‘Our culture enables matrimonial fraud’: Filmmaker Tanuja Chandra on the chief lesson learnt while directing her latest

Could you tell us about Wedding.con — its conceptualisation, making, and the overall experience?

Over two years ago, I was approached by Neha Khurana (of BBC Studios) to direct a series dealing with matrimonial fraud. At the time, I was shocked to discover that this was happening in such huge numbers in India. I was immediately drawn to it and joined their team, which had already been researching this for a while. It was a complex journey requiring us to decide who our main contributors would be and then meet them, conduct mock interviews, do intense pre-production for the interviews, recreate their experiences, and then do the long edit of the series. It has been a challenging journey but a very fulfilling one.

The series falls in line with your body of work which is largely female-centric. Is that what urged you to take it up?

Always! The female genre is my abiding passion and its importance in my career has never waned. But beyond that, the subject was riveting to me. And it needed urgent attention. It is a very relevant story of contemporary times and I wanted to be the one telling it.

You spoke to five women who were deceived on the pretext of marriage. How willing were they to open up? What was most challenging?

These are extraordinary women, each in her special way. It is very courageous of them to have agreed to speak to us because in a country like India where women are too often shamed for making mistakes, they knew that it would not be easy. Even for the ones not revealing their identities, it involved walking down a painful memory lane.

For me, one thing was crystal clear: I had zero judgment in my mind. For me, there was not an iota of blame that was to be on them. They had been ruthlessly exploited and all my support was for them. I was a hundred per cent on their side. Ours was a safe space in which they could open their hearts out, which they did. They never felt a sense of being interrogated or patronised in the least. My producers were very careful to make them feel comfortable – to the extent that there was a therapist on the set, should any of them feel triggered by memories and need to talk to someone.

Yes, it was tricky to get them to shed their nervousness because they had never faced a camera or a production crew before in their lives. But that is something one always has to navigate in documentary filmmaking.

How different was the experience of directing a docu-series compared to a film?

These are real people, not actors with a script. So there is unpredictability. We never know what we will get. That is partly true for fiction as well, but not to this extent. In the parts that were recreated or fictionalised, we had actors of course, but we had to devise a new visual language because we did not want much of the faces of actors to show. So one would shoot in such a way that half their faces showed or they were in the shadows.

I found this exciting, though. It was just so interesting to direct in a way that makes the shots poetic without revealing much. The editing of a documentary is, of course, very different from fiction. We can pretty much go down several routes of narration and play around with structure. While that is really tough and complicated, it is also a lot of fun. Maintaining a fine balance between the plot and the emotions is always tricky business and our editor, Parikshhit Jha, brought a world of sensitivity and thrill to the series.

A still from the documentary.

While speaking to the women, how much of the ‘director’ in you did you have to keep aside to connect with them more?

A director must at all times keep empathy alive even while making fiction because without that the characters will end up being somewhat flat and one-dimensional. That said, in documentary one has to stay gentle most of the time. Even a small amount of aggression is bound to make subjects shut down and that is always the fear.

One does not want to nudge them towards saying something either – it all needs to come from them. Only then will the truth of the story resonate. I was invested in our contributors deeply, I cared for them, I admired them – I conveyed this most clearly. While my face and eyes reflected to them their own emotions, I had to keep my own emotions in check so as not to overwhelm them. So yes, these were tricky waters to wade through.

What about the laws pertaining to such cyber fraud in India?

The laws surely need to be in step with sophisticated cyber crime modus operandi. There is too much of a responsibility on the victim. First of all, it is difficult for the police to locate and nab the criminals and when they do, their hands are tied considering the associated sections in the Indian Penal Code. In most cases, it is a bailable offence and the perpetrators are out of police custody in a short time, only to trap more victims. Plus, many frauds are committed by perpetrators abroad and this is where the law makes it even more difficult for criminals to be traced. This is just not supportive enough for victims.

You have been a pioneer in helming women-oriented films. Where do you feel Indian cinema stands when it comes to celebrating women vis-à-vis global films?

It is very straightforward for me – as long as half our films or even OTT shows are not about female characters, we cannot claim that it is enough. Whether or not this is done globally, my concern is Indian storytelling. Stories revolving around women have to be consciously and mindfully written, directed and produced. Plus, there needs to be a much larger female presence on screen as well as behind it. When I started out, it was just a handful of women directing films, but the number has not grown the way it should have in over two decades.

As part of your research, did you come across statistics on the percentage of men deceiving women on the pretext of marriage, and vice-versa?

There aren’t enough studies on this subject for statistics to be available. We simply do not know enough. And it is urgent and crucial that more research be done on this by the government as well as private agencies.

 

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We do not get to see your work as much as we would like to. What has kept you away for this long?

The fact is that in movie-making, a director struggles to get projects made. It is a tricky terrain because one has to find funding, which is dependent on the actors attached, which in turn is dependent on whether the script one wants to make finds their fancy. So it is a long journey. That said, I had a series release a year before this one called Hush Hush, and keep in mind one season is close to three films in length! It requires an intimidating amount of work and time. We are receiving some solid appreciation for Wedding.con already, which is exciting. And I’m working on two projects this year.

What is the most important thing you learnt while working on Wedding.con?

First of all, for me, that matrimonial fraud happens – at this scale. But also that our own culture enables it in many ways. When the institution of marriage is considered crucial, urgent, and an ultimate goal, especially for women in our society, a kind of fertile ground for exploitation is provided to perpetrators. Which is why this fraud enjoys the kind of success it does. And finally, that our law, the police, even families need to be much more supportive of women as well as men who find themselves in the clutches of perpetrators.