I’ll begin with an introduction of our guest here. Pranab Kumar Aich is an independent filmmaker and documentary photographer from India. It is essential to mention that he won the Sony World Photography Award in 2009 for his work on environmental issues. His motivations come from his early volunteer experiences with NGOs, and today the films that Pranab Aich has been making deal with topics such as health, education, environment, and human rights. He has garnered a lot of recognition in global media outlets. His short documentaries have been showcased at over 50 film festivals worldwide including the Durban International Film Festival and the Beijing International Film Festival.
Ashwani: The film that will be our context for the conversation is very special. It is Pranab’s debut feature documentary. It’s a hybrid documentary titled Nanda Master’nka Chatasali, am I right?
Pranab Kumar Aich: Yes, it’s called Nanda Master’nka Chatasali. It means the same as you said.
Ashwani: Does it translate to Nanda Master’s Class or School?
Pranab Kumar Aich: Yes, School.
Ashwani: Nanda Master’nka Chatasali is a life portrait of Nanda Prusty, who was a distinguished educationalist and teacher, and he was awarded Padma Shri, India’s 4th highest civilian award, by President Ram Nath Kovind for his contributions to the field of education and. To understand the scale of his work and impact, one line is enough: He taught his villagers and the children in his village for free for over 7 decades of his life. He lived a really long life.
When I read about Nanda Sir, I kept falling back to was Anand’s dialogue that “zindagi lambi nahi, badi honi chaahiye.” Nanda sir’s life has been both, it’s been a long life, but it’s also a huge life due to what he was able to achieve. He is one interesting subject that we’ll be delving into with greater detail. The great thing about this particular documentary is also it’s the debut feature documentary made by Pranav Aich, and it was produced by Abhaya Pati under the banner of Abhismita Films. Pranab da, I think you would be the best person to talk about the film, and on that note, I would like to know what the trajectory of the film has been, where has it been shown, what kind of audience it has been exposed to and what does the future trajectory look like, at least in the immediate future?
Pranab Kumar Aich: We started making this film in 2021 when Nanda sir was alive and before he had received the award. In the process of shooting, he left all of us by the end of 2021 when we were halfway through the film. We had planned a short film because we were unsure about his remaining years on Earth, so we were a little apprehensive about making a feature film. We started making a 45-minute short documentary.
But in the process, we realized that it’s a very powerful story and if we are not able to tell the story at its complete scale, we won’t be able to do justice to the story. Unfortunately, Nanda sir left us. We decided after he left us that since the documentary part available to us would not be strong enough without him, we would add his past life with actors because by then we had learned a lot about his life. We were shooting the real person, meeting the real people associated to him, and then envisioning the past life. He was 103 years by the time we started shooting and he left us when he was 104.
My producer is a debut producer and the Odia film industry is not going through a great time. Obviously we had our own apprehensions. We kind of started our journey in festivals when our film was actually not completely ready. Last year we started off with the Kolkata International Film Festival. NETPACK select nomination. Our film was among the 6 films for the NETPACK Award.
NETPACK is an Asian Association to admires good cinema from Asia, which Sri Aruna Vasudev started, who is called the Mother of Asian Cinema. Unfortunately, we did not win the world, but that became our world premiere. We realized in the process that we were actually serving people a longer film which was 2 hours & 13 minutes long. In the next 6 months, we cut down the film to 90 minutes film.
Abhismita Films is a debut studio, and my producer Abhaya Pati gave me the freedom to explore the festivals myself. I was not too keen on a curator. Had someone been interested from their side, I would have been convinced. But my earlier experiences of having people help me with my short documentary were not that great. I thought it was an interesting way to do it; you’re making an independent film.
Who else knows better about your film than you? You should tell people. You cannot afford a curator with an independent film. Your budget goes heavy. So instead, you think that why not put that money into festivals and other things like marketing the film, because if you’ve made a good film, some festival will pick it up. But today’s scenario is very different in indie filmmaking.
