Straight from the Heart of an Incorrigible Film-Buff

"How do you feel after winning the National Award for your very first film?" In the past few days I have been asked this question several times, and I find myself struggling to come up with an answer. As always, I want to answer it honestly, but doing so will sound incredible, and may dampen the spirits of my well-wishers who definitely are several times happier than me or Devanshu. What the award means to me, the film-maker, is something that cannot be answered briefly, as there are several perspectives to be understood before coming to that. But what it meant to me, the film-buff, to be a part of that function last Saturday is something I would love to share here. We can start by sharing a little trivia that it was the 101th anniversary of the birth of Indian Cinema when this evening at Vigyan Bhavan became a joy forever for me. Now, let us start from the very beginning.

It was February, 2010. Devanshu and I had gone to watch the first show of 'LSD: Love Sex aur Dhokha'. The lead of the second story was also there, among the handful of audience, with his friends. It must have been a proud moment for him. We loved his work and greeted him after the show. He acknowledged our compliment with utmost sincerity and humility. Since that day, he appeared in several films, and somehow, Devanshu and I kept bumping into him at different places in this city, without really introducing ourselves to him. In the next four years, he became Rajkummar Rao, earning unending praise for his several performances, and finally a National Award for Best Actor. Last Friday morning when we reached the airport, we saw him boarding the same flight. Of course, he recognized us as the two guys who keep meeting him randomly, and a "hello" was effortless. But then he was glad to know that we too are going to Delhi for the awards. After the flight, we were taken to the hotel in the same car and we saw the trailer of his upcoming film 'City Lights', again by Hansal Mehta, the director who made 'Shahid' that won them both their National Awards. The film buff in me was so happy for them, and for 'Shahid', that they won this honour. And I was happy for Geetanjali, who won Best Actress. The world has hardly seen her yet, and at the very beginning of her career this award will definitely be a tremendous encouragement and boost. Add to this, several well-deserved awards won by some of the films I truly loved. Met Bishwadeep Chatterjee who won the Sound Design award for 'Madras Cafe' and had a wonderful chat with him. 'Fandry' won Best Child Actor and I told Somnath Avghade how much I loved his performance in his film. He was there with his Dad all the way from Sholapur. Also met Nagraj Manjule, the director, and thanked him for his powerful first film. "I am eagerly awaiting your next", I told him. He smiled his gentle, calm smile. I was more demanding with Anand Gandhi, when I congratulated him for winning the biggest award of the year, Best Film for 'Ship of Theseus'. "All of us are going to have extremely high expectations from your next film. We are dying to see what the author in you has to offer now." I was so happy to see him receive the award with his producer Sohum Shah. Rajeev Ravi winning the Cinematography award for 'Liar's Dice' and 'Miss Lovely' winning for Art Direction also made me feel great about the award list. Of course, whatever clips we saw of other regional language films that won awards that evening filled me with sincere respect and admiration for all those film-makers whom I didn't know or whose works I had not seen. But to be in their company was special.

Ever since the short film 'Kush' won the top prize at Venice 2013, I had been wanting to get in touch with Shubhashish, the young director of the film. It was special to meet him and I told him how thrilled I have been for him since Venice. Meeting Ruchir, the director of 'Mandrake, Mandrake' and Kavin, its cinematographer, was like making new friends. These young film-makers will be big names tomorrow and I will proudly cheer for them. Saurabh Shukla won the Best Supporting Actor for 'Jolly LLB' and I made my Dad meet him who has been his fan since he wrote and acted in 'Satya' (1998). I also told him how that film had affected the fourteen-year old me and how it remains a personal milestone in my life. He most gracefully posed for a photo with my family and signed an autograph for my ten-year old cousin.

