Kannada film ‘Thithi’ to have Asian premiere at the Mumbai Film Festival

Reddy started by making short films, which became a process of self-education. After he graduated in 2010, he made Ika (Feather), a Telugu short about a boy who wants to make a film but does not have a camera. He finds an old cardboard box, sticks old VHS tapes on its side and sets out to make a film. “It’s a film about the nature and perception of art. It is sort of a meta fiction and exploration of what cinema really is,” says Reddy. He finished Ika in 2012, a year after he completed his self-published debut novel, It’s Raining in Maya.

For a more formal education in filmmaking, he went to Prague Film School. He was always certain of one thing — he wanted to set his first feature film in a small village in the Mandya district of Karnataka. “My co-writer and collaborator, Ere Gowda, was born and raised in that village. I wanted to shoot there but did not want to force the story, which came about organically much later,” he says.

After film school, Reddy spent nearly three months, which he calls “a creative exploratory period” in the village. On most days, he and Gowda would roam around — meeting people, discussing different aspects of their life or swimming in the nearby canal with the village children. “We took notes everyday and brainstormed. We started building our stories based on that. One of the important things that happened during the period was that we cast our three key actors. We liked them so much that we decided to make a film about them even before we wrote the story,” says Reddy. So, when they got down to writing the script, they kept their traits and mannerisms
in mind.

Writing the script took three months. The casting took eight. Reddy was drawn to working with non-professional actors as he considers this a genuine way of telling a story. Thithi needed 50 actors. Reddy and his team followed a very intuitive way of casting and spoke to thousands of villagers. “If we sensed that someone fit our requirements, then we met them. Since my co-writer is from the village, he already knew many of them,” he says. Most villagers did not know what acting entails so, instead of mentioning “acting”, Reddy asked them if they were interested in trying something new.

“If some of the cast were naturally good at acting, we let them be. A few of the actors required help with their body language while others were good off camera. In the latter case, we found ways of recording their bits without making them self-conscious,” says Reddy. He
also roped in technicians from FTII, Pune, and the Prague school. Thithi has a strong international flavour, thanks to Reddy’s cinematic sensibilities that have been honed by subtitled films from around the world. From Iranian cinema to the works of Wong Kar-wai, Michael Haneke, Wes Anderson, Ang Lee and Ethan and Joel Coen, Reddy has soaked in the stories of celebrated filmmakers.

The NFDC Film Bazaar played a key role in bringing the film an international recognition. An early cut of Thithi was shown at NFDC’s work-in-progress lab. Producer Sunmin Park, a mentor at the lab, came on board. Through the lab, the Locarno Film Festival heard about Thithi — and paved the way for it to travel to the world screen.

alaka.sahani@expressindia.com