Though it has become much more empowering, and much more professional, it has also become very chaotic. Because earlier there was a film, an independent filmmaker, a festival, a program, and a small team of screeners. These days a lot of these OTT brands with big production houses have jumped into the indie scenario. Big production houses with big actors or big owners go through an age crisis at a certain point of time. Then they start exploring the other dynamics of filmmaking such as indie filmmaking. Suddenly, people who had never done anything independent in their lives, become the messiah of indie filmmaking.
I think in that context, this is a true indie film wherein we have picked up a story. My producer, Abhaya Pati, is also a journalist who was doing a story on Nanda Sir before he got the award. He was inspired to produce a documentary because he’s an educationalist and an entrepreneur. He thought if he could pull a film on Nanda Sir’s life. And then he got in touch with me. He had no experience of film festivals and sending a film to international forums. I had an experience of sending short documentaries with some acclaim in my bag. But with each passing year, the scenario is changing. There is a different kind of treatment you get at festivals. There’s a different kind of approach that you need.
We worked really hard to place our film in whatever way possible in the international arena through film festivals. We were supposed to do our world premiere at an international festival outside India. The rule of the game is that once you put your film in India, your film is no longer a virgin. You start with an International Festival outside India and then you get it back to any festival in India, but you have to start with the big one. That’s where I lost the case because I actually started with the Kolkata International Festival.
Earlier I have done a lot of anti-narrative films like City Step Child (2014), which on urban poor children in slums who live on the edge of life and how they lead their life irrespective of all these difficulties. The parallel layer of the environmental crisis is quite visible in the film. That is planted in a subtle way. Most of my popular documentaries are with children. I love to capture children because they’re very innocent, they’re very raw. I believe independence and objectivity are the primary focus of documentaries.
But all of us, after a certain age, no longer remain independent and objective. We are all biased with our own idea of the world and our own idea of a situation. We all are quite engaged with our sociopolitical take on anything. For that reason, I love capturing children because they are very objective in whatever they feel. Even if they don’t like something about the family, their culture, or their religion, they’ll be very frank about it. That’s why I’ve been making films with children mostly. And this is my first feature film. But in a way you can say Nanda Sir was a child because at the age of 100, you become a child again.
When you’re making films for festivals, either you’re a woman making films for women, or you are making films on protests that are anti-establishment narratives. Of course, there can be anti-establishment narratives. You can justify things as you give your own idea of what is happening. But the fact of the matter is when the narratives are anti-establishment, breaking through the nuances of life in a society, the festivals love it. Sometimes it is good for the society. I also made City Step Child. One of the protagonists is a child who lives next to a landfill in Delhi. He works in the landfill in Ghazipur and then he collects electronic items to create machines dreaming of becoming an engineer.
For that matter, I think City Step Child was a huge success in festivals. A film like Nand Master’s School to Festivals is not anti-narrative but about a man’s honest devotion to society. These kinds of stories have not been around festivals. So, it doesn’t fit into many festival strategies. Also, we did not put our best foot forward. Our mistake was starting off too early. We should have made our film ready and then started off at an international festival.
Irrespective of the struggle, I applied for the Busan International Film Festival in the process with Nanda Master’nka Chatasali for the official program, but we got rejected. I also applied for Platform Busan as an independent filmmaker. I guess they took me because of my body of work.
Ashwani: One of the key questions I was looking forward to asking you was about your selection to Platform Busan 2024, which is starting on the 5th of October. If you can shed some light on what you are planning to do and how you will be utilizing this opportunity? And what is so special about this opportunity? I read a few things about Platform Busan 2024, and I found that it’s very much focused on independent emerging filmmakers in the sense that the filmmaker, for example, must have only made one or 2 feature films and not come with a huge body of work. I just wanted to know a little bit more about something which we cannot read on the website, something that you have been planning, etc.
