Patang brings healing touch to Gujarat
INDIAN-AMERICAN director Prashant Bhargava chose to set his award-winning rst feature lm Patang (Kite) about family con ict in Ahmedabad because of the unique way people of Gujarat handled tragedy with kites playing a key role.
"What touched me about Gujarat was the way people handled tragedy — riots, natural disasters. And kite ying played such an important role in providing them that momentum to pursue happiness and persevere," Bhargava said over phone from New York.
"For me kite ying was a meditation and a purify- ing experience," said Bhargava, who focused on the nucleus of a family to tell his story — a successful Delhi businessman "returning to his childhood home with his daughter, a big city girl, who parties a lot.
"That magic that I saw during the research period was something that I wanted to preserve," said Bhargava, born and raised on the South Side of Chicago.
"And so I designed the whole lm, the whole scene the whole shooting style living that life on screen and preserved that authenticity and pride of that everyday stuff."
Coming from a director who has made music videos and commercials, it's not surprising that the lm has a lyrical visual quality, but it's the naturalistic performance of the cast, 90 per cent of which is made up of non-actors, that has taken everyone by storm.
How did he do that? For one, he paired an actor with a non-actor during the shooting and gave them small objectives. The result was very long takes with a one-minute scene sometimes taking two hours.
For one particular scene on the roof, the whole cast was in character for six hours with Seema Biswas of Bandit Queen fame moving around in character, preparing food for everyone the night before. "That was the way we worked," said Bhargava. He did a two-and-a-half month workshop for the street kids with games and memory exercises to make them comfortable in front of the camera.
In the case of Nawazuddin Siddiqui, who plays the role of Chakku, an angry young man who resents the way his big city uncle descends grandly on the small town relatives, "I told him to roam around for two weeks. Do whatever you want to do. Find that Chakku character."
"So for two weeks he would go to chai shops, listen to people, watch out how they spoke. And he met a character who was like Chakku in real life," he said. "Eventually when he had to act in the lm with kids, I introduced him as Chakku the character."
After winning awards and acclaim at prestigious lm festivals like the Berlin and Tribeca, Patang releases in US theatres on June 15 — in New York City, New Jersey and Chicago. Following that, it will release on June 22 in Toronto and on June 29 in Vancouver, the San Francisco Bay Area, and additional US cities in July and India soon after. — IANS