Read The First Part Of The Interview Here

Ashvin Kumar, the Oscar nominated director, whose much anticipated feature film ‘ The Forest’ releases today (11th May,2012), reflects upon the representation of Kashmir in mainstream Hindi Cinema , documentary film-making, online film release and his goal to become a hot-shot director, among other things.

What is your opinion regarding the representation of Kashmir in Indian Commercial Cinema ?

Indian commercial cinema has done a disfavour to both the Indian and Kashmiri citizen. Above, I spoke about Power and Responsibility. Our cinema could have played a vital role in disabusing the country of cartoonish notions of the Kashmiri conflict which have come to stay. This approach encourages the hero-villain formulation and discourages engagement with complexity. Cinema could have been the medium of social change here. Our people, so used to getting their news in television bytes, deserved a chance to understand the real situation in Kashmir and make up their own minds about the Kashmiri desire for self-determination, but our cinema has turned this hugely complex situation into a cop-robber movie. Good Indian solider vs. the bad Kashmiri terrorist. The good Hindu vs. the bad Muslim.

The indoctrination of the soldiers in their training camps is communal. This is explained by the fact that we have fought three wars against Pakistan. By now, it’s the unwritten part of the manual. It is their cynical masters who put them in such an untenable situation, which is fodder for a film on its own. It is conceivable that an army man sworn to defend his country would need all the motivation he can get to wage war upon his own people, but can we say the same for film-makers who have given us dangerously laced representations of Kashmir in commercial cinema? How did the subtleties and nuances of the very human condition that film-makers are spokespersons of, get the short shrift?

It feels like the Indian government came up with a certain formulae by which to explain why we have to torture, rape and maim our own citizens in Kashmir. Then brought Bollywood in to sell the fiction. Seen ‘Wag The Dog’ by David Mamet? (hyperlink)

Bollywood has given an inaccurate and awkward shape to the desires and feelings of the ordinary Kashmiri. She is seen in self-deprecating terms. The smiling shikara-walla or obedient pony-walla. Red apples. Rosy cheeks. Fair complexioned dames in picturesque vales. We are kept at a distance. The image is a post card. We don’t see the barbed wires, bunkers and bullets for a child who crosses the road to go to school. We are not shown the tears in the eyes of a mother who has not seen her eight year old son for fourteen years and who may well be in one of the mass graves that the government refuses to exhume. We don’t get to see the bullet-holes in wooden living rooms of villager’s homes after a gun-fight between militants and armed forces or the charred remains of a house that has been ‘exploded’ by security forces to ‘teach a lesson’ to civilians for harbouring militants. These practices continue till today. In our secular, democratic republic while we speak about 9% growth and becoming global super-power. Ironic, no, that Bollywood as an industry is one of the industries that has profited greatly by the boom of the last twenty years. The same twenty years (1991-date) in which the Kashmir conflict has been raging. Not ironic perhaps that Bollywood would refuse the inconvenient truth when there’s so much money to be made.

So, how has Bollywood projected the Indian armed presence in Kashmir?

As a god-send for the Kashmiri. The forces are supposedly there for the protection of the Kashimri against the ‘foreign-hand’. This keeps the rest of India safe. You can sleep well tonight. This is misleading. It is a fiction. Go speak to any Kashmiri. From an eight year old to a eighty year old. If you can’t do the next best thing www.inshallahfootball.com / www.inshallahkashmir.com

The Kashmiri lives under a siege in a state of emergency that you and I will find intolerable. We have not only abdicated our responsibility to represent this conflict in real terms, but fuelled hate, distrust and misunderstanding between Indians and Kashmiris when it could so well have been just the opposite. It is using power without responsibility. Don’t you feel that it’s the duty of anyone who calls himself or herself a film maker to have some responsibility towards the people for whom the film is being made? It has made Kashmiris look like ungrateful recipients of Indian largesse, it has de-historicised a legitimate claim for self-determination and de-humanised the suffering of its people. It has read from a book given to it by our so-called independent national media and government propaganda.

Now thanks to YouTube and the internet, one of the greatest inventions for democracy, it is not so easy to hide mass graves, false encounters and thousands of tortured and disappeared people.