Pranab Kumar Aich: Platform Busan is an opportunity for emerging filmmakers. There are several workshops that I will be attending. They give us free accreditation with access to the entire festival so we can go and watch films. Then we can attend film funding talks. There are pitching sessions where they select one of the top 10 pitches. During these pitch sessions, you can also personally meet the producers, distributors, and programmers.
I live in Odisha in a small city, Bhubaneswar, and every month I spend a week’s time in my village. That way I’m connected to the roots. I’m making every attempt to be honest, and independent. I think if a filmmaker is not rooted, they are not independent. When I travel from this to an international festival, there is so much of this regional, local energy and stories and emotions that I carry. For me, this opportunity is obviously very, very emotional.
Nanda Master’nka Chatasali has been selected for DOK Leipzig’s 100 exclusive films in the market. We are selected for one of the largest documentary markets because Leipzig is the oldest documentary festival in the world, and it is the second biggest documentary festival in Europe.
Ashwani: The first premier of the film was 2 hours; and 13 minutes and your final cut is around 90 minutes. Was the first cut that you were screening in its nascent stage and then you refined it further or you reduced the runtime depending on the feedback you received from multiple sources?
Pranab Kumar Aich: It is a mix of both. We have an idea of the audience’s perspective, and when we show to an audience, we watch them enjoy a few things and not get intrigued by a few others. After the Kolkata Film Festival, I realised there was a problem with my film after 70% of the film had been watched. There were around 600 people watching it. All the entire passes of this film were sold out and the rains were incessant that day. But people still managed to come with umbrellas beating the rain.
They enjoyed the first half of the film, and they enjoyed the ending of the film. From 600 people in the audience, around 100 left at that juncture, which I and some of my teammates felt to be slow. It was not because of my filmmaking skills. People told me that you are a bang-on editor. How can you make such a long film? The problem was me wanting to show the entire story and then the hero passed away. Now what do I do? I wanted to make a docudrama, not a fiction. I wanted my film to be 70% documentary and in order to retain that 70% documentary I had to use a lot of footage of his student. The villagers least cared about being in a film.
Half of the time they wanted to run away from the shoot. They would hide inside their houses and tell me that they were not home. This is a very remote place (Kantira) and people did not want to get shot. Since I wanted to tell the story, I had kept a lot of portions of the villagers which was not up to the mark. After KIFF, I realized I had to chop this up. I put a lot of effort into Film Bazaar.
We did a market screening. We put a lot of effort into getting some big names to watch our film like Iikka Vekalahti and Leena Verma. Leena is the one who took The Lunchbox to Europe. She is one of those early game changers of Indian cinema in the European market. She is an old friend. I had worked with her in a film as an assistant. She was the producer. We became very good friends. She met me and guided me. She guided me on how to pitch my film.
Ashwani: When I was watching the film, I was expecting it to be in the documentary space along with a few dramatized portions. I was expecting it to be slow. It’s not a word that I like to use, but my mind was adjusted to the idea of how life portraits usually are. But when I started watching, I realized that it has a very entertaining aesthetic. A lot of credit has to go to Nanda sir’s life since he was an actor so there are a lot of colours in his past life to create an entertaining feature. Watching this documentary is essentially a very enjoyable experience. Listening to you about festival strategy, I wonder that maybe the markets now have to open to this particular aesthetic as well, because this is what has been missing in a lot of film festivals.
Pranab Kumar Aich: Another problem with our film is that it belongs to the documentary-drama or hybrid category. Most of the festivals, in fact, 90% of the festivals, don’t even have a category for it. We either have to fall in the documentary category or some unique category. Any film that does not fall into any category can be dumped into this (unique) category. We either become the dump or have to adjust to a documentary category.
