WHAT CAN a filmmaker do to show the nasty side of humanity? If the filmmaker in question is Nagesh Kukunoor, the answer would be ‘make a children’s film’ because that is exactly what the Hyderabad Blues director has done with his new movie, Dhanak (Rainbow), which was screened at the Toronto International Film Festival’s (TIFF) Kids section on April 18 this year. Dhanak paints a broad canvas of hope and humanity in the form of the story of a little girl’s determination to cure her kid brother’s blindness. In the process, Kukunoor travels back in time to revisit an India, which, he says, was built on trust and faith. “After seeing the nasty side of humanity today, I wanted to look around and discover the belief that there is still some humanity left,” he explains. “In the India that I grew up in, you actually trusted people,” says the 48-year-old filmmaker who was born in Andhra Pradesh. Kukunoor’s search took him to a sleepy rural hamlet in Rajasthan, where he wove a story of two orphans, who go on a similar pursuit across the desert state.
Myth and magic
Kukunoor’s protagonists in Dhanak, his second children’s film after the hugely popular boarding school drama Rockford (1999), are 10-year-old Pari and her eight-year-old brother Chotu, who is visually disabled. With their parents long dead in an accident, they live with their uncle and his wife, who are reluctant to spend the money needed for an operation to restore Chotu’s vision. But Pari has promised her little brother that he will see a rainbow before he turns nine years old and so the children embark on a desert chase of a Bollywood hero who is an ambassador for the blind.
“Kids believe in magic,” says Kukunoor, who shot for 33 days continuously in Rajasthan in the blistering summer last year for his 14th film. “Children look at an ordinary event and say it is magical. Adults don’t,” says Kukunoor. The kind of magic in which ordinary events help someone fulfill their dream is pitted against the myth of heroes doing the impossible. “We think that in today’s world, where everyone is able to communicate with each other, the whole myth of heroes might have diminished,” says the director. “But that is not so. In spite of the revolution in communications and information, it has made the mythology only stronger,” he adds. “You only have to make a trip to a village anywhere in India to realise that. Filmy heroes are the answer to everything, from poverty to disease. It is ridiculous that in our country, 10 people (heroes) hold sway over everything. They sell (everything from) charity to cement, chocolate to life insurance. It is amazing that the public never gets tired of them,” says Kukunoor.
Nature cure
After handling subjects like sports in Iqbal (2005), crime and forgiveness in Dor (2006) and trafficking in his last film Lakshmi (2014) in a nearly two-decade-long career, Kukunoor sure knows how to get the better of the elements. In his new film, he turns to nature to take on the concepts of magic and myth by exploiting the sense of isolation prevalent in the endless stretches of Rajasthan. “When you take two little kids and place them in a desert land, there is a scare of isolation,” says Kukunoor. “There are these two children with nothing but sand and sky, which adds a stunning sense of drama to their lives,” he explains. The drama in the desert comes in the shape of kidnapping, rescue and eventually deliverance. “Rajasthan has a strong element of visual frame,” says Kukunoor. “There are few places left in India, which can contribute to a film.” With Dhanak, Kukunoor believes he has completed his Rajasthan trilogy, which began with Dor in 2006 and later Ye Honsla, which was set in Rajasthan but never released.
Dhanak also advances Kukunoor’s exploration of relationships. “Most of my films at some level have dealt with that,” he says. The 106-minute film won the Best Feature Length Film prize and a special jury mention at the Berlin Film Festival in February. Interestingly, last year, too, an Indian film—Marathi Killa by Avinash Arun—won the Best Under-14 Feature Film Award. At TIFF Kids, where Kukunoor was in attendance, the film, which is aiming for an August-September release in India, shared screen space with films like the Paraguayan movie Landfill Harmonic, which is about a group of young people who turn trash into musical instruments to become the famed Recycled Orchestra and Peanuts by Schulz, which celebrates the 65th anniversary of Charles Schulz’s comic strip.
Faizal Khan
Faizal Khan is a freelancer.
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