However, despite all these wonderful moments and interactions, the biggest high came from the Masters being there, and being awarded on the same stage. The almost overpowering humility of Jahnu Barua and Girish Kasaravalli, both winning their tenth and fifteenth National Awards respectively was the single most important learning for me during my stay in Delhi - to understand how important it is to stay grounded despite all achievements. I wish it were easy! As of now, I can only say that sharing the award with Mr. Kasaravalli was a matter of unthinkable pride for me. Also was special to talk briefly with the spirited Kamal Swaroop. I can't wait to show Tamaash to him, especially because he understands the Kashmiri language. And then, the biggest moment of the evening, was to watch Gulzar Sa'ab receive the Dada Saheb Phalke Award. Teary eyed, smiles on my lips, I clapped incessantly, with hundreds others sitting there, and then rose to give him a long standing ovation. During that moment, clearly, he had overshadowed the President of India in receiving appreciation from the audience. And then he talked. And he talked about Bimal Roy and S.D. Burman, and Salil Choudhury and Pancham Da and A.R. Rahman. Both Devanshu and I were beaming with pride and were overwhelmed with emotion. Whatever we achieve in our lives from here will have its importance, but not many moments will come close to this. Let it go down in history that when Gulzar Sahab received the highest cinema honour of this country, Devanshu and I were physically present there, feeling proud and inspired and humbled, and very, very special.

Thank you jury and the officers at DFF. Thank you the I&B Ministry and thank you honourable President of India, for giving us such wonderful joys to me and my family. It will remain special, all our lives.

Thank You, my Blog!

I am generally not comfortable using the space on this blog to upload pictures about Devanshu and me receiving prizes or attending film festivals with our film. But something happened last evening that forced me to do this. And I am not talking about the three awards that we won last evening. Please allow me this indulgence, and read on...

In the year 1994, the documentary that won the Golden Conch at 'Bombay International Documentary Film Festival' was "Manufacturing Consent: Noam Chomsky and the Media" by directors Mark Achbar and Peter Wintonick. Twenty years later, in February 2014, the festival, now known as Mumbai International Film Festival (Shorts, Animation, Documentary), had Mark Achbar as the head of one of its juries. Peter Wintonick had passed away less than three months ago and the festival began with a homage to him. "Manufacturing Consent" in these twenty years had already become one of the most famous documentaries in the world.

At the award function, the Mark Achbar led jury was also responsible for the four awards in the Short Fiction (National Competition) category. And three of those awards came our way, for our little Kashmiri film, Tamaash, the awards for Best Cinematography (Sahir Raza), Best Sound (Yatin Dabhi, Manoj Sikka, and Abhishek Bhattathiri), and Best Film. It was incredible and overwhelming, and perhaps the best part about it was something I could not experience - my family could watch the program live on National TV back home!

At the dinner after the awards, Mark and his wife gracefully approached me to congratulate me for the film. "Now I can talk with you", he said. We had a long chat, about our film, other films in competition, about the brother-duo in Devanshu and me, about how the Coen brothers work, and about the three years his wife had spent in Bombay as a kid way back in the 60s. However, the biggest and most pleasant surprise for me was when he said, just after the first line, "So is it you who writes the blog, or is it your brother?"

I was staring at his face with wide eyes and a shocked smile, wondering how he got to read my blog. "After watching your film, one of the jury members looked you up on Google. And he shared your blog with us. We read your post on 30 things you learnt while making a short film." It is a post more than two years old. Even I didn't remember if it were exactly 30 lessons and hence was not sure if it was this blog he had read. But then, mentioning the name of the blog made it clear.

Am I exaggerating when I say that this was perhaps as memorable a moment for me as it was going up the stage and winning the awards? This blog has been a sacred space for me, to talk about my love affair with the movies, and until now I have not actively shared it with people. But to know that Mark Achbar and other jury members came here on this cyber space and went through some of my articles is humbling and inspiring at the same time.

Thank you, my dear blog! You have been the source of very special joys!

Perks, Perspectives

Last month, Devanshu and I enjoyed, perhaps for the first time, the perks of being film-makers, during the first film festival we attended as participants in competition, rather than delegates or film-buffs. The event, International Children's Film Festival, was held in Hyderabad where our film, Tamaash, was competing with 15 others in the International Shorts Competition. To be honest, we had no idea how wonderful the experience could be, until we reached there.

