The British Academy of Film and Television Arts (BAFTA) has selected 10 promising talents in cinema, television and gaming for its Breakthrough India initiative for 2022. In the second year of this initiative, the honourees were selected by a jury that included music composer A R Rahman, writer Apurva Asrani, actors Anupam Kher and Ratna Pathak Shah, director Shonali Bose and producers Guneet Monga and Siddharth Roy Kapur. The selection intends to help the new cohort explore international opportunities for networking and professional development, with the support of BAFTA and Netflix.
Excerpts from an interview with two of the honourees:
Ajitpal Singh
Writer-director
Ajitpal Singh | Photo Credit: BAFTA
Fire in the Mountains, Ajitpal Singh’s debut feature film, narrates the story of a mother trying to save money to build a road so that she could take her wheelchair-bound son for physiotherapy. His short film Rammat-Gammat explored how money and privilege differentiated two football players. The 2021 web series Tabbar (Family in Punjabi), written by Harman Wadala and Sandeep Jain and directed by Ajitpal Singh, is a crime thriller that follows a family thrown into the deep end and desperately trying to stay afloat, with a cast led by Pavan Malhotra and Supriya Pathak.
Ajitpal’s stories veer away from the mainstream: “I grew up in villages till I was 16, did my graduation in Ahmedabad and Mumbai has been home for the last eight years. I have family and friends in Ahmedabad and rural Punjab and this gives me insights into what is going on in India. I look for stories that reflect different people, not just the privileged classes.”
His father ran a cinema hall in Bathinda, but this is not where his interest in cinema stemmed from. Ajitpal remembers being more captivated by the coffee machine that dispensed cappuccino-like coffee with froth, rather than the films. His interest in cinema grew years later and he gravitated towards independent cinema.
BAFTA Breakthrough India participants for 2022
Ajitpal Singh, writer-director (Tabbar)
Aloknanda Dasgupta, music composer/director (Sacred Games - music composer)
Arati Kadav, director writer (Cargo)
Leena Manimekalai, writer-director (Madathy, an Unfairy Tale)
Mathivanan rajendran, producer (Nirvana Inn)
Nakul Verma, game director (In My Shadow)
Prateek Vats, writer-director (Eeb Allay Ooo!)
Saumyananda Sahi, cinematographer (Eeb Allay Ooo!)
Shubham, writer (Eeb Allay Ooo!)
Sumukhi Suresh, performer (Pushpavalli)
Tabbar, for which he caught the attention of the BAFTA Breakthrough India jury, took shape after he had hit a high note with Fire in the Mountains being selected for the 2021 Sundance Film festival. He and the writers of Tabbar decided to keep the narrative realistic. “The production design, costumes and dialogues were non-filmi. I believe all this helps the actors to deliver true-to-life performances. We wanted to reflect the milieu of a lower middle class family in Punjab.”
Weeks before Tabbar went on floors, Ajitpal was diagnosed with thyroid cancer. He reckons it was a trying period, but adds that work gave him enough reason to move forward: “Had it not been for work, I might have been sulking at home.”
Ajitpal is now in Kashmir, researching for his next film in the horror genre. He looks at the BAFTA recognition as further validation after the Sundance selection last year: “This is an exciting time for storytellers. Stories are crossing borders. I have seen content from South Korea, Spain and the Nordic countries on Netflix. Such a possibility frees us, storytellers, from the constraints of having to find a large (theatrical) audience in one country, one region and in one language. I am looking forward to new collaborations.”
Prateek Vats
Writer-director
In 2020, Eeb Allay Ooo! premiered on YouTube for 24 hours as part of the We Are One global film festival. It garnered more than 1.5 lakh views. Much later, it began to stream on Netflix. “This mainstream digital distribution ensures that the viewership to our film is never stagnant,” says Prateek, who is often greeted with emails from across the globe, in appreciation of his work or to discuss the issues the film put forth. Through the story of a migrant labourer hired to repel monkeys in Lutyens’ Delhi, the film explored politics, religion and nationalism in the garb of humour.
Prateek Vats | Photo Credit: BAFTA
The film’s writer Shubham, cinematographer Saumyananda Sahi and Prateek are among the BAFTA Breakthrough India’s chosen 10. “It is a huge validation for the film,” says Pratik, mentioning how some of the core team members have been getting offers for projects.
Indie filmmaking was a natural progression for Prateek, an alumnus of Film and Television Institute of India, Pune: “When you want to tell different stories but no one wants to put money into it, independent cinema is the way out.”
Born in Ranchi and growing up in Delhi, he watched international cinema at the Osian’s Cinefan Film Festivals, the screenings at the Centre for the Study of Developing Societies and Max Mueller Bhavan, all of which shaped his interest in cinema. “I was primarily drawn to theatre during my days at Kirori Mal College, Delhi. My vision of cinema opened up when I joined FTII; I loved how they taught cinema and oriented us to different kinds of cinema that I never knew existed.”
Prateek’s earlier film was the documentary A Very Old Man with Enormous Wings, which won a Special Jury award at the 65th National Film Awards in 2018. He followed it up with Eeb Allay Ooo!, which made a mark at the Mumbai International film Festival and at the Berlin International Film Festival, among others.
Prateek has been vocal about his line of thought, a case in point being when he was among the student agitators who raised their voice against the narrowed scope for different kinds of cinema at the International Film Festival of India, Goa, in 2015.
When asked about the increasing scrutiny and censorship faced by filmmakers, Prateek says, “We are living in a situation where festival organisers, streaming platforms and production houses do not want to end up offending anyone. Unless we offend the status quo through our stories, nothing will change (in society). To make an indie film, you go through monumental odds and look forward to reaching an audience through a film festival. If that shuts down, it closes the gates for aspiring independent voices.”
Eeb Allay Ooo! has opened up possibilities for Prateek and with his co-writer Shubham, he is working on a writing project for another filmmaker (the details of which he does not disclose) and later in 2022, looks forward to his second feature film project. In the meantime, he hopes the BAFTA Breakthrough India selection, will help him “meet practitioners from various fields of cinema, mentorships and international collaborations.”
