Filmmaker brothers take off with Tamaash

Filmmaker brothers take off with ‘ Tamaash’  

Herald Review June 8, 2014


Satyanshu Singh on his directorial debut with the short film, ‘ Tamaash’, and why he dislikes a film with a child protagonist being classified as a ‘ children’s film'. 



LISA ANN MONTEIRO 


Satyanshu and Devanshu Singh’s directorial debut Tamaash (Puppet) has recently been winning numerous awards at film festivals around the world. The short film set in Kashmir tells the story of nine year old Anzar who is rebuked by his father and teacher for performing poorly in school.

His elders ask him why he can’t be more like Sadat, his straight- As classmate.

Anzar is running out of time. He has only two days till his exam to prove his worth to his elders. Things seem easy at first when a mysterious man offers to help him score more marks than Sadat. Soon Anzar realizes what he was doing wrong and does everything within his capacity to set it right.

The story is beautifully told and the child actors couldn’t have played their parts better. The directors, who are also brothers, admit it was the stories of Ruskin Bond and the cinema of Iran especially Iranian director Abbas Kiarostami’s Where’s the Friend’s Home that was their core inspiration Theirs is a story of collaboration. Devanshu wrote a story about a kid who is unfairly compared with the topper in his batch, while Satyanshu brought in the magical element of the puppet to the film, turning it into a fable and adding elements of mystery and surrealism.

“ It was then that we really felt excited about making this film. And of course if the film is set in Kashmir, uses Kashmiri actors, we had to have Kashmiri dialogue and songs because the aural milieu of a film is as important as the visual one. We have a fascination for different languages, especially the way each language sounds. It was a delight to realize that our first film would be in a language that we don’t know. Soon we fell in love with the sound of the Kashmiri language,” Satyanshu told Herald Review.

The directors say working with Kashmiri children was a wonderful experience.

The key, they say, is to cast correctly.

They were looking for talented kids who were also intelligent and had good attention spans. “ Burhan who played the little Mufid had never acted before, but he is incredibly talented and was perhaps one of the most intelligent people on the set. He could cry on cue and understood the right notes during the film. After casting them, Devanshu spent time with them, conducting workshops, and more importantly, developing a strong bond.” The most touching part of the entire filmmaking experience was the way the children bonded with the directors.

With them around, they say, they laughed more often than they would otherwise.

Shooting in Kashmir, far away from where they live, was made relatively easier for the directors because of a friend, Omar, who managed everything there for them. They shot in Badgham district in areas known as Mujhpatri and Dudhpatri.

Satyanshu says he wouldn’t advise anyone to shoot in a state they’re not familiar with, unless they have good support from locals. Dozens of Kashmiris helped them without expecting anything in return. They had people who volunteered to sleep in their kitchen because they were shooting in their bed- room. “ It is as if all of them wanted us to do a great job.” Because of their limited crew, Devanshu had to double up as the production and costume designer while he planned the daily shoots, took continuity notes, kept track of time and took care of basic production supervision.

Apart from all of this, they had to extract performances from the actors who spoke in a language they didn’t understand. The increasing cold temperatures pushed up costs, and they ended spending more than twice their initial budget.

The filmmaker brothers, originally from Bihar, studied Hindustani classical music as children and began writing and directing plays during their school days. Satyanshu wrote poems and stories for Uddan and lyrics for the song ‘ Life yeh Mausambi- si’ in Ferrari Ki Sawaari.

The directors don’t appreciate their film being categorized as a children’s film. “ All audiences react to this film in the same way— whether they are kids or adults. All of us, whether we are kids or adults, love children. It is so easy to make the audience fall in love with a child character because that character can entertain you, make you laugh, move you and make you cry like no grown- up character can. In my opinion films with children should be the safest bets when it comes to the commerce of cinema,” Satyanshu says.

Unfortunately, we have not been able to understand that, which is why we have preconceived notions about the market and about classifying films into artificial categories, he believes.

“ A children’s movie doesn’t have a good chance at the box office not because it is a children’s film but because it is generally another independent film without any star and it struggles like all such films. We all know that when backed by big names and stars and studios, children’s films have been immensely successful,” he points out.

Films, he says, should be classified if need be into only two categories: " good films" and " not so good films", and this too should be subjective from one audience to another. Review Bureau