Sachin Kundalkar places a lot of emphasis on his films’ locations. To him, they are as important as the people that inhabit them. This prominence for the place is readily apparent in his latest feature, Pondicherry. The evidence is not just in the title. The film’s poster, for instance, has a pastel-coloured tiled-roof house with long windows, a vintage lamp post, coconut palms, a bicycle and other quintessential aspects of the erstwhile French colonial town.
The film revolves around a Marathi woman, Nikita (played by Sai Tamhankar), who stays in an old villa in Pondicherry with her eight-year-old son and runs a homestay. Her husband, a Tamilian, is in the Navy. So, he is away from her most of the time. Pondicherry is about the characters Nikita encounters and the resultant conflicts that arise from these encounters.
“We meet so many migrated Maharashtrian families with amazing stories to tell. And nobody’s telling them. So, my co-writer Tejas Modak and I decided to make a film about this Marathi family, who’s staying away from Maharashtra, in a multilingual place. That was the genesis of of Pondicherry,” explains Sachin, a two-time National Film Award recipient.
But it could have been any place in India. Why Pondicherry in particular?
“We chose Pondicherry because it’s not just beautiful but also houses many cultures. It has so many languages, so many kinds of people come there in search of something.”
But to know Pondicherry, it was not enough to just visit the place; he had to live there. “When you go to Paris, the day you get extremely bored of the Eiffel Tower and the Mona Lisa, that’s when you start living there,” he says, “Likewise, in Pondicherry, there is an influx of weekend tourism and people come there to visit the ashrams. You really have to get rid of both these extremes to find your own Pondicherry.”
And, “finding Pondicherry” took several months. He rented a homestay, travelled around in two-wheelers, went for long walks, brought groceries, and cooked his own food. As much as he could, he imbibed the town. The buildings, roads, foods, and the colours of Pondicherry fascinated Sachin. .
“If we had shot the film traditionally – with a big camera setup – then, we would have needed a big crew, the roads to be blocked, the people evacuated, and a lot of extras. It would have been unnatural. So, we decided to dissolve the camera so people wouldn’t know there was a film being shot.”
Sachin Kundalkar (right) during the shoot of ‘Pondicherry’ | Photo Credit: Special Arrangement
After a lot of deliberation, Sachin and his cinematographer, Milind Jog, decided to shoot the film with an iPhone. This dramatically lightened the crew. “Including actors, we were just 15 people. There was no lighting or make-up. The actors had to dress up on their own. They commuted in scooters. It was a totally new experience for everyone involved.”
Despite the lighter crew and almost invisible equipment, the making of the film was not simple. “For 10 benefits of shooting with a phone, you find 10 challenges,” says Sachin, “Your camera lensing varies, your light perception changes, the actors need to be aware of the distance from the camera… [After the shoot], you need a very good laboratory to process your images and an equally good sound designer.”
Since Sachin wanted to place his characters in Pondicherry without disturbing its natural milieu, the crew had to be meticulous with its planning. “We calibrated shooting times for the scenes. We knew which roads would be crowded when. We knew when there would be more hawkers, when we could see more bicycles, when there would be more schoolchildren... we basically tried to match the timings of the city.”
The process was painstaking but enriching, he adds.
And, it seems, for Sachin, the process was more fulfilling than the result. He is happy with the response so far for the film on social media but does not want to dwell too much on it. “I always say goodbye to a film when I hand over the copy after the mixing. I move on because I’m always busy writing my next script.”
Sachin does not even attend public screenings of his films. There are two reasons. One: he is shy. The second one is more profound. He says, “I think a film’s theatrical run is an exciting but short-lived event to judge the lifespan and the value of a film. Films outlive you. They don’t end in theatres. That’s just the beginning. Films are perpetually beautiful entities. Even after they are out of theatres, they keep responding to you in one way or another.”
‘Pondicherry’ is running in theatres. It is expected be out in Planet Marathi OTT, a streaming platform, in March 2022