I have shown some snippets in fiction and maintained the criterion with 75% of the footage as a documentary inside the film, but that is all of what is available from Nanda sir’s life present life. I could have shown the remaining through animation because (the use of) animation justifies it as a documentary. How is it the director’s imagination and collaboration with actors inferior to the director’s imagination and collaboration with the animator? I understand why DOK Leipzig took it because DOK Leipzig is a festival for documentary and animation, so they understand that the mainstream film festivals won’t pick the film and therefore, they have to pick this film and push it.
This does not belong to the obvious in filmmaking. I kept the film jolly because I am bored of people telling me that we don’t watch documentaries because they’re boring. All of us know that all of us accept that, and yet we glorify a filmmaker who makes boring films. Just because they have been admired at festivals. Everyone wants content. You can read an article about it. You can check some photos. Why do you make a film at all? Obviously, a film can be slow and gripping. I’m not saying it can’t be slow, but it should not be boring. It should not be extra abstract like something that is not comprehensible. Then why at all make a film? Sleep and dream about it. Why do you need to tell your dreams to people? You don’t need to tell them. What would anyone do with your dreams? You have to process your dream in a way that others are able to comprehend it.
Recently I was watching one of Imtiaz’s interviews. He very meticulously put that if you’re making a film, you should be able to communicate. The story can be very interesting with a lot of thrills, but the communication style has to be simple so that everyone gets it. He said that he was inspired by the narrative styles of Indian Puranas, and Mahabharata of Ramayana.
They have narrated the most unimaginable, unfathomably complex stories in the simplest manner. We can’t imagine nuclear bombs shooting out of those arrows and hands today, right? Whether that is true or not is another debate. But what is true that these writers of Puranas have been able to convince billions of people in very simple ways for thousands of years? My style of narration is inspired by the Puranas, not by independent filmmakers. I make my own films, and I appreciate whoever makes good films or whatever they’re interested in catering to. I’m here to do meaningful films to cater for issues. I’m not here to show my abstract artistic potential.
I have also kept in mind my local audience. I have made a film in Odia. My primary audience has to be Odia because when people watch it in subtitles, they will not be able to comprehend the film in the way that anyone who knows Odia can. That’s the reason why I did not make abstract artistic choices. I could have had long takes and made it slower, and poignant. But I did not. I wanted it to move fast so that people enjoy it, live the film, miss the man and want to become like him.
Ashwani: If I’m not wrong, there are around three songs in the film. I would like to ask about the choice of songs and where they are rooted. I really like how melodious they are and how they are complementing the narrative. They are just not random songs. What was the process that went behind creating those songs?
Pranab Kumar Aich: I’ll go back to Puranas. We have a culture of narrating stories through songs. It is obviously inspired by that. This is a film about a teacher who had a guru. And then he became a guru. These gurus are influenced by Bengal’s Baul culture. They come from Nadia. They mostly come with this ektara instrument and sing songs of spirituality. In Odisha, the same job is done by Shaiva gurus or Shaiva jogis. We call them jogis here. These are jogis who come with a traditional Odia instrument called Kendra.
We have used raw Kendra in a film for the first time. We actually made the gurus play a lot of it. Some of it was played by another musician who could play a little bit of Kendra but a lot of it was played by the guru himself. In order to bring that energy to the real guru, we got a real guru and made him act inside the film law.
This is an experimental film. People might take out a lot of mistakes I’ve made in the film. You know it’s a real run-gun film. You’re shooting a 103-year-old man. He couldn’t listen properly. You had to talk to him loudly and then he would reply to you in a loud voice, which would create problems for the sound person. We had to be sensitive, like when you’re dealing with a patient inside a hospital.
Half of the time I was a doctor and half of the time I was a filmmaker. Because if anything happened to him, everyone would blame us. We are sensitive, but we had to be extra careful. We did not ask him to walk more than 10 feet per hour. Wherever he walked we followed him. We did not ask him to stop. In fact, we didn’t ask him to do anything. We followed him as much as possible and wherever was possible. I was not focusing on the shots. I was focusing on the content.
