Arjun Gourisaria,founder of Black Magic Motion Pictures and Moinak Biswas,a professor of film studies,talk about their joint directorial debut Sthaniya Sambaad (Spring In The Colony),which recently bagged the Best Film Award at the New York Indian Film Festival. What motivated the making of Sthaniya Sambaad? Arjun Gourisaria and Moinak Biswas: We wanted to make a film on Kolkata. The film tells a love story. But the hero disguises his search for love while hiding his escape from the scene of battle. The idea was to start with a teeming community and jump over the standard middle-class Kolkata to a cosmopolitan city of fun and madness. We are not sure if the main journey is entirely real,or whether the absurd sub-plot of the two boys trying to sell a chopped plait is illusory. How did you work as a team? Moinak: Arjun and I have lived the film for years. The script goes back to 2001. It went through many revisions over seven years or so before we got down to production. Arjun and I made the major stylistic decisions before we began to shoot. But on location,changes became necessary. Arjun made those decisions. The edit gave us enough time and space to think jointly on the changes. Our approaches to cinema are not different. I did not make the film as an academic,but as a film-lover. Arjun: The long-term friendship between Moinak and me is based,among other things,on our similar taste in films. Joint direction was a foregone conclusion as Moinak had written the story and the script. Everything starting from the fine-tuning of the script,to casting,location hunting,camera angles,lensing,acting styles,editing and sound was decided through joint discussion,debate and consent. The film is a result of this deep collaboration,based on a mutual respect for each others strengths and capabilities. Arjun,you have mainly produced feature films that have out-of-the-box ideas. Isnt it a business risk? For my partners in Black Magic and for me,filmmaking is an act of love. We have always tried to make films that would give us personal creative satisfaction. We have consciously tried to stay away from obvious commercialisation. Patalghar, Teen Ekke Teen and Sthaniya Sambaad are fruits of that same honest endeavour. The only exception was Amar Pratigya,a Swapan Saha film. But that was honest too because it was unabashedly intended as a commercial film! But it was a super-flop. So we resolved to tell only such stories as we truly believed in and leave the rest to fate. Moinak,as you have written the story and the script,what triggered this story that explores life in a refugee colony? I have grown up close to pockets of refugee colonies,though not within them. When Arjun asked me to write a script,I thought of writing something around these colonies. The story grew out of snippets of everyday life in a colony that we named as Deshbandhu Colony. I added an absurd angle to push the film towards a quasi-dream-like experience from a starkly naturalist exploration. It was necessary to assimilate the basic absurdity of what is happening around us in the name of development. Arjun,the storyline is upbeat and contemporary. How does the Bengali title that means local news link with its very different English translation? Spring In The Colony was the initial working title. We fell in love with it as it seemed to capture the mood of the film. When we tried to find an equivalent title,we realised there wasnt one in Bengali. So we arrived at Sthaniya Sambaad,not a translation,but,in a sense,a transcreation of the mood we wanted the name to capture. Does the film have a Ritwik Ghatak influence? Moinak: Since this is a story based on characters from a refugee colony,the kind of place we see in Ghataks Meghe Dhaka Tara,there are some scenes that remind you of his work. There are a couple of references to him,but not more than that. The location might have itself created some echoes of Ghatak. Arjun: Moinak and I have always found inspiration in Ghataks amazing body of films. The influence was unavoidable! The fact that the people and the areas portrayed in the movie are the same people and areas that Ghatak portrayed,has made the influence (as well as our humble tribute),a little more obvious. Deshbandhu Colony,as far as the name goes,is a figment of our imagination. But several Deshbandhu Colonies continue to exist,under other names. Your actors are either completely new or are drawn from theatre. Is there any specific reason for this? Moinak: The story is unusual. The tone and the look are different from the usual films. We had to find new faces and non-actors,often from the localities where we shot. Group theatre actors like Mrinal Ghosh,Suman Mukhopadhyay,Anindya Banerjee and Bratya Basu were brought in to provide solid backing to this inexperienced lot. They have created an interesting mix. Arjun: The right face,the right body type for the right role has been our endeavour. The people chosen to play the roles had to attend a gruelling,year-long casting exercise. The people we wanted to portray in the film are the kind that are hardly depicted in todays Bengali cinema. You have many technical USPs to your credit so far as this film goes. The film is shot on red,mostly from the eye-level,from a distance. It keeps away from psychological proximity to characters. We wanted the familiar but almost never explored spaces of the city to take on an added reality through authentic faces,speech and bodies. We have used live sound and real locations to enhance both the realism and the hallucinatory take offs.
