Telephone appeared in movies as an instrument that provided a multitude of narrative possibilities and also benefitted, in the initial days, from the portrayal in cinema as a desirable, aspirational commodity.
ATIKH RASHID
Both cinema and the telephone are modern inventions – the former about 45 years younger than the latter. During the early decades of the 20th century, the two tools interacted with and complemented each other as symbols of modernity.
Telephone appears in movies as an instrument that provides a multitude of narrative possibilities – as a herald of a plot twist, a conduit of the feeling of love, or as a device whose incessant ringing leads to tension-building.
Hindi films have had numerous songs featuring the phone as a tool connecting two lovelorn beings, crooning at each end (Recall: “Jalte hai jiske liye” from Sujata). In many crime thrillers of the 1950s, telephone lines unravel the tangled plots and help the film reach a happy ending.
The telephone, on the other hand, also benefited from such a portrayal in cinema – a mass medium with great influence – as a desirable, aspirational commodity providing a plethora of possibilities.
Hence, it is no surprise that telephone companies were among the most prominent advertisers in film magazines of the late 1930s and 1940s. The Bombay Telephone Company, which was established in 1925, issued regular advertisements to filmindia, the most prominent film magazine of the time, in its attempt to expand its subscriber base in Bombay, Karachi and Ahmedabad.
These advertisements had stars and starlets of Hindi film industry seductively holding the receiver to their ears, anticipating a conversation from the other end.
An ad issued by Bombay Telephone Company, Ltd in December 1937 edition of filmindia.
“Have you a telephone in your home?” asks this advertisement issued by the Bombay Telephone Company in the December 1938 issue of filmindia magazine. “If not you are denying the pleasure of communicating with your FRIENDS and running the risk of being unable to call the DOCTOR or FIRE BRIGADE in the time of need,” it says. The young model, lazily lying on the sofa, is holding the receiver in one hand and a glamour magazine in the other. The target audience here, clearly, is English-speaking, educated, urban and affluent Indians.
The context to this marketing strategy adopted by Bombay Telephone Company to prominently highlight the social use – the pleasure of communicating with friends – of the telephone along with the more obvious logistical function, is provided by a letter sent by Lord Willingdon in September 1934 to London. In this communication, Willingdon laments that a lack of demand for telephone service in India was slowing down the expansion of the service in the country, largely owing to high cost and inability of a large section of the society to bear it. Indians are making comparatively little ‘social use’ of the technology, says he.
BUT WHO IS THE GIRL?
The full-page advertisement, it appears, not only worked for the advantage of the telephone firm but for the young model too.
“Who is the girl whose photo we find in the advertisement of the Bombay Telephone Co.? Is she a film star?” asks a curious reader of filmindia R S Mudaliar, a Madurai resident, in the ‘Editor’s Mail’ section of the magazine two months later.
The response to Mr Mudaliar by filmindia editor Baburao Patel informs us that the girl is the new Wadia Movietone starlet Pramilla who was previously attached with Imperial Studio. Elsewhere, the magazine fills in that Pramilla is busy shooting for Wadia’s Jungle King, co-starring John Cavas and Maheru – the monkey. Pramilla, born Esther Victoria Abraham in a Baghdadi -Jewish family of Kolkata, would go on to bag the Miss India title when the inaugural pageant was held in 1947.
COLOUR QUEEN OF INDIA SAYS ‘HULLO’
Before starlet Pramilla, the telephone was being marketed – in similar full-page ads in filmindia – by Padmadevi, the silent film star. She had appeared in JBH Wadia’s stunt films, most notably Dilruba Daku (The Amazon, 1933) fighting with goons as a masked daredevil. Later on, in 1937, she was the heroine of the first indigenously produced colour film Kisan Kanya directed by Moti Gidwani and briefly earned the moniker of ‘Colour Queen of India’.
One of the advertisements featuring Padmadevi has an interesting warning: Never tap or touch the receiver rest. You will get a wrong number.
In the garb of the warning, it’s a tip – and an allure – to the prospective owners of the telephone, that taking home the device will afford them a hitherto unavailable possibility of making an unexpected contact with an unknown stranger – who could be as pretty as Padmadevi – whom the device may ‘accidentally’ connect you with.
While reliable statistics are not available on the number of telephone subscribers in India, as per a US Department of Commerce report, by March 1945, British India had 1,25,400 telephone lines, most of these operated by Indian Posts and Telegraphs Department, Government of India. In 1933, an international line between Bombay and London was also inaugurated, which was later suspended between 1939 and 1945, owing to security concerns during World War II.
(This write-up appeared on the indianexpress.com on June 10. Find it here.)
Using Kells Priory, an Irish medieval site, as a case study, this essay examines how Stanley Kubrick transforms a specific historical and geographical place into cinematic space, drawing upon the priory’s architectural form, medieval history, and associations with conflict, power, and decline to create meanings that extend beyond landscape realism in Barry Lyndon.
This scene involving Redmond Barry confronting his childhood sweetheart Nora Brady and wealthy English Army Captain John Quin during their outdoor rendezvous was shot at Ballynatray Estate near Youghal situated on the border of County Cork and County Waterford. (Photo: Still from Barry Lyndon (Dir: Stanley Kubrick)
ATIKH RASHID
When Stanley Kubrick arrived in Waterford in July 1973 to scout for locations for Barry Lyndon, he was unknowingly or knowingly entering a landscape whose depictions on canvas or celluloid, in lyric and prose, are charged with layers of political, cultural, and emotional meaning.
The vision of Ireland as a pastoral utopia has evolved through various historical stages: from Oliver Cromwell’s displacement of native Catholic populations of Ireland to the less fertile western lands in 17th century, to Paul Henry’s renderings of rural life on canvas, to nationalist reappropriations of the countryside as the moral heart of the colonised nation. The postcolonial Irish state further instrumentalised this imagery to promote tourism, as did Hollywood with depictions of Ireland’s countryside – with films such as The Quiet Man (1952) – as rural utopia, for its own purposes. This story came full circle in the decade of 1970s with Irish filmmakers actively trying to deconstruct this image with films such as Caoineadh Áirt Úi Laoghaire (1975) and Poitin (1977).
The excitement around Kubrick’s plan to shoot ‘Barry Lyndon’ in Ireland is palpable in this article published by the Sunday Independent on July 7 . 1973 (Accessed on November 23 2026 through Irish Newspaper Archives)
Kubrick’s Barry Lyndon, coming as it did in the middle of this decade, could be seen as another portrayal of Ireland of the older kind. Yet, the film was not – or hasn’t been – seen with the same derision that The Quiet Man and Ryan’s Daughter were for their stereotypical portrayal of Ireland and its people. In fact, Barry Lyndon was adjudged as the best Irish Film ever made by a jury at The Irish Times in 2020.