Ashwani: This is very specific to the kind of subject you were exploring because you have to bring perfection and imperfection when you are dealing with a person who’s more than 100 years and it’s very uncertain when he’ll pass. Your process has to be very fluid because you don’t know where the film is going.
You are capturing it in the present, and you are dramatizing the past, but you also don’t know how it will resolve because the subject can eventually pass away at any time and your narrative can break. I first came across the idea of this challenge when I was talking to Prateek Vats (Eeb Allay Ooo, 2019) who has made A Very Old Man with Enormous Wings, which is a life portrait of Manohar Aich, one of the greatest bodybuilding icons from West Bengal. This documentary is also much like Nanda Master’nka Chatasali. He also mentioned that they were never sure when the old man would pass away and there were very strict physical limitations.
Pranab Kumar Aich: In fact, the media had already exploited Nanda sir so much throughout the year after the announcement of the Padma Shree award. They would take him to the hills nearby and ask him to recreate a school scene. I thought I didn’t want to do all of this because that’s not what he does at the age of 100, he doesn’t go to the nearby hills. He used to go to when he was young. I decided If I had to do that, I would do it through actors.
Ashwani: There is a shot where the play is going on in the present. Children are sitting in a circle and there is this old man enacting the play and then the same play cuts into the past where Nanda sir’s younger version is performing the play with other actors. It’s the same play happening in the present as well as in the past, which sort of establishes that Nanda sir was an actor and also establishes the theatre tradition of the region. I found it a very captivating way of storytelling.
But while I was watching it, I was also thinking that there are portions which have been based on anecdotal narratives. You are depending on multiple people who have either had a contribution made to their life by Nanda sir or who affected Nanda sir’s life. Their stories and their experiences build a certain narrative that is dependent on their memory. What were the aspects of this narrative that required investigative research? Did you perform any investigative research to validate the experiences being shared about your subject and what is the validity you can assign to the narrative itself? How much truth can you claim?
This pertains to the integrity of the process by which knowledge is produced. Because memories are regenerative. If there are gaps in the memory, they are filled by other details. There are also a lot of slippages from the memory. People don’t remember everything. So the kind of narrative that you’ve built from the anecdote, how much truth can you assign to it and what were your specific ways to investigate and verify the same?
Pranab Kumar Aich: I always reconfirmed my story through multiple and varied sources. Nanda sir himself narrated some parts to me, my team and other journalists. I am from the same town where Nanda sir comes from. In fact, my producer is from the same town. The journalists had given me the first-hand information.
When you pick up data from a city and when you pick up data from a village, it’s very different. In cities, data is very confirmative at the surface, but deep within there are conspiracies. Because nobody has lived in that place after a certain point of time. Everybody comes and goes, nobody stays in the place. On the other hand, there is a legacy of families living in villages for thousands of years. When you asked something to someone in the village (Kantira), there were ten confirmations. When I asked them how would you know?
They would say that we had seen, or we had grown up listening to the same story. If you are looking at an anglicized process of analysing truth, then I would say that I don’t buy this idea. We have started believing factual presentations of truth because they’re written by someone. But when ten or hundred people who were living around reaffirm it, we don’t believe it?
I have witnessed Nanda sir’s life myself and I have captured it and presented it to you. Truth is expressive in itself. We are unable to comprehend the truth because of our meagre human levels. I met people who had met people, and they narrated the story based on that. Then, I wrote the drama part based on what they told me. I documented the real people who were working next to Nanda Sir as junior actors, you know, 78-year-olds, 90-year-olds and put them inside the film. These people had lost most of their memories. All they remembered were these plays. It’s interesting that the man you were talking about often stands there among kids and like a madman, he performs remembering those days.
I was in that village for several days to shoot that film. I did not have to go out for research as I was researching while I was filming. Actually, I used to research in the afternoon and film in the night as villagers don’t give you shots after 12:00 o’clock till 4:00 o’clock. You know there is a separate film to be made on the production of this film. Because that’s another struggle.
