In Mahesh Narayanan’s Malik, the sea is an integral to the film’s narrative. Through its protagonist, Ahammadali Sulaiman (played by Fahadh Faasil), a migrant, we delve into the story of the evolving relationships between the local communities in the adjacent coastal villages of Ramadapally and Edavathura. The sea forms the backdrop of friendship, romance, betrayal, and bloodshed in the gripping drama.
“All my stories come from my surroundings, not from any kind of literary work. I couldn’t have set Malik anywhere other than a seaside village because the sea is an integral part of the conflict of that story. The place is an important part of my films,” says Mahesh.
His most recent film, Ariyippu, is no different. It is about an immigrant Malayali couple working in a medical glove manufacturing factory in Noida. In this film, too, the importance of geography is apparent. Because we see how language, culture, terrain, and weather can alienate people. The film is also set during the peak phase of COVID-19, which made it an apt choice to open the ninth edition of IIHS’s Urban Lens film festival.
After two years of being online, the festival is back to physical screenings this year. Apart from Ariyippu, the other films at the festival include Shaunak Sen’s Oscar-nominated documentary feature All That Breathes, Wanphrang Diengdoh’s Lorni - The Flaneur, Rebana Liz John’s Ladies Only, and Aboozar Amini’s Kabul, City in the Wind.
Explaining the choice of films for this year, Subasri Krishnan, the curator of the festival and a filmmaker herself, says, “We went for films, both fiction and nonfiction, that deal with the condition of being in a city either physically or tangentially or metaphorically. Since we live in a post-COVID-19 world, we also picked films that represented the pandemic experience in some way or the other.”
City and cinema
According to Subasri, city and cinema influence each other. “In Rangeela, for instance, Aamir Khan speaks what you call the ‘Bambaiya Hindi’, which you find people speaking in real life. However, with the dialect spoken by a star on screen, it gets popular,” she says, “How the city is represented in cinema finds a way into the cultural lives of people, individually and collectively. The reason we started the festival is to see how a city has found a voice in films through different artists and filmmakers.”
Wanphrang’s Lorni - The Flaneur, for instance, is set in Shillong. The protagonist of his film, Shem (Adil Hussain), navigates the narrow streets and dark alleys as he embarks on an emotional and mental journey reflective of his reality and that of the city.
Wanphrang, who lives between Shillong and Brighton in the UK, says, “My city has not only been an integral part of my films but all of my art. Sometimes the stories that need to be told choose you. The environment I find myself in requires me to tell a particular story. A landscape nurtures a certain kind of storytelling or a legend or a myth or even a culture.”
He sees urban spaces as a melting pot of people of diverse identities coming together, clashing and interacting with each other. “These spaces challenge the notion of a glorious past. They are living proof that there is no such thing as “purity”. This is very important, taking into consideration what India is reimagining itself to be – this homogenised, one-nation identity based on a particular faith.”
Experiential knowledge
Since cinema can shape the way people think and chronicles the social and cultural history of a place, Wanphrang reckons filmmakers should be responsible when they depict a place and its people.
“A lot of mainstream Bollywood films that have been set in the Northeast fail because they don’t understand the character of the place,” he says, “The place is always a character as opposed to a mere backdrop. The people who make these films won’t know, for instance, what it feels like when you walk through the butchers’ markets and smell the flesh that’s hanging there. You cannot reinvent a place unless you have had experiential knowledge of that place.”
Mainstream Hindi cinema, he says, fails to understand the plurality of the Northeast. “The south of India is not a homogenous identity. There are so many different characteristics that make the South. Similarly, there are many linguistic identities, geographic locations, and cultural nuances in the Northeast. You can’t just represent Northeast just by throwing in a few characters whose faces look a certain way.”
Mahesh, meanwhile, believes that cinema has no boundaries. A filmmaker born in Kerala can narrate a story happening in Noida. However, he says, they need to understand the place and the people they are depicting in the film. In Ariyippu, for instance, he was familiar with his central characters but to acquaint himself with the place, he spent over two months with the migrant factory workers in Noida.
When asked about why he is fascinated with the stories of the migrants, Mahesh says something that encapsulates the bearing of a place in people’s lives: “The vulnerable nature of human beings can be easily explored when you put them in an alien environment.”
Urban Lens film festival will be on from February 16 to 19 at Goethe-Institu/Max Mueller Bhavan and the IIHS, Bengaluru City Campus. Entry is free. Visit urbanlens.iihs.co.in for registration and more details