In the film, a young Irishman tries to climb the English aristocratic ladder through hook, crook and marriage only to lose everything as he is crushed by the rigid social order of 18th-century Britain. Looking for reasons for Barry Lyndon’s positive appraisal, film scholar Maria Pramaggiore argues that although the film “both indicts and participates in the colonial figuring of Ireland’s geographical and social landscape”, it sidesteps the Hollywood depiction by using melancholia and by framing the landscape through the 18th century debate about “the beautiful, the picturesque and the sublime”.
Later in this essay, I compare the cinematic space created by the filmmaker with the geographic place that Kells Priory is. (Graphic created by author; screengrabs taken from Barry Lyndon (Dir: Stanley Kubrick)
Last month, I visited the Kells Priory, County Kilkenny, one of the outdoor shooting locations of the movie in Ireland, to seek the answers to these questions for myself and to see how this site, which figures prominently in the film, was in real life. How was the cinematic place created from the geographic space? Has it changed since? How do the history of Kells Priory and its use in Barry Lyndon interact with each other?
Monastic-Military Complex
Founded in 1193 by Geoffrey FitzRobert, an Ango-Norman baron, Kells Priory was a monastic sanctuary with a defensive structure situated along the King’s River in Kilkenny County. Dedicated to ‘Blessed Virgin Mary’, the Priory was endowed with extensive lands and over the next two centuries came to comprise several buildings including a church, cloister, chapter house, dormitory, and refectory. These are parts of the monastic precinct at the priory.
The other part is the Burgess Court, which is mainly a defensive courtyard made of five defence towers linked to each other by a tall, stone-built compound wall. During its heyday, the priory served spiritual, economic and military functions that included worship, pastoral outreach, lodging for the canons, management of agricultural lands, mills and the defence of its occupants from outsiders in that turbulent era.
In March 1540, as per the policies of King Henry VII, the priory was surrendered and its lands were granted to other English nobles . Following this, the buildings gradually fell into disuse, some being adapted for secular uses. In recent times, the ruins became an important heritage site with archaeological excavations starting at the location beginning in 1972.
It’s plausible that filming and excavation took place parallely at Kells Priory. From 1972 to 1975, a large-scale programme of excavations was undertaken and it went on until 1980s. 7 The filming for Barry Lyndon took place in Kilkenny from October to December 1973.
‘The Dunleary camp’ : Barry at Kells Priory
In the movie, the scenes shot at the priory take place in the first half of the film before Barry leaves Ireland for Germany after he enlists in the Redcoats army. The priory has been used as a location to portray a fictional temporary training camp for the newly recruited Irish troops near the Dún Laoghaire harbour at the outskirts of the then Dublin city. This is a divergence (although not narratively important) from W M Thackeray’s novel, as in the latter Barry spends some time in Dublin with Fitzsimons’ family after leaving Barryville before enlisting for the English army and embarking on a ship to Prussian territories. In the novel, the episodes depicting the fistfight with Mr Toole and meeting with Captain Grogan (Fagan in novel) occur aboard the ship. In the film, these sequences are staged on land and specifically at the ‘Dunleary Training Camp’, which the novel has no mention of.
Interestingly, the first draft of the Barry Lyndon screenplay placed these sequences in Germany, unlike the finished film. Clearly, Kubrick decided to shoot more scenes in Ireland than initially planned, and the reasons for this could only be speculated. Notwithstanding the reason, it can be safely stated that this choice considerably expanded the Irish duration of the film and helped build a historical layer to the film’s depiction of a colonised Ireland.
Barry at the ‘Dunleary’ camp before he embarks on the ship to Prussia. (Screengrab: Barry Lyndon, Dir: Stanley Kubrick)
Interestingly, in an example of cinematic manipulation of space, the sequences shot at the Kells Priory are intermixed with scenes shot at Moorstown Castle, about 60 kms away, giving an illusion that these two spaces form a single place, a third, totally fictional, cinematic site of ‘Dunleary Camp’.
When I visited Kells Priory earlier this month, I found the site much the same as it appears in the film (minus the redcoats, their tents and paraphernalia) although 50 years have passed since the shooting of the film. The meadows inside and outside the walls, I saw, were populated by grazing sheep instead of redcoats having their humble lunch (as in the scene), which becomes the reason for Barry’s fistfight with Mr Toole. Of the two parts of Kells Priory – monastic precinct and Burgess court – only the latter has been used in the film.
Redmond Barry’s entry at Dunleary training camp. (Screengrab Barry Lyndon, Dir: Stanley Kubrick)The location today as photographed by the author from inside Burgess Court at Kells Priory. There is very little identifiable difference – apart from some dry patches seen in the movie visuals as compared to lush green grass at present, and sheep taking advantage of the greens. (Photo Credit:Atikh Rashid)
This space, characterized by its open, geometrically defined stone walls and towers, takes many a shapes in the mind of the visitors, becoming a place of multilayered meaning: as an ecclesiastical site with religious and colonial history, as an archival excavation site holding vast possibilities for anthropological and historical knowledge (some of the excavated material is stored inside the priory), and its ruined look harking back nostalgia and a sense of loss. By using the site in Barry Lyndon, Kubrick activates these layers of meaning and imbues it with additional ones by using it as a place where important incidents in the life of the protagonist occur.
It’s a space where Barry starts a new life as a Redcoats soldier, where a faux-aristocratic country-boy gets hardened by intermingling with ‘lower classes’. His fistfight with Mr Toole makes the green meadow an intimate Place of conflict and class tension thus imbuing the space with personal and meanings that transcend its existing associations.
The cinematic space of Dunleary training Camp soon after the protagonist’s induction into the British army.Image 2. A photo taken by the author at Burgess Court of Kells Priory. The Burgess court, an enclosure that was built for defensive purposes, has seven such towers, the monument is also called ‘Seven Castles’. There is some perspectival difference between the referenced shot and the image taken by the author is largely due to camera height and Kubrick’s well-known use of a telephoto lens for this film . The film scene may have been shot by placing a camera at a height, capturing three towers in the background. The tree cover in the mid-ground has changed considerably, affecting the visibility of the wall compound as well as the towers in the background from this angle.
For an audience sensitive to Irish history, the sight of a foreign military occupying a historical Irish ruin (a stand-in for native institutions) is a powerful, active cultural stimulus that may recall the historical trauma of conquest and dissolution. The redcoats trampling the lush green terrain under their feet in the backdrop of ruins from Ireland’s past does tell a colonial story in itself and could possibly be read as the colonial fantasy of conquering a virgin land.
Perhaps, this is exactly what sets Barry Lyndon’s depiction of Irish life and landscape apart because the film does not idealise them but depicts them as sites of loss and domination. The lush green Irish terrain is not a cite of rural utopia but must be left behind to make a life thus symbolising displacement and colonial tension. The painterly aesthetic of the film inspired from 18th century art evokes a sense of loss and melancholia, the slow and restrained visual momentum helps the film – although a Hollywood product – stand apart from the melodramatic or picturesque clichés of Hollywood films mentioned earlier.
A mere location?