The screen writers of Bollywood will find such beautiful, poignant, heart-breaking stories in the most mundane household of Kashmir. I say to them, please go with your paper and pen, talk to people there, write screenplays about daily life. Reintroduce Kashmir to India. Movies can build bridges between the dislocated Kashmiri and his cousin here in India. The first step towards reconciliation is acknowledgement. Be the messengers for that acknowledgement. Let people here know what’s going on there.

I often get asked, can movies really bring about social change. I feel that in this context there is so much misunderstanding in India about the Kashmiri, that certainly there can be an opinion shift, brought about commercial cinema done with truthful intentions.

The titles of both of your films on Kashmir starts with ‘Inshallah’ ( God –willing ) . Does it signify that you are hopeful about things getting better there ?

No, things are not getting better in Kashmir. The basic cry is to treat the Kashmiri people as individuals with rights and liberties given to every citizen of our republic. It is not such an unreasonable demand.

Both of your films end on a hopeful note too. Are you an optimist ?

When you experience such despair the imagination can’t do anything else but hope. It is a desperate hope.

Is the documentary more effective a form than fiction in depicting the social realities of a place. Is fiction an element in documentaries too ?

The Inshallah films were my first attempts at documentary. I got to tell you, it’s a rush. Far more exciting, live and palpable filming process than fiction. You are writing the script as you’re rolling the camera. In this case, I shot most of both the films, and found myself choosing my angles and shots i.e. visual storytelling, as the subject was speaking. I had some vague idea in my mind how this would  relate and be edited with something. The beauty is that you are right there, then, things are happening, you have to make split second editorial decisions, script-writing decisions – where should I stand to make the best visual use of what’s going on in front of me.

My style of making fiction has changed. I tend to incorporate that immediacy, using much more improvisation both from actors and the camera than I did previously. My film Dazed in Doon which I directed school kids aged 13 – 19 at Doon School, was done almost entirely like that. The scene was written on the page, dialogues learnt but then the kids started playing their parts and we had something very tender, very precious, very true that was happening. I still feel it’s my best work till date. But digital technology allows that sort of freedom.

Do you believe involving certain amount of staging in documentaries to obtain the required effect ? Does it render the reality of the situations less real in any way ?

There is a certain amount of staging but I don’t do it in terms of ‘go here sit there’ sort of thing. I do it to precipitate and catalyse events that could be used in the film. I still don’t know what’s going to happen. You have to be prepared for disappointments. They are inevitable. Failed attempts at doing something. But you send the subject into a market place for example to ask a few questions about a certain incident, you know you need that background information in the film, but rather than a title card, you want your subject / protagonist to discover it for himself. In our case, Basharat knew very little about the history of his own people, was a natural interlocutor. He was genuinely visiting the places we took him to for the first time. He was speaking to people about certain things for the first time. That is the sort of staging that I am interested in. Very similar to what I did with my fiction film Dazed in Doon that I discussed earlier. You set up the scene, give the actors some basic motivations then let things happen. When they do, it’s your job to shoot it well.

I’d imagine that if one was not to follow a rigour, a set of rules, one could lapse into easy solutions which always look fake. Even in fiction, an easy solution such as an actor telling you what is happening rather than you as a film-maker ‘showing’ it, is an easy solution. It feels fake because we don’t talk like that. We don’t behave like that. We want our film makes to work a little hard only then will we reward them with a suspension of disbelief. That is how I feel audiences in India have changed over the past four or five years. They are getting slightly more guarded about their suspension of disbelief, film makers can’t take them for granted anymore. It’s a good thing. It’s a coming of age for independent cinema in India, if indeed my hypothesis is correct.

Did the idea for ‘ The Forest ‘ start as a documentary idea. If yes , then how did it evolve into a fiction ?

No – it was conceived as fiction from the word go. I had just made Little Terrorist and Road To Ladakh before that. So it was to be my first fiction film. I had no clue that I would ever make a documentary film. It was furthest from my imagination. I was very ambitious at that time when I made The Forest, my goal was to become a hot-shot director, much-in-demand, burning up jet-fuel working on a global stage.

Documentaries didn’t quite fit into that dream.

Artistically, I think after the set back of The Forest, the Inshallah films led to leaps and bounds of growth , thanks to the documentary medium. Plus, I learnt how to be a cinematographer.

Have you ever considered making a fiction film on the issues in Kashmir ?

