When S. Sukhdev passed away in 1979, he left behind, in the form of his films, a biography of a nascent republic. In a career spanning over two decades, he made more than 60 films —primarily documentaries — which won over 35 international and national awards. Yet, for all his achievement, he remained a total stranger to his daughter, Shabnam.
Shabnam, who was 14 when her father passed away, has now made a film that seeks to come to terms with their estrangement, to resolve the “baggage of the past”. Titled The Last Adieu , the film is a journey through the life and works of Sukhdev, which, while helping the director in her personal quest, also pays tribute to one of the pioneers of documentary cinema in India. “I realised in the course of filmmaking how important his works were. People were forgetting Sukhdev and it was important that I brought him to life.”
For India ’67 , a documentary made to mark 20 years of India’s freedom from British rule, Sukhdev travelled across the country for several months, keenly observing its absurdities. The film, which went on to compete for the Golden Bear at the 1968 Berlin Film Festival, prompted Satyajit Ray to say, “I like India ’67 but not for its broad and percussive contrasts of poverty and influence, beauty and squalor, modernity and primitivity – however well shot and cut they might be. I like it for its details – for the black beetle that crawls along the hot sand, for the street dog that pees on the parked bicycle, for the bead of perspiration that dangles on the nose tip of the begrimed musician.”
Sukhdev also made the documentary Nine Months To Freedom , a haunting chronicle of the Bangladesh Liberation War and perhaps the first documentary to secure theatrical release in India. Among his other famous works are After The Silence , Khilonewala and Maa Ki Pukar .
The Last Adieu , which won the National Award for Best Biographical Film this year, uses a mix of interviews, clips from films, photographs and audio recordings to resurrect Sukhdev. The result is a portrait that reveals the public and private aspects of the filmmaker’s life, which were often at conflict. Since Sukhdev was wedded to a cause larger than himself, family wasn’t his immediate concern. The director recalls her father being immersed in his work to the point of being inaccessible. Moreover, she was shielded from him by her mother, who felt Shabnam was too young to understand her father’s life, and his friends. It didn't help that he was also given to alcoholism.
Shabnam says she became a filmmaker almost by default. After Sukhdev’s passing, it was expected of her to carry forward his legacy. “It’s like my career choices were made for me.” An alumnus of FTII, and now an outreach advisor there, Shabnam has made, among others, Ishaa Journals , a documentary on the immigrant youth experience in Canada, and Stranger In My Own Skin , on an Egyptian poet in Canada.
The beginnings of The Last Adieu lay in a poem she wrote in 2005 for a poetry festival in Edmonton, Canada, where she was previously based. “That’s when I started looking inwards, trying to understand what my father meant to me or didn’t mean to me. It was a process, and when I wrote the poem I realised there is a film in the poem.”
Thereafter, she visited India and recorded interviews with friends of her father, tempering their recollections with her critique. “I wanted to fill the gaps in my memories while there was still time,” she says. Some of the interviewees are actor Shashi Kapoor; writer and actor Partap Sharma; voiceover artist Zul Vellani; cinematographer Baba Azmi; production designer Bijon Dasgupta; filmmakers M.S. Sathyu and Shyam Benegal; journalists P. Sainath and Dileep Padgaonkar; and Salim Sheikh, assistant director on many of Sukhdev’s films. While Shyam Benegal says he has “never seen any handheld work as good as Sukhdev’s”, a cinematographer recalls his being an inspirational presence in the moribund, sarkari atmosphere of Films Division.
Sukhdev’s association with Films Division forms part of the focus of the documentary. After all, he was part of an inspired group of filmmakers in the 1960s and 1970s who, despite working within an apparatus that expected conformity, showed, in the words of film critic Bikram Singh, a “willingness to face facts and, occasionally, even to stick the neck out (and) say an oblique ‘boo’ to the establishment.” The anger and idealism of Sukhdev’s films dissipated in later years, however, when during the Emergency he made what appeared to be a string of pro-Indira Gandhi films. The film also details Sukhdev’s unlucky foray into the Indian film industry, where he directed My Love , featuring Shashi Kapoor and Sharmila Tagore. Reshma Aur Shera , directed by Sunil Dutt, also features uncredited work by Sukhdev.
In mapping Sukhdev’s unique trajectory as a filmmaker, Shabnam makes her own quiet journey from denial to anger and ultimately reconciliation. In his films, she finds the father she had been looking for, and bids him a belated farewell.
