Sibling Revelry

The 47-year-old Kukunoor may have a hardened, distanced way of handling children on his film sets, but he is a sensitive filmmaker when depicting them on screen. While Rockford is one of the first poignant Indian coming-of-age films, Iqbal fetched actor Shweta Prasad a number of awards. Dhanak — selected in the Berlinale’s K section, a category dedicated to films about children — is the story of an eight-year-old visually challenged boy whose 10-year-old sister promises him that he will have his vision back before his next birthday. Without divulging anything more about the story, Kukunoor says that Dhanak is about children’s ability to see the magic in the routine and the mundane.

Originally conceived for a television commercial that was later scrapped, the central idea of Dhanak had been lying with Kukunoor since 2012. “I write all my script ideas in a diary. In 2013, when I stumbled upon this story once again, an image of a brother and sister walking through a desert, holding each other’s hand, popped up in my head,” recounts Kukunoor. The visual was so vivid that he wrote the script in a sudden burst of creativity. The image is now the poster of Dhanak.

Dhanak comes after Kukunoor’s dark and disturbing Lakshmi, a film about human trafficking and child prostitution. The film was critically well-received and won the Audience Award for Best Narrative at the Palm Springs International Film Festival 2014, but failed to get the filmmaker back in the reckoning. With films such as Hyderabad Blues (1998), Rockford (1999), 3 Deewarein (2003), Iqbal (2005) and Dor (2006), Kukunoor has been an important independent voice in Hindi cinema. But films after Dor, such as Bombay to Bangkok (2008), 8X10 Tasveer (2009) and Aashayein (2010) failed critically and commercially. Apart from the first, though, the filmmaker doesn’t consider any of the films as his failure. “May be they could have been marketed better, but I did the best I could,” he says.

Today, Kukunoor is much more certain about how to market his films. He is aiming for a theatrical release for Dhanak in India only after it has done the rounds of the festival circuit for six months. “The exhibition system in India has become nightmarish,” he rues, “Yes, there are more small films releasing today than before, but the amount of money one is expected to spend on marketing sometimes exceeds the film’s budget. I am hoping that Dhanak will attract an international distributor, such as Sony Picture Classics or Paramount Pictures, and boost its India release.”

sankhayan.ghosh@expressindia.com