“What guided us through storms and tested us under the blue skies;
Like the shepherd turned into a cuckoo, searching the mists for Gold-Laden Sheep.”
This introduction to Ridham Janve’s exquisite and intriguing film— The Gold-Laden Sheep & the Sacred Mountain —underscores one of the film’s crucial motifs. There is a persistence of quest in the life of the old shepherd (Arjun Pant) in Himachal and his help Bahadur (Lokendra Gurung). The pursuits are myriad: for wood to keep the cavernous stony home warm, for a bottle of liquor hidden away by a stingy employer, for the hundreds of sheep out grazing on the slopes under the eye of the lovely dog, and that mythic treasure that awaits the booty-hunters in the wake of a crashed plane and its untraceable wreckage somewhere in the holy mountain.
Alongside, there is another arc, the larger play of the theme of innocence juxtaposed against an ominously creeping greed and the eventual loss and a lingering question—what is it that lies beyond the misty mountain? Would the shepherd who never returned have found the answer?
There is nothing constructed or structured about Janve’s hard-to-pin-down work. It’s like an unscripted slice of the mountain life that keeps evolving from its daily rhythms towards a philosphical core. The non-professional actors from the local Gaddi community, speaking in the Gaddi lingo, add to the naturalistic, organic touch, whether it’s their small skirmishes or story-telling sessions around the fire. Most so for their scraggy faces, some sturdy and a few weary bodies finding a rare oneness with the rugged landscape.
- Director: Ridham Janve
- Cast: Arjun Pant, Lokendra Gurung
- Storyline: An old shepherd, his help and herd of sheep, a crashed plane, its untraceable wreckage, treasure hunters and the play between innocence and greed, which can only end in loss
- Runtime: 97 minutes
It is an entrancing mix of mysticism, folklore and ethnography. The film is centred on the local myths, legends and anecdotes and the spirituality that one is supposed to experience in high altitudes. But these are not the conventional, scenic, breath-taking ranges. Janve’s mountains are rough and jagged as are the harsh lives of those living in their folds. Then there is a visual constancy of the sheep rolling on the slopes, seeming like snow in their white expanse. They are also a marker of time, moving in their seeming stillness.
Janve’s is meditative cinema moving gently with pauses thrown in, like the wandering shepherd community at the core of it. “[The] Mind is a mountain in a vast ocean,” proclaims the epilogue. It’s a slow burn of a film that makes demands of your mind, and patience. Surrender to it, and you will feel profoundly rewarded.
The film is available on MAMI Year Round Programme Home Theatre from May 22-23. Members need to send in requests till 6 p.m. on May 22.
See http://www.mumbaifilmfestival.com/TheGoldLadenSheep for more details