The question of whether the use of Kells Priory is merely locational in Barry Lyndon is a vexed one.
On one hand, the site is used as a location in the most functional sense as it stands for something fictional – the Dunleary training camp. On the other hand, it’s more than purely locational as basing the scenes at an identifiable Irish ruin, Kubrick imbues the scene with layers of historical and cultural meaning due the site’s documented history of loss and conquest and Barry’s own personal and ultimately unsuccessful struggles within British aristocracy.
Remains of the archaeological excavations that took place at Kells Priory can still be seen at the site. Photo Credit: Atikh Rashid
Kells Priory, although a national monument and an important medieval ecclesiastical site of great archaeological importance, is not a popular tourist destination. Barry Lyndon shoot there has not helped it (unlike the locations of The Quiet Man and Star Wars franchise), one would imagine, largely because the film itself doesn’t enjoy a broad popularity, claiming fanfare among a niche cinephile crowd. The tourism data published by Failte Ireland shows that within the Kilkenny county, the Priory is not a sought-after destination, with only 31,000 visitors in a year (although it’s a free-entry monument) as opposed to Kilkenny Castle which attracted 452, 383 visitors who had to buy a ticket.
Kells Priory, however, makes frequent appearances on online forums on platforms like Reddit in discussions involving shooting locations in Ireland. The film has gained in popularity with passage of time which shows in the online mentions of the film and its shooting locations but it’s still a niche to send crowds in the direction of the Kells. Also, in the crowded list of historic shooting locations in Ireland listed on portals such as Screen Ireland, Heritage Ireland or OPW, Kells Priory does not prefigure prominently
References/Further Reading:
Bradley, John, ‘Kells Priory, County Kilkenny: Archaeological Excavations 1972–1975’, Proceedings of the Royal Irish Academy, 80C (1980), 345–420.
Harper, Graeme, and Jonathan Rayner, eds., Cinema and Landscape: Film, Nation and Cultural Geography (Bristol: Intellect, 2010).
McLoone, Martin, ‘Landscape and Irish Cinema’, in Cinema and Landscape: Film, Nation and Cultural Geography, ed. by Graeme Harper and Jonathan Rayner (Bristol: Intellect, 2010), pp. 131–46
Peckham, Robert Shannan, ‘Landscape in Film’, in A Companion to Cultural Geography, ed. by James S. Duncan, Nuala C. Johnson and Richard H. Schein (Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing, 2004), pp 420-429 Poitín, dir. by Bob Quinn (CineGael, 1977).
Pramaggiore, Maria. Making Time in Stanley Kubrick’s Barry Lyndon: Art, History, and Empire. London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2015
Thackeray, William Makepeace, The Memoirs of Barry Lyndon, Esq. by Himself (London, 1844).
Cinema and Landscape: Film, Nation and Cultural Geography, edited by Graeme Harper and Jonathan Rayner, Intellect, 2010, pp. 131–146.
As true crime has evolved into one of streaming’s defining narrative forms, a quieter strain of arthouse cinema has approached the subject from an altogether different direction as portraits of loneliness, social decay, and the unsettling banality of violence. The crime itself frequently occupies surprisingly little screen time.
A still from The Girl with the Needle (Magnus von Horn, 2024)
ATIKH RASHID
The popularity of true crime is often explained through a deceptively simple contradiction: we seek proximity to what we fear. Psychologists have variously attributed the genre’s appeal to morbid curiosity, our evolved vigilance toward danger, and an impulse to rehearse threats from the safety of spectatorship. Cognitive film scholars similarly argue that narrative cinema functions as a laboratory for emotional simulation, allowing audiences to test moral intuitions and empathic responses without material risk. True crime, as per them, satisfies an ancient desire to understand violence by transforming it into narrative. The murderer is apprehended, the motives are catalogued, and disorder eventually yields to explanation.
Yet contemporary true crime culture—particularly as shaped by streaming platforms—has gradually shifted from understanding violence to consuming it. The documentary series, with its episodic revelations, archival footage, police interviews, and dramatic cliffhangers, has become an endlessly renewable machine of suspense. Murder is reorganized into content. Victims become mysteries, perpetrators become puzzles, and investigation itself becomes spectacle. Even when ethically motivated, the genre often reproduces the procedural logic of law enforcement, asking not what violence feels like or what social worlds produce it, but merely who committed it and how they were caught.
There exists, however, another lineage of cinema that approaches true crime from almost the opposite direction. One that distrusts revelation, resists procedural satisfaction, and refuses the reassuring architecture of justice: the arthouse true crime. These are the films which have at their central plot a true crime – or even a serial killer – and are made by independent filmmakers and are mainly circulated through festival circuit, unlike the true crime documentary genre which gathered a startling momentum through digital screening platforms. It is a cinema scattered across countries and decades rather than united by movement or manifesto—a constellation of films that might be called arthouse true crime.
The Golden Glove (Fatah Akin, 2019)
I am talking here about films such as Angst (1983), Gerald Kargl’s suffocating immersion into the fractured consciousness of a serial killer; Sion Sono’s Cold Fish (2010), which transforms a notorious Japanese murder case into a corrosive study of patriarchal domination and capitalist excess; Vincent Le Port’s Bruno Reidal: Confession of a Murderer (2021), an austere adaptation of a real murderer’s written confession that privileges introspection over explanation; and Fatih Akin’s The Golden Glove (2019), an unflinching portrait of postwar social decay seen through the crimes of Fritz Honka. A notable addition to this constellation of movies is Magnus von Horn’s The Girl with the Needle (2024), which situates the horrors of the Danish serial baby killer Dagmar Overbye case within the brutal realities of poverty, motherhood, and postwar Europe.
These films are interested less in crime than in the ordinary conditions surrounding it: poverty, alienation, masculinity, social neglect, loneliness, labor, hunger, repression. Violence arrives not as an exceptional rupture but as something disturbingly embedded within everyday life.
A still from Japanese film Cold Fish (Sion Sono, 2010)
Watching these films often means abandoning the expectations cultivated by Netflix. There are no detectives, retired or serving, guiding us through evidence, no experts reconstructing timelines for the screen, no comforting narration promising that every question will eventually be answered. Instead, we inhabit spaces rather than stories. We remain with people long after conventional narratives would have moved on. The crime itself frequently occupies surprisingly little screen time.
What distinguishes arthouse true crime is not simply aesthetic sophistication but a radically different ethics of looking.
Social landscape of violence
One place to begin is with The Girl with the Needle (2024), the recent period drama by Magnus von Horn that hauntingly reimagines of the crimes of Dagmar Overbye, the Danish woman convicted of murdering infants in the uneasy years following the First World War. Von Horn has little interest in reconstructing the case or in tracing the neat causal arc from crime to punishment that has become the default grammar of the contemporary documentary series. Instead, he drifts outward, away from the killer and toward the world that made her legible: a Copenhagen of soot-blackened factories, amputee veterans, unwanted pregnancies, and women for whom survival itself had become a daily negotiation.
