Atul Sabharwal who made the underrated Aurangzeb for Yash Raj Films has spent the last two years of his life making a documentary In Their Shoes on the shoe traders of Agra. Interestingly Atul's father is in the shoe trade.
Atul Sabharwal who made the underrated Aurangzeb for Yash Raj Films has spent the last two years of his life making a documentary In Their Shoes on the shoe traders of Agra. Interestingly Atul's father is in the shoe trade.
Speaking on the impulses that prompted Atul to undertake this journey into the shoe making business in Agra the filmmaker reveals, "It was a combination of some emotions and incidents that led me to this documentary.
During the making of Aurangzeb, I was discussing and exploring father-son emotions with my actors and technicians and it struck that I am here, shooting this big studio film because my father nudged me out of the family business."
The tradition of the son continuing the father's legacy was broken by Atul when he was prompted out of his father's shoe business. Says Atul, "In our country sons normally take over, usually successfully, ones father's or family's legacy be it in politics, business or arts. Families often encourage children to do so. Therefore I found my father a somewhat misfit character in that regard. I wanted to document it because I knew he had grown up and done business as young man in the era of 'license raj' and later during the 'liberalization' brought in by Manmohan Singh and Narsimha Rao. The urge to document my father's and his peers' journey, on camera, led me on this journey of my own.
The re-visitation to his past helped Atul understand his family history. "It helped me understand my present mostly, the construct of my thoughts at the moment which I had not known."
Making the documentary was not as hard as marketing it. "The apparatus for marketing does not exist in our country, for a non-fiction film. A non-fiction film, a documentary film, cannot make use of 'free-play' of songs on TV channels, cannot afford heavy media buying, does not have star faces that newspapers and supplements are eager to publish, or the reality shows are eager to invite. That is the apparatus we have for publicizing our mainstream films. There is no alternate, tailor-made marketing apparatus for documentaries. Anyone who taps into it now will definitely get the early-bird advantage. I don't know whether it will be a studio or an individual. But the scope is broadening every year."
Atul's next feature film is for Yash Raj Films. "I am working on a script for Yash Raj Films and they will make an announcement when the time is right."
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