Okay. So, I haven't travelled much by air - only thrice before this. The festival organisers took care of our air fare and hence I got the chance, once again, to feel the excitement of being hundreds of metres above the ground, silently revising the concepts of physics - relative velocity, frame of reference, etc - that we had learnt in school, and marvelling at the achievement of man. On reaching Hyderabad airport, we received a traditional welcome with flower garlands from the festival volunteers that left us amused and awkward at the same time with everyone in the airport looking at us. Then a car took us to the hotel we were supposed to stay in for the next eight days. To add to this, my Mom joined us that evening, and for both her and me it was our first stay at a five-star hotel. Our meals were taken care of, and we were provided with vehicles to travel from the hotel to the festival venue and back. Interacting with film-makers from abroad, with the audience during the screening of our film, and with the media followed. Personally speaking, the biggest highlights of the trip were to make Mom meet Gulzar Sahab and Amol Palekar, visiting Ramoji Film City and other places of interest in Hyderabad, and having a one-hour informal lunch meeting with Raju Hirani. This last meeting was amazing, with Raju wanting to hear from me my poems from 'Udaan' and we talking about his approach towards writing and editing his films. I'm sure Mom will cherish that forever. And then, on the last evening, our film won an award, as I have mentioned in a previous post. The most beautiful thing about it, of course, was that it happened before my mother. As if this was not enough, soon after this trip ended, our film won the Audience Award for Best Short Film at River to River Film Festival, Florence, Italy. The win also secured two more screenings in Italy for the film, one each in Rome and Milan.

Through my brother's FB account, we have shared this news with all. And we have been receiving congratulations from all our well-wishers. And the first thing most of them ask is - you must be partying hard, right?

Well. No. We did celebrate in our own little way, but our degree of celebration would disappoint most of our friends' expectations. The most important thing at this moment is not all the accolades that we won, but the desire to repeat it again, and more importantly, do that with a much better film. The most important thing, in fact, is not a repetition of all the perks and praise, but to ensure that our next film is a better cinematic work - with only the two of us, Devanshu and I, being the judge of the same.

Each film, I believe, results in three different kinds of results that the film-maker should respect and be aware of. The first is the maker's feeling toward what he created. In our case, we are proud of the film, mainly because it taught us more about film-making than anything else, and we know that a lot of things fell in the right place to make this happen. But the merits of the film are equally glaring in comparison with the shortcomings, which we feel are many and need to be taken care of. However, the second result is the way audience reacts to the film. If they love your film, you have to respect their reaction, as much as you have to accept their disapproval for it. And the third result is - how you can use your film for professional gains - from monetizing it, to using it as a PR tool, to anything and everything that may help you as a film-maker. Even if I hate my film, and the audience hates it, I should still try to maximise my returns. I cannot abandon the film, because costs involved in film-making and lack or availability of opportunities are as important as our craft and the specific successes or failures. These three results are and should be mutually exclusive of each other and a wiser film-maker will never try to mix the three and hope for the best in all these fronts.

At times we will click. At times we won't. The only way forward is through this maze of differing perspectives and the hide-and-seek opportunities play with you. And the only real tool you have is the desire to create something new, and hopefully impressive. All the past projects - good or bad - and memories and learnings associated with them are only the building blocks of the next. Celebrations included.

The Blog Turns Five

During what can be safely called the most stressful and emotionally challenging period of my life, a little over five years ago, I was struggling with my inability to create something worthwhile. It was the time when I had just shifted to Mumbai, and was trying to arrange a massive sum of money to buy my freedom from the Indian Armed Forces. Giving up the service liability was expensive in more ways than one - not only was I letting go of the job as a Doctor in the army, I was embracing a life of "struggle" - in the conventional sense - as an aspiring writer-director in the Mumbai film industry. Emotionally isolated by all my family, all trying their best and ineffectively so to make me change my mind, I was going through a stubborn, confident, but difficult time. And could hardly do anything productive and fulfilling. Then one evening, I chanced upon a blog by one of my juniors, and thought of starting one of my own, dedicated to cinema. That was how, in November 2008, this blog was born, to celebrate cinema as a film-buff.