Dagmar Overbye, as imagined by Magnus von Horn in The Girl with the Needle (2024)
The film’s emotional centre is not Overbye but Karoline, a young seamstress navigating a society that has already abandoned her long before she encounters the woman who promises refuge. The murders emerge gradually, almost imperceptibly, from this landscape of deprivation, as though they were another symptom of a social order that had already normalized quieter forms of violence.
That displacement—from the event to its atmosphere—is where the film locates its cinematic power. A conventional true-crime series would almost certainly organise the Overbye case around evidence, testimony, chronology: archival photographs, police files, expert commentary, the steady accumulation of facts leading toward judicial closure. Von Horn does something far more elusive. He empties the narrative of investigation almost entirely, replacing it with duration. The camera lingers on corridors and stairwells, on factory floors humming with mechanical repetition, on faces suspended in moments of waiting that seem to stretch beyond narrative time. Information is withheld not to manufacture suspense but to dissolve it. One is never encouraged to solve the crime so much as to inhabit the historical conditions from which it became thinkable.
Its monochrome imagery only deepens this sensation. Bodies emerge from darkness only to disappear back into it, while the city itself becomes less a setting than a material condition pressing against its inhabitants. Poverty acquires a tactile weight; interiors seem permanently deprived of air; faces bear the sediment of labour and hunger before they express emotion. Violence, when it arrives, scarcely disrupts the rhythm of these spaces because the world itself has already been organised around quieter forms of attrition.
What makes The Girl with the Needle stand away from the contemporary true crime is not that it humanises Dagmar Overbye but that she isn’t the privileged object of the gaze. She remains opaque, unsettling, resistant to diagnosis. Instead, the film asks us to attend to everything that ordinarily disappears in crime narratives: the economic structures that render certain lives disposable, the fragile solidarities among women, the institutional indifference that transforms desperation into opportunity. The crimes are never explained away, nor are they elevated into singular acts of monstrous evil. They remain embedded within the ordinary textures of social life, where history itself begins to resemble the unseen accomplice.
Akin’s grotesque examination
If The Girl with the Needle traces violence back to the invisible architectures of social abandonment, then Fatih Akin’s The Golden Glove (2019) descends into a world where abandonment has already become a way of life. When this film premiered in competition at the Berlin International Film Festival, it sharply divided critics. Many dismissed it as an exercise in calculated repulsion, accusing Akin of wallowing in degradation and reducing the suffering of Honka’s victims to grotesque spectacle.
The titular bar in The Golden Glove, where Honka picks most of his victims (Fatah Akin, 2019)
Based on the crimes of the West German serial killer Fritz Honka, who murdered at least four women in Hamburg during the early 1970s, the film unfolds almost entirely within a handful of oppressive interiors: the titular dive bar, cramped apartments stained by nicotine and neglect, and the claustrophobic attic where Honka’s victims disappear into the architecture itself. At first glance, Akin’s film seems to embrace the lurid iconography that arthouse cinema has traditionally held at arm’s length. There are decomposing bodies, bursts of startling brutality, prosthetic grotesquerie, and an almost overwhelming sensory assault. It is perhaps unsurprising that many critics dismissed the film as little more than exploitation masquerading as prestige.
The murders, shocking as they are, occupy surprisingly little narrative importance. What lingers instead are the rituals surrounding them: endless rounds of cheap schnapps, stale cigarette smoke hanging in the air, broken conversations between people too intoxicated to finish their sentences, and the melancholy choreography of regulars who return to the Golden Glove every evening because there is nowhere else left to go. Honka himself is almost incidental to this social landscape. He is neither criminal mastermind nor charismatic psychopath—the two dominant archetypes of contemporary true crime. He is physically deformed, emotionally stunted, sexually frustrated, and painfully ordinary. His monstrosity lies less in exceptional intelligence than in his utter banality. Akin refuses the perverse glamour that so often accompanies cinematic serial killers, presenting Honka instead as another discarded body among many.
In this regard, The Golden Glove is less interested in serial murder than in the slow violence of social invisibility. Its most devastating observation is that Honka’s victims are able to disappear because they had already, in many respects, disappeared from public life. Their absence scarcely registers beyond the confines of the neighbourhood because the film insists that neglect precedes murder. By the time violence erupts, society has already withdrawn its gaze.
Its aesthetic, too, is one of relentless materiality. Every surface appears damp with sweat, grease, alcohol, and decay. Wallpaper peels from nicotine-stained walls; food rots on kitchen counters; fluorescent lighting renders flesh sickly rather than expressive. One comes away remembering textures before events, smells before plot. In many ways, Akin replaces the evidentiary logic of true crime with what might be called an archaeology of environment.
The film doesn’t transform Honka into an unknowable monster whose evil reassures us of our own normality. Nor are his victims sanctified into abstract symbols of innocence. Instead, Akin insists on something far more unsettling: that everyone in this world has already been shaped, diminished, and forgotten by the same social conditions, even if only one of them becomes a murderer.
Not a procedural
If conventional true crime is organised around information, arthouse true crime is organised around duration. Its attention drifts toward the moments that procedural narratives routinely discard: a meal prepared in silence, an empty factory floor, a solitary drink, the slow rhythms of work and waiting. Violence is no longer an event to be reconstructed but a condition that gradually settles over everyday life.
Victims exist before they become victims; perpetrators remain morally accountable without being reduced to monsters. Explanation never hardens into exoneration. What these films ultimately deny is the comfort of distance. Murder appears neither exceptional nor spectacular, but banal, repetitive, woven into histories of loneliness, deprivation, and neglect. Their gaze shifts from the crime itself to the social worlds that make such violence imaginable—a refusal of easy causality that may be arthouse true crime’s most quietly radical gesture.
Animated documentaries (clockwise), Waltz with Bashir (2008), Flee (2021), Just a Guy (2020), and Tower (2016).
ATIKH RASHID
“…Animation can show things that lie outside the reach of photography… This mode of filmmaking can bear vibrant witness to things that cameras might not, or could not, or perhaps should not, record on the spot”: David Bordwell
Documentary filmmaking has traditionally been associated with live-action images that capture and depict ‘reality’. The animated documentary challenges this assumption by combining factual narratives with animated representation, expanding the possibilities of how reality can be documented and communicated.
As David Bordwell suggests, animation enables filmmakers to bear witness to subjects that cameras cannot reach, whether because they belong to the past, exist only in memory, or involve spaces and experiences that cannot be visually recorded.
This subject has generated significant debate about the relationship between documentary truth and artistic reconstruction. While critics have questioned whether animation compromises the documentary’s claim to reality, supporters argue that it offers unique ways of representing subjective experiences and hidden histories. Films dealing with trauma, memory, incarceration, war, and personal testimony have particularly benefited from the medium’s ability to visualize the unseen and the unrecorded.
