Gali Guleiyan the place informs Gali Guleiyan the film. “It’s a character. Without it the film would not exist,” says debutante filmmaker Dipesh Jain. The locale is not a figment of Jain’s imagination but the neighbourhood in Old Delhi where his maternal grandparents lived their entire lives. “We used to visit them as kids so the images of that area were ingrained in my mind while writing the script,” he says. Making the film then was about revisiting memories — about how his grandfather was comfortable in the half a mile radius around his home but couldn’t deal with the world beyond. Jain’s claustrophobia as a child is reflected in his protagonist Khuddoos, played by Manoj Bajpayee. Gali Guleiyan premiered at Busan in 2017 and won the grand jury award at Jio MAMI the same year, hits theatres this weekend.
Geography matters
Jain has tried to redefine how Old Delhi is perceived and portrayed in Hindi films — as this happy, community-oriented place. He wanted to keep things free of nostalgia and stereotypes — no kite-flying, pigeons and Jama Masjid. Instead Jain portrays the intense, dark side of the alleyways. “That was my perception of it as a child, I couldn’t understand why people would live there all their life, why wouldn’t they move out. The world has moved past but these people are still there,” he recollects. The film then is about how places trap people. “Entrapment is a universal theme. We have tried to show it metaphorically through Old Delhi,” says the director.
For this debutante filmmaker the importance of location is higher than the story. Jain’s cinema idols are filmmakers like David Lean, Roman Polanski, Ingmar Bergman and Krzysztof Kieslowski. The films that have resonated with him are those that have built a compelling world. “In classical cinema the focus was on setting which means you are building a world — location, costumes, how you light them. I can tell any story in that world,” he says. That immersive space, he thinks, is getting compromised in the contemporary “quick” filmmaking ways. It’s no surprise then that the best part of filmmaking for him is the research, delving into articles, books and videos, to familiarise himself with the world he is setting up in the film. Jain describes films as a “solace” in his childhood. “When my friends used to play cricket I’d watch a film,” he recollects. A cold war ensued when he declared his filmmaking ambitions to his parents: “A lot of us have the same kind of stories. My father and I didn’t speak for two-three years.”
Silver dreams
Post his chartered accountancy degree, Jain worked in New York City as a tax consultant for mergers and acquisitions only to realise that, “It was not for me.” So he quit a job that was paying him “shitloads of money” and went to study filmmaking at Prague film school. From there he got selected at University of Southern California (USC) School of Cinematic Arts in Los Angeles for his master’s degree. If Prague was about getting exposed to the art of cinema, USC is where Jain learnt the craft of filmmaking, spending time making shorts and documentaries. His final film at USC, 11 Weeks , travelled to several festivals, winning the Director’s Guild of America student film award.
Jain’s film ambitions are clear, “I want to make films internationally. The next two films are both international with American and British A-listers,” he says.
But before that, is the film that would have been his first. Even before Gali Guleiyan , Jain’s script called A Stone’s Throw Away got a lot of traction in Los Angeles with Francis Ford Coppola ranking it amongst the top 30 scripts of the year. Jain describes the film set in Kashmir with an all-American cast as Argo -like. Since it was an expensive film to make for a first-timer most studios wanted to buy it out from Jain. “I decided I should make something that can prove to them that I can direct,” says Jain which led to Gali Guleiyan . It was also on a subject close to Jain’s heart — child abuse. He calls it an issue of parenting, “If you deny a child of love, you deny her/him of life…This is what the film is about,” he says.
