There cannot be a better time to mull over the production and reception of short films.
As fans of the Japanese filmmaker Hayao Miyazaki are now welcoming his return — post his announcement to retire in 2013 — and are excited about his new full-length feature, Kemushi No Boro [Boro the Caterpillar], it goes without saying that much of the enthusiasm seems to come more from the fact that the film, originally planned as a short, will now be turned into a feature. Miyazaki’s shorts, as most would know, neither release on Blu-ray or DVDs nor on YouTube. They are produced exclusively for visitors of the Ghibli Museum in Mitaka, Tokyo. That’s why Miyazaki’s feature My Neighbour Totoro is so well known, but not its sequel Mei and the Kittens, which is a short. The attention his full-length features get may be one reason why celebrity filmmakers like Miyazaki haven’t done much to promote the shorter format.
India’s best-known independent filmmaker Anurag Kashyap, who has focused for the most part in his career on making features, can be accused of having the same bias against short films. From Dev D, The Lunchbox and Shahid, Kashyap’s production house has invested ample time and money on lengthy feature films — some of them, like Gangs of Wasseypur, running to over six hours of playtime.
Given what a rage Kashyap is among the urban youth and how every directorial of his is debated and discussed at large, it was quite surprising to see how a short film produced by him around two years ago, which was screened at the recent Dharamsala International Film Festival (DIFF), was barely noticed. Apparently, when this short — entitled That Day After Everyday — was released on YouTube, it had hit over one million views. Surprising again, because Kashyap hardly promoted it nor did it ever become the charchha as much as Murabba, one of the four shorts of anthology film Bombay Talkies did, which had also released in the same year.
Showcased under the short films category at DIFF, That Day After Everyday, despite having a strong message about sexual harassment in daily life, fails to make a mark because of appalling production standards and weak direction. Three middle-class women, played by Radhika Apte, Arannya Kaur and Geetanjali Thapa, are regular victims of roadside romeos of their colony. They face routine molestation attempts on their way to office and are subjects of lecherous men at workplaces. Sick and tired, they decide to enroll in self-defence training and take on the local rowdies. A cigarette-smoking Sandhya Mridul, who plays the role of the instructor, is seen to boost the women with the lines, “Jab tum darna band karoge tab tum taiyyar ho…agar tumne man bana liya toh koi kuch nahi kar sakta [When you stop being afraid, you are ready…once you have made up your mind, no one can stop you]”; and the closing shots of the film has Radhika Apte’s husband preparing tea while praising his wife’s actions.
Most of the time, women-centric films fall into the trap of male-assisted plots. Although the torchbearer of revenge in this film is a woman, it seems that women can no longer take action on their own until they have some form of male approval, even if that came as a supporting justification after-the-event, as is the case with the final scene of That Day after Everyday.
A far superior vigilante revenge thriller, also showcased at the fest, was Payal Sethi’s Leeches (2016). Based on the life of a girl named Raisa who has hatched an improbable plan of saving her younger sister from the social evil of contract marriage, which is a common practice among poor Muslims of the old city of Hyderabad, Leeches goes well beyond the issue to become a story about Raisa — the choices she makes (by going against her mother, her partner) to take on the age-old custom of one-day brides and her battle against society’s obsession with female virginity. “When I was living in Hyderabad in 2011, I read a short news article on temporary marriages. This is an old custom that has found new roots among poor families in Muslim ghettos, where rich patrons pay for an arrangement brokered by efficient agents, while a pliant cleric draws up both marriage and divorce contracts simultaneously so that the businessman is free to end the sham union whenever he is ready to leave the city. I was developing a feature idea back then and this character of a girl who was forced into contract marriage by her family became a sub-plot in that script,” says the director Payal Sethi. “The feature did not materialise due to many reasons and at one point this sub-plot became the idea of a short film for me. When we probed into the issue, we learnt that virgin brides were in demand when it comes to these sorts of marriages, so the story was going to be about this 16-year-old girl Raisa whose younger sister is going to be bartered as a virgin bride. She wants to save her by taking her place, but she herself is not a virgin, so she has to try and trick her virginity.”
The title, Leeches, is a word play referring to those who prey on young girls and push them into prostitution and there are, of course, actual leeches in the film which Raisa (Sayani Gupta) uses to fake bleeding on her wedding night. The leeches become an instrument of exposing that there is no physiological difference between a woman who’s had penetrative sex and one who hasn’t. Medical histories have documented how women throughout have faked their virginity using razor nicks and leech bites, and Sethi’s film is a powerful commentary on how there never was and never will be any physical proof of a woman’s virginity; that “hymen-breaking” is just a ridiculous popular constructed image which one should forego because stereotypes like these force women to face unpleasant sexual encounters.
“A short film is like a miniature painting or a short story and it’s a form in itself. And the kind of impact that a short film can create can be much more than a feature at times…. I was eager and happy that a lot of great short films will be made in India, too. But that was not the case. When I saw those shorts, I realised that it was not enough just to have the camera, one needed to understand the language of a short film.”