However, in the following years, I kept updating almost every cinema-related event of my life in this space. From what I learnt from my self-study of the medium, and my experiences as a teacher, to all professional acts and achievements - articles of all kinds found its way into the film-buff's public display of obsessive affection with the movies. Today, despite any active effort to promote this blog, I have a healthy bunch of dedicated readers, some of them very regular, and the traffic of daily page-views has increased remarkably. With 300 posts in last five years, an average of one post every six days, I do not claim to be an avid blogger, but am happy to have stayed consistent, always trying to present something not too technical or academic, but informative anyway, hoping to share whatever little I know and discover of this amazing and magical art and craft of film-making. During these five years, I have also met people who have known me through this blog, and have even been approached by a studio marketing unit to attend their previews. Today, when I read some of my old posts, I smile at my own innocence and naiveté, closing to embarrassment. I continue to struggle with my English, and it is never easy to write on this space. Every time I attempt to write a post, I feel the insecurity of how it will shape up and how my readers will receive it. One of the biggest struggle has been to keep writing personal accounts without making them sound egotistical, as well as to balance the much-aspired modesty with the desire to share my achievements and successes. Despite all this, the only truth is that the blog continues to evolve, with me, and remains a very important inspiration in my life. I hope this blog remains alive as long as I live. After all, it is the only social medium I am active at.

On the fifth birthday of my blog, I would like to thank all my readers, regular or otherwise, who have constantly motivated me with their kind comments about my writings. And would also like to share some good news, that would also explain my absence from this space for more than three weeks. Well, simply put, my brother and I have just won our first award as film-makers - a Golden Elephant trophy at International Children's Film Festival India 2013, Hyderabad, for our Kashmiri short film "Tamaash". There were 16 films from all over the world competing in the category of International Shorts, and the Children's Jury adjudged our film as the best, over the Oscar-nominated "Buzkashi Boys", the Golden Bear winner at Berlin "The Amber Amulet", and several other beautiful films, many of them, according to me, being better than our film. The Jury thought otherwise and gave us this award that has brought an exceptional joy to all my friends and well-wishers. You, the reader of this blog, are also a part of this moment of celebration. I hope you keep witnessing this fascinating journey, as I continue the unending struggle to create something worthwhile, including the posts on this wall.

Tamaash: Our First Film for the World

Last November, I had written a post about the post-shoot blues I was suffering from after shooting a short film. Since then, there has been no mention of that film on this blog. Well, here it goes. We started editing in December, and our other commitments did not allow us to come up with a rough cut until March. We then started showing it to others for feedback, and realised this film is being received well. What had started as an exercise to learn film-making had turned into a pleasant surprise. But the bigger news was yet to come, and hence the film was not mentioned on this blog. Not yet.

Our 32-minute film in Kashmiri language, "Tamaash", has just been selected to screen at two international film festivals. It premieres at Seattle South Asian Film Festival on the first week of October. You can click here to have a look at its mention in the festival programme. And between 17th to 26th October, it will be screened up to four times at Heartland Film Festival, Indianapolis. It is a competition category and if the film wins there (it is impossibly tough, but if it does), it would be eligible (only eligible, not nominated) for the Oscar Award for Best Live-Action Short!

Perhaps this is the biggest news of our career, of my brother and mine. We wrote, produced, edited, and directed "Tamaash" that went on to become our first film for the world. (Our previously made not-so-good short films must be feeling so ignored!) However, this could be possible only with the enormous support of close to a hundred people in Mumbai, Kashmir and elsewhere, and several hundreds of best wishers, including you - the reader of this blog. The film was funded by close friends who did not even go through the story and became proud co-producers of it based on their faith in us. I hope we didn't let them down. And thanks to them, and to so many others, five years after moving to this city it's time for one of my very own works to play on big screen in a couple of cities far, far away. Until our debut feature film arrives, and it may take a while, let us offer you some short fiction. The first in the list is ready to be served! :)

P.S. I hope to write a series of posts on the wonderful journey of making the film. That Kashmir trip has all the makings of one of the most significant trips of my life. It would be fun sharing it with you.