It’s a Bengali film with English subtitles yet it’s the one Indian indie film everyone is dying to see. Perhaps it has to do with the title. No one’s ever named a film Gandu before. Maybe people are curious because they’ve seen the trailer. Or it could be that they’ve heard about the rather explicit sex scene where a character played by the director’s real-life girlfriend, Rii gives the film’s protagonist, Gandu, head. [caption id=“attachment_47465” align=“alignleft” width=“380” caption=“Still from the movie Gandu. Image from Mumbai Boss.”]  [/caption] To suggest that Gandu is about an angry young man would be an understatement. The anti-hero of the film, who has been nicknamed Gandu by his entire neighbourhood, is desperate for any kind of break. Put simply, he’s an asshole and a junkie. He crawls into his mother’s bedroom while she’s having sex with her lover to steal money from the man’s wallet. He buys a lottery ticket daily, hoping that one day he’ll get lucky. The only bright spot in his life is rap music. Gritty, provocative and rife with sexual innuendos, _Gandu’_s rhymes expose the moral hypocrisy of the world he inhabits. Needless to say, even though Gandu has won wide acclaim at international festivals — it has picked up awards at the 2010 South Asian International Film Festival in New York City and the 2011 Seattle Film Festival — it’s unlikely that the film will ever be released commercially in cinemas. It isn’t available on DVD because the film has yet to be cleared by the censor board. If it does receive clearance, it would set a precedent in India considering its highly explicit sexual content. If it doesn’t, Indian audiences will have been deprived of the experience of watching one of the freshest, boldest and most provocative films to have ever been made in their country. Read the interview with director Qaushik Mukherjee on Mumbai Boss.