One of the films from this genre that I found quite interesting was Just A Guy (2020) by Shoko Hara. It’s a 14-minutes animated documentary exploring the relationship three young women had with the Richard Remirez, the notorious American serial killer known as the ‘Night Stalker’, when he was lodged in a prison on death row. They corresponded with him through letters, with one of them paying him several visits in the prison and also receiving a proposal from Remirez to marry him.
It’s also a personal story for the director Shoko Hara as she is one of three women whose relationship with Remirez is depicted in the film, though she never met him in person. The film employs a mix of animation styles, including stop-motion, claymation, collage and also uses mixed-media to achieve a raw and immersive aesthetic
A screengrab from Just A Guy (2020)
Shoko said in an interview that she chose to animate the memories of these girls using dirty pink clay and other materials that are available in prison, like plastic, paper or garbage to convey the idea of exploitative, toxic love which was at play in the Ramirez affair. She said that she decided to use animation for the film as one of the two other women wanted to remain anonymous. She used their facial features, especially eyes while making their animations because she felt that audience would want to know how they look or looked.
In the film, Shoko Hara says that she was introduced to Ramirez by one of her female friends who was in a ‘correspondence relation’ with the murderer.
Talking about the young girls who were fascinated by Remirez – often called ‘groupies’ in the popular culture – Shoko says, “I realised that their relationship with Remirez wasn’t very different than other real relationships. It was about jealousy, toxic but also nice”.
For me, however, the film also raises the question that critics of ‘animated documentary format’ have been raising (mentioned in David Bordwells post ‘Showing what can’t be filmed’). The critics doubt animation’s ability – given that it involves great amount of human intervention involved like in other arts such as painting or architecture – to capture the flow of real time and space like photography does (in Andre Bazin’s words).
You see a lot of choices made by the filmmaker in the depiction of visuals that go with the testimonies of the Remirez’s female admirers. This adds a great degree of subjectivity to the film that would be undesirable for a documentary’s claims to factuality.
For instance, as Eve, one of the girls, describes her first meeting with Remirez in the prison, she remarks that he looked much bigger in reality than he seemed in photos or on television. The visuals, however, exaggerate this impression considerably making the images too subjective to the point of seeming unreal.
The animated documentary’s depiction of Eve’s first meeting with Ramirez
The animation makes him look like a giant, which may put in question the faith in factual presentation that the audience would take for granted in a documentary. The audience, from henceforth, may shift the comprehension strategy to accommodate the subjectivity, which may harm the claims to authenticity desired in a ‘conventional’ documentary.
The sequence (screengrabs from 1 to 4 taken by the author) shows the limbs, torso, and head of the drawn woman getting dismembered without making it clear if the drawing comes from Remirez or is an effect made by the filmmaker.
In another sequence in the beginning of the film, a drawing of a semi-naked woman from one of the letters by Remirez is dismembered in a sequence images. Did Remirez draw the dismemberment or was it the filmmaker who dismembered the drawing to symbolically convey his violent past?
Similarly, in another sequence, Eve shares that during some of her visits to Remirez he had flashed his sexual organ to her. This accompanies the visual of a giant, serpent like phallus trying to violate the woman. This, most likely, is a latter interpretation of the visit as during her visits she was a consensual participant in the affair and may not have felt the encounter as grotesque or violating as shown in the animated sequence. This adding another layer of subjectivity to the visual narration.
A screengrab of a scene where Shoko Hara’s subjectivity takes over
However, it’s more than clear that the film was an impossibility to make in live-action format as two of the three girls were not comfortable with showing their faces as they have moved on and there’s no recording of the prison visits by the girls. Shoko has cited the need for a partial or full anonymity requested by the young women as the primary reason to choose animated format for the film.
Still from ‘Lisboa, Crónica Anedótica (1930), Dir: José Leitão de Barros
ATIKH RASHID
I like most city symphony films: Dziga Vertov’s eccentric, stylized, and self-aware The Man with the Movie Camera (1929), Walter Ruttman’s vibrant portrayal of the rhythm and energy of a single day in Berlin: Symphony of a Great City, and oris Ivens’s Rain (1929), a lyrical and atmospheric portrait of Amsterdam that transforms a passing rainstorm into a study of urban movement, texture, and light.
In this company, Leitão de Barros’s Lisbôa, Cronica Anedótica (1930), is a peculiar exception. It creates a poetic montage of the lives of various dwellers of Lisbon, like the other great city symphony films made elsewhere and before it. In addition, it incorporates staged visuals that set it apart from other symphony films.
I have often wondered what a city symphony film of an Indian city would look like. Each of the great cities of India in the second and third decades of the 20th century would have made great material for a symphony film: Bombay, Delhi, Calcutta, and Madras. Full of activity and brimming with political excitement, they were just a decade or two shy of freedom from colonial rule.
Screengrab from Panorama of Calcutta, India, from the River Ganges (1899) often credited to John “Mad Jack” Benett-Stanford.
India did have a filmmaking practice since the beginning of the 20th century, but it’s true that most of the films that were made during this period were made by westerners: British, French, or American filmmakers who headed to India with a camera to shoot it as an exotic land or as the “crown jewel of the British Empire.”
Numerous actualité and travel films were produced by companies such as Pathé and Gaumont which presented India less as a lived social reality and more as a spectacle to be consumed by audiences in Europe and North America. As film historians have noted, these early films often privileged scenes of religious ritual, bustling bazaars, royal processions, and picturesque landscapes, framing the subcontinent through a colonial gaze that emphasized difference, wonder, and imperial possession rather than everyday life.
Although there are no city symphony films for any of the Indian cities, if one looks through the archives, one may find that there’s some proto-city-symphony material that was shot in India by visiting filmmakers, and some of that material survives.
For instance, one of the earliest films shot in India, called Panorama of Calcutta (1899), does have the ethos, at least visually, of a symphony film. However, as has been pointed out by scholars, the visuals that one sees are not even from Calcutta but from a town (Benaras) almost 700 km to the west.
As Robin Baker wonders, “Maybe the cameraman got confused about his travels, or perhaps the company thought a more familiar name might be more tempting for audiences?”
The absence of an Indian symphony film is partially resolved when British-Indian filmmaker Sandhya Suri uses the ‘India on Film’ footage made available by the British Film Institute (BFI) in 2016 as part of the celebrations to mark the centenary of the Indian film industry to make Around India with a Movie Camera in 2018. She repurposes the visuals captured in India by British, French, and Indian cameramen to decolonise the gaze and create a symphony set to freshly composed Indian music of life in India before Independence.
Stills from Around India with a Movie Camera (2018) Dir: Sandhya Suri
A striking moments in Suri’s film is her use of footage from the Delhi Durbar of 1911, particularly the appearance of Maharaja Sayajirao Gaekwad III of Baroda. Historical accounts confirm that Gaekwad caused controversy by allegedly offering only a perfunctory bow to King George V and Queen Mary and turning away hastily, an act that was widely interpreted by colonial authorities and the British press as a breach of imperial protocol.
