Bringing Up Baby

Director Nitin Kakkar recounts the tale of making and releasing his National Award winning debut Filmistaan.

Nitin Kakkar (Source: Express photo by Amit Chakravarty)

It all started with Manto. Reading him brought the ghost of Partition to Nitin Kakkar’s life quite abruptly. So he procured the rights of a few of Manto’s stories to weave a script that dealt with the demon of Partition that loomed large on a diaspora. But then Manto doesn’t fit into the narrative of Bollywood masala. “Producers would tell me that it was a good script. But they also told me that nobody is interested in a story of Partition. I took it to script labs too but getting finances was not easy. Since it was a period film, there was a huge cost that also included a huge cast,” says Kakkar.

In order to deal with this impasse, he went back to the drawing board to pen down other ideas. “One day I had this vague thought about how films have a major impact on us. Subconsciously they rule the way we think at times. I meet people who, in their daily lives, use a lot of film dialogues,” he says. And this led him to create Sunny, a Bollywood-obsessed character. And once Manto and Sunny met, Filmistaan was born.

The film tells the tale of wannabe actor and assistant director Sunny who mistakenly gets abducted in Rajasthan by an Islamic terrorist group, and he lands up as a hostage in a house in Pakistan. However, the house belongs to Aftaab whose love and livelihood is pirated Hindi films. The film goes on to narrate an unlikely cross-border friendship of Aftaab and Sunny, through the celebration and joy that cinema brings in the lives of the larger mass, without getting schmaltzy and preachy about the Indo-Pak issue.

“Here you are fed over and over again that you have an enemy. That’s what goes on 24X7, for whatever reasons. But when you meet the common man, it’s completely different. I decided to see it through my eye, that’s what I saw, and that’s what culminated into Filmistaan,”
adds Kakkar.

Since the film is an ode to cinema, he didn’t want to cast any stars. “The film is about stars whom we have been looking up to as an audience. If there would been a known actor, it would look like a film. I tried to have an unknown cast,” adds Kakkar. Hence the cast of unfamiliar faces — Sharib Hashmi, Inaamulhaq, Kumud Mishra and Gopal Dutt.

Filmistaan, which was shot in 20 days, was selected for the Busan International Film Festival where it received a Special Jury Mention. But he was keen to see how the Indian audience reacts to the film. “Small jokes and dialogues like “Holi kab hai? Kab hai holi?” can be understood only by people who have grown up on Hindi cinema,” he says. Winning a National Award for Best Feature Film in Hindi in 2012 was thus a big feat.

Then the bubble burst. The film just couldn’t reach theatres as everybody assumed it to be commercially non-viable. Producer Shyam Shroff procured the film finally, and talks with Disney India started. It was supposed to release in May last year, but by the time the paperwork got done, it was already October-November, which is the season of big releases. “People were asking me to move on to the next project but it doesn’t happen. I think a film gets completed only when it reaches the audience,” he says. After much delay, the film will finally be released on June 6 with 450 plus prints.

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Now Kakkar is planning his next feature, a film on the life of an artiste, something from the colourful world of circus.

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