Kabir Singh Choudhary’s Mehsampur, which premiered at the Jio MAMI Mumbai Film Festival with Star on Sunday, is an absurdist takedown of the filmmaking process and its farcical fidelity to truth.
The film starts out as a docu-drama — about a filmmaker shooting a docu-drama — but soon grazes into a misty borderland between fact and fiction. The crux of it revolves around assassinated Punjabi folksinger Amar Singh Chamkila, whose ‘innuendo-laden’ but immensely popular lyrics drew the distaste of religious and Khalistani outfits in the ‘80s. The title, Mehsampur, alludes to the place of Chamlika’s assassination — a village in the Jalandhar district of Punjab — to where ventures out aspiring filmmaker Devrat (Devrat Joshi) in the present day, hoping to recreate the trauma of Chamkila’s mysterious death and achieve what he describes as a ‘cinematic breakthrough’.
Mehsampur is unique in its puzzling juggleries with genre and form, but also conventional and accessible in its approach to humour One mysterious character, who appears as a lovelorn bar singer and later as thief, thoroughly embodies the deadpan absurdism of the film. “I am not sure if I’ve made a film... this was just a prank I was trying to play,” Choudhary admitted while introducing Mehsampur to the audience. The screening was also graced by the Navjot Randhawa, who plays an aspiring actor in the film, and by Lal Singh and Kesar Singh Tikki — two of Chamkila’s closest colloborators who play versions of themselves in the film.