By incorporating this footage into her film, Suri invites viewers to look beyond the spectacle of imperial grandeur and attend instead to the tensions, ambiguities, and acts of dissent embedded within the colonial archive. In her hands, images originally produced to celebrate imperial rule are recontextualised to reveal the unseen tensions that prevailed at this historic moment and highlight the fragility of authority and the presence of Indian agency within spaces designed to display colonial dominance.
REVIEW: Netflix original docu-series Don’t F**k With Cats: Hunting an Internet Killer tells the tale of a publicity-hungry murderer who likes a good chase.
ATIKH RASHID
The enduring notoriety that the Zodiac killer — who terrorised Northern California in the late 1960s and early 1970s — continues to enjoy even after 50 years of the series of incidents, is not so much because of his gruesome crimes but that he turned them into a game. A game that he played with the police and public at large in full media glare.
The Zodiac killer, whose identity still remains unconfirmed, not only succeeded in forcing news dailies to publish his handwritten letters and cryptograms, but his goals of seeking meet with newer successes with every documentary, feature film or media article that appears on the scene, years after the original crimes.
About four decades later, in 2010, a 28-year-old from Toronto, Canada, sets out to achieve a similar goal, using the same methods, but via a different medium: the internet. Luka Magnotta’s criminal deeds and a hunt launched by a group of ‘internet nerds’ is the subject of the latest Netflix mini-series Don’t F**k With Cats: Hunting an Internet Killer. Directed by Mark Lewis, it was released on Netflix last week. In this three-episode docu-series, a failed show business aspirant Magnotta adopts ways and means which are eerily similar to the Zodiac killer. He acquires notoriety by committing gruesome crimes and using the internet to spread the word about his ruthless methods. He deliberately drops clues for those looking to hunt him down and makes the chase a story in itself.
The documentary starts in 2010, when Magnotta posts a video on the internet, which shows him killing two cats by suffocating them using a plastic bag and a vacuum cleaner. This attracts the attention of animal lovers who launch an online hunt to catch the cat-killer. Egged on by the attention, Magnotta proceeds to repeat similar atrocities on cats and posts them on the internet. While the angry internet-sleuths take this as a challenge, Magnota is aware of this ‘manhunt’ by a small group of internet nerds and he chides them and misleads them by dropping clues in each of his videos. The US-based amateur internet-sleuths — most prominently Deanna Thompson aka Baudi Moovan and John Green — who observe Magnotta’s behaviour pattern over a period and worry that he may soon graduate to more serious crimes. They also approach the Canadian police to warn about Magnotta but the latter doesn’t show much interest.
Deanna Thompson aka Baudi Moovan
In 2012, Magnotta takes the next logical step. He murders a young man, a 33-year-old computer engineering student from China, and releases the video of the gruesome act online. Magnotta then dismembered Lin’s body and mails his severed feet and hands to the headquarters of Canada’s Conservative and Liberal Parties — wrapped in silk paper with suggestive poems written on the inner side. At this stage, the police get involved and the case then turns into a full-fledged international manhunt as Magnotta flees from Toranto to Montreal, Paris and finally to Germany.
Use of social media platforms including Facebook, YouTube and portals in the deep web are an inalienable part of Magnotta’s crime design. He carefully choreographs his entry into the scene by putting videos pertaining to cruelty to cats — thus violating the ‘Rule Zero’ of the internet that ‘You don’t mess with the cats’.
Murderer Luka Magnotta’s story is also a tale of what happens when a criminal mind obsessed with gaining fame meets cinephilia. As is revealed in the mini-series, Magnotta, a failed actor-model, draws his inspiration for the crimes depicted in movies. His choices of aliases, profile pictures for fake social media accounts as well as cities where he commits the gruesome crimes, come from some of the most well-known Hollywood crime films, such as Basic Instinct (1992), American Psycho (2000) and Catch Me If You Can (2002).
In the film, Magnotta comes across as a “narcist extraordinaire”, who yearns for Jack the Ripper-level attention of the public and the media. In this pursuit, years before he embarks on the cat-killing misadventure, he creates fake rumours about him dating a female serial killer and fools newspapers into publishing the stories of his denials. Later, when he makes the ‘snuff videos’ they are full of homages to other serial killers — historical or fictional — either through visuals or references.
The success of Don’t F**k With Cats lies in turning this story of a cumbersome online pursuit into a compelling, binge-worthy thriller. The three-hour, mini-series has the energy and tension of a gritty high-octane action thriller — although most of the ‘chase’ happens within the bedrooms of Baudi and Green. Such a story, with a lot of information and little movement, holds the risk of being boring. However, The Cats… is also a triumph for the audio-visual medium and cinematic language as the director succeeds in making static elements such as still pictures, computer screens, web-pages become, in a way, mobile on the screen to complement the fast-paced plot.The documentary builds interest and manages to keep it at a high level as the protagonists engage in tedious work of analysing videos posted by Magnotta, frame by frame, checking the digital footprint left by him and even geographical peculiarities of the household items visible in the videos.
Although the film is about violent crimes, the gore is largely omitted. This has been achieved by making the characters describe the videos, instead of the showing them directly to the audience.
Towards the end, the mini-series poses a question to its protagonists: did the internet-sleuths who chased Magnotta from his first video until the day he was finally nabbed, feed his narcissism to the point that he had to go forward and perform one outrageous act after another? Perhaps they did. But have we, as viewers, who are intrigued, disgusted, impressed, outraged or shocked with Magnotta’s deeds, fallen for his design? Every click on the ‘play button’ must be bringing a smile to Magnotta’s face as he counts his years in prison.
Hellaro is a celebration of colour and cause. It’s enjoyable if you can ignore the shortcomings.
The film’s most celebrated part — its meticulously choreographed dance sequences — is also the most problematic one.
ATIKH RASHID
FOLKTALES provide good fodder for cinema. The tales have an inherent strength which has helped them survive for centuries. They also do not have a claimant author clinging to the content and commanding ownership. In the Indian context, where filmmakers have to ensure that the film includes certain ‘must-haves’, which will enable it a commercial life, the folktales also provide a flexibility in adaptation that would otherwise be difficult to secure in case of a celebrated work of literature.
Hellaro, directed by Abhishek Shah, which has brought laurels for Gujarati cinema by winning the industry’s first ever Golden Lotus at National Film Awards, is a folktale adaptation which tries to tick all the right boxes. This is something that has helped the film’s first-time director secure rave reviews, two national awards as well as a special mention at the recently concluded International Film Festival of India (IFFI).
Hellaro, which in Gujarati means ‘a strong gust of wind’, takes its plot from a popular folktale from a small and forgotten region of Gujarat — the sandy and solitary Prathand in the desert of Kutch, close to the frontier with Pakistan — and turns into a cinematic feast with vibrant visuals and overtly melodramatic ebbs and flows. In the process, however, the folktale that the film draws its story from is retained only in its bare frame.
