‘IT’S LIKE THE HAIKU AND THE EPIC. ONLY SOME STORIES CAN BE TOLD WITH AN IPHONE,’ SAYS VETERAN FILMMAKER SHYAM BENEGAL
Tamil Nadu and Andhra Pradesh. “The aerial shots are an integral part of the storytelling here. I would never have been able to make this movie without a helicopter before,” he says.
There’s tech involved in every stage, including post-production fundraising — Varghese raised ₹8 lakh through crowdfunding over 10 weeks — and distribution.
Zoo might never have found an audience without the OTT platforms like Netflix, Varghese is set to tour the film circuit, and is hoping to make it to such a platform too.
TINY TALES
“In terms of both the making and the consumption of cinema, smaller, digital devices are the future,” says Meenakshi Shedde, film curator, critic and South Asia consultant to the Berlin film festival. “The audience is more willing to experiment, and is open to different kinds of stories. As phones and cameras become smaller, shooting with phones and natural light will become less of a challenge and will allow, in fact, for a greater degree of realism, grittiness or intimacy in a scene.”
Liberation from heavy technology has democratised filmmaking, Shedde adds, making it cheaper and allowing a lot more variety in the kinds of stories being told.
Seasoned filmmakers are revelling in this freedom too. Vikramaditya Motwane shot Trapped (2016) on the Red Dragon digital camera. “It allowed me to shoot even
Some are giving time; others are pitching in with their skills or offering space where the books can be stored safely in the interim. Still others are serving as porters, carefully transporting the most precious books to homes in the neighbourhood.
All the volunteers have day jobs. So they dedicate three or four hours every night to the library, sorting, cataloguing and restacking. The indexing began in March and is expected to take until October.
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It’s now past midnight on a windy August day. Naeem stands amid shiny new steel shelves that don’t yet match the rest indoors without any extra lighting,” he says. “I then used this process extensively in [the Netflix series] Sacred Games too, where many indoor shots were done with minimal lighting.”
Similarly, Sanal Kumar Sasidharan’s S Durga, the critically acclaimed film released in February, was shot with a Sony Alpha Digicam, in actual streetscapes and natural light.
“But with filmmaking becoming easy, it has also resulted in some lazy work,” Shedde warns. “A background in solid story-telling, combined with modern technology and techniques would be an ideal situation.”
TANGERINE
Liberation from heavy technology has democratised filmmaking, making it cheaper and allowing a lot more variety in the kinds of stories being told. In terms of both the making and the consumption of cinema, smaller, digital devices are the future. MEENAKSHI SHEDDE, film curator, critic and South Asia consultant to the Berlin film festival Using a digital camera in Trapped, I realised I could shoot even indoors without extra lighting. I then used this process extensively in [the Netflix series] Sacred Games. VIKRAMADITYA MOTWANE, filmmaker
The posterboy for this kind of guerilla filmmaking is Sean Baker, the American whose 2015 film Tangerine was a turning point. Not because it was the first to be shot on an iPhone (it wasn’t), but because the 88-minute feature told a compelling human tale of two friends, transgender sex workers, celebrating, arguing, fighting about a cheating boyfriend / pimp, and setting out in search of him.
Tangerine shone on the festival circuit, premiering at Sundance, being nominated for the Best of Next award there, and going on to show and win at festivals around the world. The film is now on Netflix, and one of the phones used to shoot it has been preserved and displayed at the museum of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences (which holds the Oscars).
It was Baker, in fact, who inspired Sharma to take up the iPhone. Sharma was at the Indian Film Festival of Los Angeles in 2015, where Baker was on the jury. “I heard about what he had done with Tangerine and it struck me that I could use the iPhone too,” he says. of the room, with its worn wooden door, iron beams and fading signboard.
He inspects the shelves carefully, and says it’s time for the books to come home. “It is a weird feeling. I want them all back here,” he tells Mohammad Sajid, a DYWA member, on the phone.
Sajid, 41, an admin executive, is further up the lane, sitting in a second-floor flat with three other young men, surrounded by cartons of books they’re supposed to catalogue tonight.
In the non-functional kitchen, he opens a carton. “Preserving this treasure is our primary concern,” he says, pointing to the hardbound books inside — Diwan-e-Zafar (Poems by Bahadur Shah Zafar, the last Mughal emperor, printed at the royal press, Red Fort, 1885); a copy of the Bhagvad Gita in Urdu; a 600-year-old Arabic book on logic; Sair-ul-aqtab, a 200-year-old book of Sufi teachings.
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Although it started out as a library, the space gradually took on other functions too. Locals come here for help navigating school admissions, advice on business plans, counsel on shariat or Islamic law.
“The DYWA members come from various professions. They are accessible and there is a sense of trust. So the library is the go-to place for neighbourhood people,” says Jawwad Iqbal, 24, a law student and a regular at the library.
It remains the go-to space for research material too.
“I had to do a project on the Urdu poet Firaq Gorakhpuri and couldn’t find material. A friend directed me here. I was surprised to find so much information in a neighbourhood community library. I have been visiting ever since,” says Farheen Naz, 23, an MA student at Jamia Millia.
Anand Taneja, assistant professor of religious studies and anthropology at the
In addition to slashing costs, the phone camera frees the filmmaker from the baggage of elaborate set-ups.
“Normally we would have to pay or make elaborate arrangements to shoot at a café, for instance,” says Sharma. “But when they saw our small crew and mobile, they just let us do our scenes.”
Shooting in a slum, he adds, the arrangements were so minimal that no one really noticed them. “At one point, some cops arrived because they’d heard there was filming on, but when they saw just four people with a mobile phone, they left.”
This is not to say it’s easy going. Das of Village Rockstars took four years to write, shoot and edit her film. “There is so much information available on the internet, which I used to teach myself,” she says. “But my kind of minimal budget and technique may not work for other stories.”
She’s echoing Shyam Benegal when she says that. “Only some stories can be told with a device like an iPhone,” says the veteran filmmaker. “It’s like the haiku and the epic. They’re both effective art forms and one can’t replace the other. Which one works best depends on what the artist has to say and what effect he wants to have on the audience.”
IN THE CAPITAL, A NEIGHBOURHOOD RALLIES TO SAVE A LIBRARY OF RARE READS
Vanderbilt University in Tennessee, says he first visited in 2010. “During my doctoral research, whenever I was in Old Delhi, I would make it a point to go there,” he adds. “I would turn to the high shelf of Urdu books on the history of Delhi. Being able to get a sense of Delhi nearly a century ago, while I was investigating the contemporary life and politics around its monuments, was an invaluable gift.”
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Termites paved the way for the renovation. Finally, the DYWA decided to fix the current space by replacing wooden shelves with steel racks, redoing the floor, and finally cataloguing the books.
“The significance of an institute like ours is not tangible. I cannot pinpoint one thing we have changed or give you a count of people who have benefitted,” says Naeem, standing amid the still-bare shelves. “But I can tell you that it is a great feeling to be of help to society in an age when people are increasingly focused on the self.”