JioMAMi Day 2: Q&A sessions revealed interesting info on 'Thithi' and 'Chauthi Koot

By Tanul Thakur

The Q&A sessions after films playing at the JioMAMI Film Festival barely offer any surprise. Since a majority of movies playing in the World Cinema section don’t have a director or a crew-member to represent them, so often there are no Q&A sessions.

When there is one, mostly in case of films playing in India Gold, India Story or International Competition (usually made by first-time filmmakers), the audience usually asks predictable questions of the director, and it’s hardly surprising, for you need the film to really sink in before it can open up to insightful readings and discussions.

So when Gurvinder Singh, director of Chauthi Koot, which played at the Cannes International Film Festival earlier this year, and competing in India Gold at the JioMAMI Mumbai Film Festival, came on stage, I didn’t expect anything remarkable from the next 15 minutes.

I was wrong.

“You have not seen the film,” Singh came directly to the point, showing no interest in formal introductions or boring niceties. “This was our first screening in India, and we didn’t want it to be like this. And a part of the blame goes to the Mumbai Film Festival. They haven’t checked the projection, sound — the night sequences are not like this. You can clearly see the faces of the characters [in the original cut>. There’s no brightness; there’s no contrast; there’s no colour. I really wish I could have stopped the screening. It was the most painful two hours of my life.”

At this point, the theatre was absolutely silent. “We should demand a repeat of this screening,” said Satya Rai Nagpaul, Chauthi Koot’s cinematographer, standing near the front rightmost row. The audience began to pitch in and back Singh: “In fact, this has been reported right from yesterday, that there have been similar issues in other screenings, too”; “you should have stopped the film after the first 10 minutes”; “irrespective of the projection, I thought your film was a masterpiece.”

For a regular audience member, watching a film for the first time, it’s nearly impossible to judge whether the projection is faulty. Which is presumably why Singh didn’t keep quiet. As most films usually don’t have their directors or technicians at the screening, the festival organisers may make a note.

In sharp contrast, the Q&A session that followed Raam Reddy’s Thithi, which won two major accolades at the Locarno International Film Festival a few weeks ago, was fairly straightforward. Set in a village in Karnataka, revolving around the death of a cranky 101-year-old man and the darkly comic lives of his descendants, Thithi is a wonderful debut centered on greed and selfishness, consisting of characters who are funny, clueless and absurd.

Twenty-six-year old Reddy spoke about getting the film’s cast together, comprised of untrained actors who were chosen over a period of eight months, wanting to make a film “that was something authentic, true and honest”. But, for me, the most interesting, and insightful, part of the session was Reddy talking about his collaboration with the film’s co-screenwriter, and his friend, Eregowda. “I have known him for 16 years. We were best friends growing up. Six years ago, I went to his village [which is where Thith is set and shot> for the first time, and I was fascinated by this fascinating and enigmatic world. He [Eregowda> was an insider; he had been born and brought up there. He had a wonderful relationship with that place, and we had a wonderful relationship, which eventually led to this.”

A few minutes later, Reddy asked Eregowda to talk about the film, who needed some coaxing to speak as he isn’t very fluent in English, and an important discussion on the film followed: on the filmmaker’s gaze. A film like Thithi, which looks and feels local, and doesn’t exoticise its setting or inhabitants, is a tough cookie to crack, because the director can often get tempted to cutify its characters, milk them for their quirks.

Reddy doesn’t; he understands that his characters are people, complete with their ambiguities and eccentricities, that their prime responsibility is to talk and react to each other, not the audience’s expectations of them. Eregowda took the mic for a bit, and spoke for only a few minutes, but they were enough to tell us how this film came into being. Eregowda was a local, an “insider”, Reddy an outsider (he got his bachelor’s degree from St. Stephen and studied filmmaking from a film school, in Prague); when Reddy came to Eregowda’s village, he saw something this local couldn’t: a new world, a different set of people and, more importantly, a story.

An outsider usually sees what an insider can’t, because you can’t know the story if you are in a story. If the outsider (Reddy) sees what the insider can’t, then the local (Eregowda) hears and interprets what the outsider can’t. And it’s this curious, unlikely relationship that may have kickstarted a promising filmmaking career.

Tanul Thakur is a Mumbai-based film critic and journalist. He’s on Twitter as @Plebeian42

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