The plot follows a group of upper-caste women, who are living in an extremely patriarchal and suppressive system, and are barred from doing garba — the Gujarati folk dance — owing to a superstition that it would anger the village deity, who ironically is female. As the women suffer this injustice silently, enters a young, semi-educated and rebellious girl Manjari (played by Shraddha Dangar) after she is married into the village. During the daily ritual of fetching water from a far-off pond, the women discover a wayward, low-caste drummer (convincingly played by Jayesh More) who agrees to play for them at Manjari’s request. Although reluctant initially, the women join the dance and this becomes their secret routine during the daily trip to fetch water. As the crime is discovered and punishment is suffered, the women manage to retain their right to garba, not because of a change of heart on the part of men but as it’s discovered in the climax of the film that as women dance the goddess ‘blesses’ the village with rains.
The plot of the folktale, Vrajvani No Dholi (Vrajvani’s Drummer), is considerably different. Here, a handsome but ‘low-caste’ drummer walks into a village and starts beating his drum in the square. The sound is so enchanting and irresistible that women drop their chores, gather around the drummer and start dancing. The men find nothing wrong in this until a jealous priest turns one of the men against the dholi, pointing to his caste. The man kills the drummer, and as the beats stop, the women smack their heads with their bangles and kill themselves as if to atone the sin.
The film plays down the caste aspect of the story and reduces it to a sub-plot. Instead writer-director Shah invents the theme of women’s rebellion against patriarchy and suppression as the rallying point of the film. For this purpose it has to introduce the ban on garba, although, in the folktale, there’s no embargo on the dancing of women. This new plot works fine too — the changes can be ascribed to Shah being, confessedly, a ‘feminist’. But the apparent success of the screenplay, the bland characterisation dampens all the fun that the plot holds promise for. Bhaglo is a man with sympathy for women’s cause because of his regular trips to the city. Like most men in the village, Manjari’s husband is an incorrigible misogynist, who believes in violating his wife than loving her.
Such characterisation and overt melodrama takes the film closer to the aesthetics of the one strand of the Indian art-house cinema of ’70s and ’80s. One is reminded of Ketan Mehta’s Mircha Masala (1987) which, although doesn’t specify its setting, is based in the same desert of Kutch. In fact, the setting, structure and sartorial choices of its inhabitants, the ritual of fetching water from a far-off water body, hints that it’s the same cinematic village that we have seen in Mehta’s film.
The film’s most celebrated part — its meticulously choreographed dance sequences — is also the most problematic one. The sequences designed by the celebrated Gujarati choreographers Arsh and Sameer Tanna, who have previously worked for Bollywood blockbusters Ram Leela (2013) and Hum Dil De Chuke Sanam (1999) — reduce the women’s brief interlude from the repression into a spectacle for the viewer. The group wears colourful chania-cholis and does synchronised dancing. It is done in a way that it is agreeable to the camera, to the extent that the vessels dropped by women in the sand arrange themselves in symmetric form at the edge of the frame. It makes one wonder if the women are dancing for their freedom from patriarchy or to the enslavement of the camera.
That said, the praise and recognition that the film has received is likely to reinvigorate the Gujarati film industry. What has been achieved by the team, in a respectable but small budget of Rs 2.5 crore, is no small feat. Hellaro is a celebration of colour and cause, and it’s an enjoyable film if you are ready to ignore its many shortcomings.
A short film by the students of Film and Television Institute of India (FTII), And What is the Summer Saying, was selected for the recently concluded Berlin International Film Festival. The students talk about the non-fiction form and the possibilities it offers.
ATIKH RASHID
TALKING of love has never been easy in India. It’s more difficult for women. As one travels away from urban centres, to smaller towns and villages, it almost becomes a taboo. A short film made by the students of Film and Television Institute of India (FTII) captures the expression of love and longing in a remote village that must only be conveyed in whispers. The 23-minute film, And What is the Summer Saying, which was screened at Berlin International Film Festival (Berlinale) that concluded last week, is set in a tiny village nestled in the Sahaydris where humans and forest co-exist as amicable neighbours.
The film, which calls itself a documentary, is far from true to its generic convention. It comes close to the tradition of experimental filmmakers such as Thai director Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives (2010) and Mysterious Object at Noon (2000), and London-based Ben Rivers’ Two Years at Sea (2011) and What Means Something (2016) — films that trade the borders of fiction and non-fiction filmmaking.
This is the third film made by the team, comprising Mayank Khurana as cinematographer, Shreyank Nanjappa as sound designer and Ghanshyam Shimpi as editor, helmed by Payal Kapadia as director. Their last project Afternoon Clouds was the only Indian film to be screened at Cannes last year.
The audio emerges as a primary storytelling device in the short film, with the soundtrack giving sound and words the space to create meaning.
According to Kapadia, non-fiction filmmaking is an open form which concedes a lot of space for experimentation. “You can use a lot of devises because it is not necessarily narrative filmmaking. We look at documentary in narrow terms but its only difference from fiction is the approach. While making this film I was like a scavenger, looking for many stories and finally selected a few that made sense to me, and created a sense of a whole,” she said.
eam members from left (Shreyank Nanjappa, Payal Kapadia) during the shoot.
In the film, a honey-gatherer who depends on the jungle, to earn his living, enjoys an intimate relation with the jungle and those who inhabit it. The wilderness that engulfs the village in the night is captured in quiet, still visuals which let the soundscape of the film do most of the talking. The audio emerges as primary storytelling device with each layer serving a purpose. The whispers carrying sentiments of tenderness stand out.
Nanjappa, the sound designer, says the aim was to make the audience feel the wilderness. “Although dialogues and words can give information, they might not always help in conveying feelings.We meticulously designed the soundtrack giving sound and words the space to create meaning and unfold its effects on the viewer.”
There’s no piece to camera, a prominent feature of the documentary form, with exclusive reliance on voice recorded during intimate, informal chats. The fact that the crew was mostly male, didn’t help in making the women open up about matters of love when on camera.
“Considering the circumstances and the time that I had at my disposal, I remained an outsider. Even with the way the film is framed, there is always a distance. At one point in the film, one of the women weave a song with my name in it, telling me to dance. As if, I as a filmmaker too, am being led somewhere down a rabbit hole,” says Kapadia.
The director and some of the crew members have returned from Berlin where the film was screened multiple times, among other films in the ‘Berlinale Short’ that dealt with issues of gender and sexuality. “We had quite an interesting response. But I think most people outside are not completely able to fathom the extent of the issues here. For a woman here, to even openly say ‘I love you’ is so difficult. I cannot claim that the film was able to make people understand the issue but it definitely opened up an interesting dialogue,” says Kapadia.
The team is now working on their next film, which will be their final project at FTII that deals with the “impossibility of love”. The film tells the story of two scientists, who are trying to investigate the effects of climate change in the Western Ghats, and a woman who remembers her love affair when she was a teen.
Marathi filmmaker Gajendra Ahire, winner of many national and state film awards, has made 44 films so far. He talks about his beginnings, what drives him to make films at breakneck speed and his latest film Pimpal.
