Freeze Frame

FREEZE FRAME 

September 7, 2014 

Sange Dorjee's national award winning independent film Crossing Bridges is the first ever to be made by a native of Arunachal Pradesh 


LISA ANN MONTEIRO 


A fter graduating from the Satyajit Ray Film and Television Institute in Kolkata, Sange Dorjee, a native of Arunachal Pradesh, decided to use his skills to turn the lens inward. He pooled his resources together and with help from friends and family, shot the award winning film Crossing Bridges in his own dialect Shertukpen in his home town in the Kameng region of Western Arunachal Pradesh.

The actors he sourced from his own friends and family conversant with the Shertukpen dialect. He assigned them roles they were familiar with, similar to those played in their own lives. He arranged a three- month workshop and allowed them to express themselves freely in their dialect.

The film tells the story of Tashia, a young man who loses his job in Mumbai and is forced to return to his home town in a remote village in Arunachal Pradesh. He hasn't lived there in years and his tribe's culture and the calm life in the mountains appears almost foreign to him. He waits impatiently for the call so he can go rushing back to his modern life in the city. During his wait, he re- experiences his roots and finds love. When he does receive the call, he finds that he has to make a life changing decision. The story was inspired by Dorjee’s own life. He too felt different in his own land and among his own people after being away for years, studying in boarding schools around the country.

Encumbered by a small budget, Sange decided that it would be shot on his old Canon 5D camera. Cinematographer Pooja Gupte did some initial shots in Arunachal and Mumbai and checked the footage on a big screen. Only when they were satisfied, did the two go ahead. “ We used our money wisely and tried to keep our production costs within Rs 25 lakhs. Many people make films and then leave them midway because they run out of money for post production. We didn’t want to land ourselves in a situation where our film would be stalled halfway,” Gupte says.

The film was shot in the chilling months of December and January and the crew from the city needed a few days before beginning filming to acclimatize themselves to the temperature and altitude. Covered in six layers of clothing, they braved the cold and trekked through mountains and freezing rivers for their shots. The few hours of electricity made the experience even more challenging. This meant that heaters weren’t functioning throughout the day and night. Batteries for the camera and lapel mikes had to be charged well before hand with spares kept handy. Gupte also had problems with the head of her tripod freezing over.

Dorjee is the first from the Shertukpen tribe to go to film school and his film is the first ever to be made by a local in the entire State.

The Shertukpen tribe has a population of around 4000 people. Most follow either Buddhisim or animism. Dorjee says tribes in Arunachal are quite similar to each other. It is only the rituals and their dialect that sets one apart from the other. His tribe like many others only has a dialect but no script and faces a threat with the influx of modernity today. More people are shunning their dialects, preferring to speak in Hindi and English today.

He has numerous stories from the region that he would like to share with the rest of India and the world.

“ India is such a large country with so many small pockets about which people know nothing about. I want to at least begin this process of dialogue where more stories from our region will be told,” Dorjee says. “ If people don’t tell their own stories, then no one else will.” Families in the State do have cable TV but new releases are watched only on DVDs. The State has no film industry and the cinema culture is nonexistent.

This meant that training the actors, many of whom hadn’t watched much of cinema, was a challenge in itself.

Dorjee entered his film in the Work in Progress Lab at NFDC’s Film Bazaar in Goa and received much appreciation for it. Winning the national award in April also helped the film travel to various film festivals the world over. It saw a nationwide release on August 29 when the agency PVR Director’s Rare released it in Mumbai, Pune, Delhi, Kolkata and Bangalore. Crossing Bridges has since then lived up to its title. Review Bureau 

link: http://epaperoheraldo.in/Details.aspx?id=7802&boxid=162822859&uid=&dat=09/07/2014