While Anubhav Sinha’s Article 15 won the Audience Award at the Bagri Foundation London India Film Festival last week, a 22-minute Marathi short film — Rohan Kanawade’s U Ushacha — walked away with the Satyajit Ray Short Film Award. “The film is a subtle and courageous portrayal of rural lesbian love, as a single mother and farm labourer is drawn to a woman teacher at the local school. It also shows the gender impact of economic distress: when a farmer is in debt or dies, his wife can immediately become sexually vulnerable or [a]prey”: read the jury citation.
Queer perspective
U Ushacha (U for Usha) is a sensitive portrayal of the awakening of desire between two women — an illiterate, poor labourer Usha (Kiran Khoje) and the primary school teacher (Arpita Ghogardare) at the village school. Kanawade’s Sundar (2015) was about cross-dressing and the taboos associated with it. A previous short, Khidkee (2017) looked at perceptions people form of each other while looking across a window. “When I decided that I will make one more LGBTQ film, I was clear that it will be with women,” says the filmmaker. He was also clear about setting it in a poor, rural zone rather than any privileged urban pocket.
Much against our own (mis)perceptions of widespread conservatism amongst the rural folk, Usha comes across as refreshingly broad-minded in embracing her attraction unabashedly, without any sense of guilt, embarrassment or victimhood. “She is comfortable with her sexuality and also at ease in expressing it,” emphasises Kanawade. The narrative also shows the lesbian relationship as a means of empowerment for Usha, it fires her passion to read and write so as to measure up to the teacher one day.
Shades of love
In a way, the film also harks back to Kanawade’s own attraction for a neighbour in his adolescent years. “It was all about enjoying spending time with the guy. I didn’t even know the word ‘gay’ back then,” he recollects. According to him, people grow and change with time. So a married woman with kids may discover the joys of lesbian love much later in time. “Ultimately it’s about finding completion in love, whether it is between man and woman, man and man or woman and woman,” he asserts.
All Kanawade wanted to do was make a positive film about a gay relationship, especially after the striking down of Section 377. “The homophobia in people’s minds is still not gone,” he says. It's the reason why the normalisation of LGBTQIA characters, relationships and stories is of paramount concern for him. He thinks that it helps in making a film reach out to the masses.
Self-taught filmmaker
An interior designer by training, Kanawade has had no formal education in filmmaking. The Amboli boy remembers being taken to films by his father when still in school and being fascinated by the projector in the cinema hall. While in college, the announcement of a short film competition, made his friends push him into making a film with a mobile. “A friend helped in editing but it took so long that I couldn’t submit it on time for the competition,” he recalls. Since then it has been all about learning the craft on the job with a China-made Handycam and tutorials on YouTube as initial guides.
He’s also learnt by watching world cinema — Michael Haneke, Asghar Farhadi among others. But there is no particular filmmaker who comes to mind as inspiration. It’s the all about the films not as much as the makers, he says. So he may have loved Nagraj Manjule’s Fandry but not Sairat as much.
Farhadi’s A Separation and The Salesman may have grabbed him but not About Elly and The Past.
Kanawade made his first film in 2007 but the first finished product, which he entered for an inter-collegiate competition, was Feelings at Death , made in 2010. Lonely Walls came in 2013. U Ushacha is his biggest film till date in terms of the budget with his friends pitching in as producers. “I realised that for raising the quality of the film, to improve it technically, I needed funds,” he says. But still, with a budget of ₹11 lakh, it feels more frugal than most. “It’s a big amount for me. People don’t like putting money into shorts. Most of them get made by getting people on board out of sheer goodwill,” he says.
Re alistic setting
The film was shot in Sawargaon Ghule village in Ahmednagar district where a few of Kanawade’s relatives stay. “The minute I reached there the visuals started falling in place. Everything about the place in the film is real, nothing is fake,” he says.
The process of shooting also made him learn things he didn’t know. Like how dandiya isn’t just played in Gujarat or in the cities of Maharashtra but in rural pockets of the state as well. “We made the villagers set everything the way it is during the Navratris,” he says, while talking about one of the film’s key scenes. Kanawade had a cast and crew screening of the film in February 2019 in Mumbai. The residents of the village came to attend it as well. After the film was over, the Sarpanch (head of the village) requested him to bring the film to the village and the village teacher expressed happiness that a film on such a significant theme was shot in their village.
Is he set on exploring LGBTQIA themes in depth in the future as well? He says, “I don’t want to worry about whether I will make LGBT films or not. I want to make films that interest me.” What he’s sure of, for now, is making films in Marathi. It is his language, the language of his memories and the stories he has heard and written. “It is important to bring that flavour alive.”