ATIKH RASHID
In an article written on him in 2011, the author compares director Gajendra Ahire to American director Roger Corman and controversial Japanese filmmaker Koji Wakamatsu in terms of their filmmaking speed. The only Indian name that comes to mind is of Priyadarshan, who has made over 90 films in three decades. Apart from this aspect, there are no similarities between the international directors or Ahire’s Indian counterpart.
While the majority of Priyadarshan’s work can be classified as “comic potboilers”, Ahire’s films are grim, probing and often offer a heartbreaking take on social realities in contemporary society. His characters — always fully developed and well-crafted – pose questions that are not only uncomfortable but often brushed under the carpet.
For Ahire (48), the question — “Why do you make so many films?” – is an easy one to answer. “Because that’s the only thing I do. I like the high that filmmaking gives you. I’m not doing anything else. I am not sitting in a bar sipping booze. I’m not involved in any other business. All I’m doing is writing films and making them. Fortunately, I have people around me who are helping me make them.”
He takes a pause as if he has made his point, only to add, “To tell you the truth, making a film doesn’t give you fulfillment. You always feel that something was left out. That feeling of anxiety, sense of incompletion leads you to another film. This chain doesn’t stop. It makes you work in a loop; that’s why I’m doing movie after movie.”
In early 1990s, when he was 21, living in Mumbai with his family and a graduate in Marathi literature, he left his home to escape the pressures of finding a job and settling down. “There was no point living there and continuously fighting with them,” he says. He then lived on the streets for several years guided by the protagonist of Arun Sadhu’s novel Shodhyatra, who also leaves his home to find the meaning of life.
During these two-three years, spent on the street — going places, doing odd jobs as a daily wager such as a cleaner, he came face to face with life and its realities. The people that he met and admired during this period and the situations which he lived and observed, often inspire the characters and plot lines of his films.
It was at the age of 23 that he wrote his first play for commercial theater. It was successful and opened doors for him for more plays, television serials. “You can’t replace vivid life experiences with observations or reading or imagination. It wont work if you say, ‘Let me go out and see what’s happening on the streets’. You would have to go through the process of life which gives you experiences that accumulate within you like honey drops. They will eventually come out in your work,” he says.
Despite being 44-films-old, Ahire feels that finding a producer for his next film is “as easy and as difficult” as it was for his first film, Not Only Mrs Raut. “It’s only your work that will help you get a producer. Although Mrs Raut didn’t get a release, people came forward to produce my next film because they saw the potential. It’s same even now. Anumati (2013) gave me Postcard (2014) which helped me get a producer for The Silence (2016), which then helped me get a producer for Pimpal (2017),” said Ahire.
Talking about Pimpal, his latest offering which won the Sant Tukaram Best Marathi Film Award at the recent Pune International Film Festival, Ahire reveals that the story, about the loneliness of a 70-year-old widower in Pune, whose kids are living in the US, came from his son, Chintamani. “He told me this story some years ago. I was surprised that a 17-year-old was talking about the psychological state of a 70-year-old man. The film is about the roots of an individual and how he struggles to cope with the fast-changing world. It’s also about happiness which, in these days, has become virtual. This happiness has no colour, smell or shape,” he says.
Kulkarni, the maker of contemporary Marathi classics Valu (2008), Deool (2010) & Vihir (2009) on exploring the non-fiction genre and his latest documentary, titled Kumbh, which chronicles the biggest gathering of humans.
Marathi film maker Umesh Kulkarni at his residence. Express photo by Arul Horizon, 17/05/2018, Pune
ATIKH RASHID
SINCE his very first feature film, Valu (The Wild Bull, 2008), filmmaker Umesh Kulkarni found his own audience base across Maharashtra and beyond, which only grew with his subsequent films — Vihir (2009), Deool (2011), which he directed, and Masala (2012), Pune 52 (2013) which he produced. But it’s been a long break for Kulkarni since his last release as director Highway (2015), which did not do too well in cinemas.
So where’s this filmmaker who turned the tide for Marathi films in the late 2000s, which were facing both aesthetic and commercial challenges, with Valu? Apparently, Kulkarni (42) is immersed in exploring new possibilities that have opened up in the non-fiction genre. He has spent the last two years making a documentary on the Kumbh Mela and is in the process of making another on the Wada culture in old Pune. At the same time, Kulkarni has also launched a documentary film club with the help from artist Raju Sutar and National Film Archive of India (NFAI), with an aim to showcase best works from Indian non-fiction filmmaking tradition to the general public.
Still from Kularni’s student project Girni which he made while studying at Film and Television Institute of India.
“In 2009, I had made a documentary for FTII called Three of us. It was shown at several international festivals including the International Documentary Film Festival Amsterdam (IFDA), which the biggest festival of documentary films in the world. While visiting the festival to present my film, the exposure to non-fiction form opened an entire new world to me. It was there that I realised that feature films and documentaries are not two separate, distinct forms with fixed boundaries. The way films are being made internationally, the boundaries between these two genres are getting merged and filmmakers are trying to explore the area that lies in between,” says Kulkarni, adding that some of the documentaries that he watched at the festival influenced him and left a lasting impact.
Back home, he observed that while India had a certain tradition of non-fiction filmmaking, there were no avenues for these films, with filmmakers struggling with the release and screenings of the films. “In many countries, there are festivals dedicated to non-fiction films, in some places there are television channels exclusively for documentaries. In India, although we had filmmakers like Mani Kaul, Shyam Benegal and others making documentaries and the Films Division funding a great number of them, there was very little exposure to the common public,” says Kulkarni. The film club, he adds, has recently screened Kamal Swaroop’s Pushkar Puran (2017), the first-ever retrospective of Amit Dutta in India, as well as non-fiction work by Mani Kaul.
Meanwhile, Kulkarni also started working on his own non-fiction projects. Kumbh, which he finished recently, was shot over several years chronicling the biggest gathering of humans. The film was selected at IDFA, New York Indian Film Festival and Kerala International Film Festival (KIFF).
“Kumbh is not a conventional documentary, as it tries to explore the space in the margins of fiction and non-fiction. I am at present also working on another documentary on a wada in old Pune where my grandma used to live. I have spent many days of my childhood there. Now, all the families that used to live there have shifted to their own apartments. I’m trying to explore the texture of life that the wada offered to its residents and how it has changed,” says Kulkarni, adding that he has decided to make a documentary or short film between every two feature films.
While he’s following his changing interests, doesn’t he feel that it may take away his fan base which may rather like him to stick to his flair — comical realism with a social message. “As an artist, I feel that I have to keep trying to find newer ways of expression. An artist can’t be a toy in the hands of the audience. If I continue to do what I have been doing, then I become too predictable and it gets boring. Also, we should give an opportunity to a different art form to get established. It may take some time as had happened in other cases such as Impressionism in painting or short story in literature. People resist, ridicule at first but later they accept if the movement has its merits,” says Kulkarni.
