Just back from Goa, Babu Eshwar Prasad is happy that many international film festival directors have seen his debut Kannada feature film Gaali Beeja (Wind Seed) at the NFDC Film Bazaar, a forum for indie films to pitch themselves to the next level, have their film seen by investors, producers, and distributors.
Babu, a familiar face on Bengaluru’s art circuit, tells the MetroPlus how Gaali Beeja , a film he’s written and directed, is an effort by fellow artists from Mysuru and Bengaluru to bring a story to life. “As an artist, I’ve always worked alone in my studio. But, for a film, you have to build a team and work together as one, matching your ideas with theirs. It helped us vibe and communication became easy because we were all from an art background — from the cinematographers to the actors, most of us are from Shantiniketan, CAVA (Chamarajendra Academy of Visual Arts, Mysuru), Karnataka Chitrakala Parishath, and Ken School of Art.” The lead actor is a theatre actor. Babu himself completed his BFA in Painting from the Karnataka Chitrakala Parishath, Bengaluru and MFA in Graphics from M.S. University, Baroda. “While scripting, I started visualising some of these people as my characters. I had the role cut out for them in my mind.” The film is now in post-production and the sound mixing is on, says Babu.
“Almost every one has this desire to make a film, I think. I also had mine,” smiles the soft-spoken and reticent director at the National Gallery of Modern Art, on a sunny winter Bengaluru afternoon. Cinema has always been an abiding influence for him, he says, even as he’s been organising film festivals as part of the Bangalore Film Society. His debut feature film is a homage to filmmakers such as Wim Wenders, Jim Jarmusch, and Abbas Kiarostami.
Gaali Beeja is a road movie, and the road “as a metaphor for life, for the journeys we make, the transitory relationships that are formed in the process” is the main character as such, says Babu. The film opens with Prakash, a road engineer, leaving for a site visit to an unnamed village. On the way he offers a lift to Jaffer, a former pirated DVD seller, who gives Prakash a set of road movies to watch. The sequences in the films and the people that Prakash meets in life begin to resonate with each other. There is Lingappa, a farmer who waits by the bus stop on the highway for someone, Manjanna, a poster sticker who cycles around desperately searching for something, and a woman biker who captures her long solitary journeys on a camera strapped to her helmet. Jaffer’s comment that Prakash’s life could be a film comes back to him as he witnesses each person starring in their own road movie. “The road means something different to every one. In the current Indian context the road is also representative of progress and development and the upheavals and rhetoric surrounding it,” says Babu. The film was shot on locations in Bengaluru and along the NH4 over 21 days. “It’s a film about films and there are several references to famous road films that I have seen since my college days.”
“A filmmaker’s film is very different from an artists’ film, in terms of the cinematic language. I’ve used more imagery and lot of silence to narrate my story. I’m not bound by what is art or commercial cinema. I didn’t want to overtly give any message to society. But the possibilities of what I didn’t find in painting I started seeing it here.” So soundscapes rule the film. There’s no music track as such. And two sound artists from Switzerland and Mexico have contributed to the soundscape of the film.
Having dabbled in painting, sculpture, and photography, Babu made his first video Notes from My Diary as part of a workshop organised by Max Mueller Bhavan in 1997. He followed it up with Splice (2003), Dus ka Bees (2005) and Vortex (2008), all of which have been screened at several spaces including Arad Biennele (Romania) and SAVAC (South Asian Visual Arts Collective), Toronto. His more recent short videos, Looped (2012), and Fast Forward to Zero (2011), oscillate between still and moving images, and bear witness to industrialisation and its impact on the environment. Making short films and showing them in art spaces is a different ballgame altogether, than making a full length feature film for a wider audience, admits Babu. For starters, he had to set up Moving Focus Pictures and finance his own film, of course, with the help of generous individuals and friends who pitched in with funds.
The 95-minute film stars Venkatesh Prasad, Amaresh Bijjal, Mohammed Rizwan, Bhanu Prakash Chandra, and Divya. Cinematography is by B.R. Viswanath. It has been edited by B.N. Swamy.
For details see >facebook.com/movingfocuspictures