Leeches was part of the package of Indian shorts that had been curated by acclaimed Marathi film director Umesh Kulkarni for this year’s DIFF. Known to have pioneered the short films section for DIFF since 2014, Kulkarni says, “I had first attended DIFF in 2013 for my film Deol. I fell in love with the festival because the kind of film festival that I have in my mind kind of matches with this.” DIFF has been steadily growing as an important forum for putting indie films before global blockbusters. Kulkarni adds, “In no other fest will you get the time to sit and have an informal interaction with filmmakers after screenings. Ritu and Tenzing [founders of DIFF] are also filmmakers, so their curation is different and there is a lot of ingenuity. The audience is very friendly, so I felt I should do something for the festival and had offered to curate a section on short films. They liked the idea, and from 2014 I started curating shorts because it is the most unexplored genre in India with a viewership which is still very thin.”
As a student of FTII, Kulkarni had made many short films, from five-minute to 20-minute duration, most of which were screened at various international film festivals. He says, “That’s when I first realised the potential of short films being made outside India. A short film is like a miniature painting or a short story and it’s a form in itself. And the kind of impact that a short film can create can be much more than a feature at times. When friends and people I know started making short films with more and more digital equipment, I was eager and happy that a lot of great short films will be made in India, too. But that was not the case. When I saw those shorts, I realised that it was not enough just to have the camera, one needed to understand the language of a short film. That’s when I started a short film club in Pune in 2012 called Arbhaat, where we’d curate short films from all over Maharashtra. Today I screen shorts from all over the world and also run short filmmaking workshops.”
This year at DIFF, the short films section, curated by Kulkarni, was based on the theme “We Dare to Say”. “My idea as a curator and a cinephile was to bring together those films that are not only diverse in content but which also showcase some bold filmmaking techniques,” says Kulkarni. Leeches, part of the package, for instance was shot in Muslim bastis of Hyderabad dealing with a volatile subject. Other films that were screened in this section included Chaitanya Tamanhe’s Six Strands, Siddharth Chauhan’s Papa, Guruvinder Singh’s Ghuspaithiya and another very interesting Marathi short by Nishant Roy Bombarde entitled Daaravtha or The Threshold. Bombarde’s short deals with the struggles of the LGBTQ community, portrayed through a young boy Pankaj, who is caught between the confines of a strict patriarchal society and his own desires. Roy, who bagged not one but two National Awards for the film this year, had shot it entirely in the Gondia district of Maharashtra, and in exactly those places where he had himself faced homophobic abuse as a child.
There was a time when short films were only meant for film festivals. But today the main avenue for a short film release is the internet. Onto their fifth edition this year, DIFF for the very first time had collaborated with Royal Stag to showcase three films: Anurag Kashyap’s That Day After Every Day, Adhiraj Bose’s Interior Café Night and Jyothi Kapur Das’s Chutney. In a conversation with Guardian 20 after the screening of Interior Café Night, Adhiraj Bose says that “Royal Stag Large Short Films” had put up Kashyap’s film directly on the internet and that it had never gone to festivals in the first place. Same was the case with Sujoy Ghosh’s Ahalya. It was only after they became a sensation on the internet that they were picked up by film festivals. Bose’s film, on the other hand, had gone through a more complex, riskier channel of film distribution. “While films by people like Anurag are being directly financed by brands like Royal Stag, it wasn’t the case with me. After my film was made and had won a few cash prizes at various film festivals, it caught the attention of Royal Stag which is when they decided to buy it. This, of course, is a riskier way of earning revenue because there is always the possibility of the financier offering you much less than the amount that has gone into the production of the film,” says Bose. Shot in one night at a quaint little café in Kolkata, Bose’s professional debut is about two people (Naseeruddin Shah and Shernaz Patel) sitting across a table and experiencing a wide range of emotions (loss, hope, anguish, pain) in this dreamy, 13-minute short.
While cinema attendance is often bemoaned today as declining with increasing digitisation, for short filmmakers, paradoxically, it is opening up newer avenues of generating profit. Online platforms like HumaraMovie and Muviiz are giving the genre its due. “Yet it is nothing like how a film gets received in a film festival,” opines Adhiraj Bose. “If you are a sensible filmmaker, you can judge it by the amount of applause you get or by the amount of silences you receive. Money is important but that is not all.”
Film festival footfalls around the country are reported to have risen. The obvious reason being the possibility to see what one cannot see elsewhere. Hence, it will not be altogether wrong to say that the specific reception environment created by film fests is largely defined by the way they are organised. In this sense, DIFF is a very organic festival. “We don’t take submissions of shorts. This is a completely volunteer-run festival where we do not believe in incorporating competition sections. I feel it induces negativity and unhealthy competition among filmmakers. Here at DIFF, we are bound purely by the love for good cinema,” says DIFF founder Ritu Sarin.
And I cannot agree more with this. Had it not been for DIFF 2016, I would have never made the sweet discovery that Six Strands is, Chaitanya Tamanhe’s first short film, made in 2011, and which also gave Tamanhe the exposure to pursue his much-acclaimed feature film Court as he travelled with his short across a dozen festivals. Court is Tamanhe’s unfinished business with Six Strands.