Oh yes. That’s how I went to Kashmir in the first place. When the release of The Forest didn’t happen for two years, I was in the dumps. I started writing this film. It was a re-make of my Road To Ladakh, except it was about a Kashmiri militant and so on. I got to Kashmir in the autumn of 2009, and within two weeks of meetings and travels around the valley, I burnt that script. It was terrible.

Then came ‘Inshallah,Football’. I have always wanted to make a fictional film on the issues in Kashmir. You can read between the lines of my response to one of your earlier questions regarding Bollywood’s role in Kashmir.

Now I am thinking of an international co-production with two A rated Latin American stars, I won’t take names but you can guess who they might be. A fictionalised feature of ‘Inshallah, football’ set in Kashmir. I also have another film set in Kashmir, it’s a story about two little girls in a remote little village that everyone seems to have forgotten. Deep, near the border. The story of Kashmir, in my opinion, is best told from the eyes of children. For two reasons, one because there is an innocence to the guile of the world, that’s difficult with older protagonists. All good actors spend years training to be able to return to that moment of truth in their performances that children are so effortless with. Two, because they are the future, they are the hope.

You released ‘Inshallah, Kashmir’ on the internet , free of charge . The new media is increasingly becoming a platform where new directors can showcase their works. What are the pros and cons of that ?

It was commercial suicide. So that’s a con, for you. Pros are innumerable. I felt it was my duty to show this film to the ‘rest of India’. And as predicted, people were shocked at how little they knew about what is happening in their own country. We had close to 100,000 hits and 50,000 full views. These are staggering numbers. Consider : this is a 80 min documentary film watched on the terribly slow internet connections we have in India. If this kind of interest / audience exists in India (all the above were from India) then why are we not seeing more documentaries in the theatres and on TV? It is a democratic medium. I released the film on a symbolic date 26th of January 2012, Indian Republic Day to celebrate the fact that while guns were being put on display in each state capital and armed forces were being paraded, here was something unflattering about those forces for whom we all have the highest of regard. I will be proud to live in a country where I can do that. I will be still prouder when we will be able to do that without the need for sanction and permission of the government by way of the Central Board of Film Certification.

It helped me bypass censorship that had plagued ‘Inshallah, football’ – due to which I lost 6 – 8 months of precious time to release that film in India. I also think that a limited digital release builds a profile for a film. I am thinking of approaching a distributor like PVR with these figures and saying shall we try to release in theatres? Use the internet as your publicity campaign.

Do you think the importance of the censors will be made less relevant due to this trend ?

The Indian censor board should cease to exist. It should be replaced by an industry constituted organisation which has to certify films in terms of ratings as is done in most western countries now. Staffed by reasonable people who’s sensitivities are not inflamed like prickly heat whenever someone says f*** or puts a tongue into a hot woman’s mouth.

I do not want kids to be watching things that they are not ready to see, and would like to warn parents if such things are contained in a film. Other than that I would respect the right of all film makers to make the kind of films they want to without extending my perception of decency and propriety on them and curtailing their freedom of speech and expression thereby. The practice of imposing arbitrary cuts, titles is out-of-step with the times…

There is all sorts of nonsense that comes on TV, some of it I find deeply shocking and objectionable. Do I ask for those programmes to be censored? No, I simply switch the channel. If something offends you – don’t watch it. But you are not in a position to decide for your neighbour nor should you use state instruments to deny someone the right to livelihood – i.e. me, the film maker.

Self regulation is a good way to proceed. The same argument was made for television and the internet but there is enough scope under existing laws to have recourse in case something is deemed objectionable. This idea of censorship is made totally impotent and redundant with the presence of You Tube. It should go.

Can it be dangerous if people choose to exploit this liberty ? How can one generate a revenue through releasing their movies online ? Your take on this new Phenomena .

Generating revenue online is still a mystery. Have not thought about that enough. I think in today’s day and age, if we can release a film online at the same time as theatrical release, you may get good revenues cause the buzz is there. Conventional distributors think of the internet as a threat, where things are pirated and stolen not without justification.

Perhaps we need to start thinking of it as another territory. Like we have Delhi, Bombay, Chennai, international, now we have the internet. If we can release a film this way and have  good digital social media campaign around it, it could do very well indeed. The audience who is going to watch your film online is not the same as who watches it on the internet. As far as piracy is concerned, once you release your movie is out anyway. May as well take advantage of an untapped market no?

Read The First Part Of The Interview Here