For years, writer Paul Zacharia has sent characters out into the world — through villages, cities, beliefs, arguments and memories. This time, the journey runs in the opposite direction. The story travels back to the man who wrote so many of them.
In the documentary titled ‘Zacharia’, filmmaker Shiny Benjamin follows that trail, beginning at Urulikunnam in Kottayam, where the writer was born, and moving through Mysuru, Bengaluru, Delhi and the many places that entered his life along the way.
As one place gives way to another, stories, friendships, politics and memories surface with them, until the documentary begins to feel less like a portrait and more like travelling through the pages of a life.
On Tuesday, the hour-long film played to a packed house at the Kairali-Sree-Nila theatre complex in Thiruvananthapuram.
“I grew up reading his stories. Later, we worked together as colleagues and eventually became good friends,” Shiny says.
“I knew him not just as a writer, but as someone deeply engaged with society and politics. So when his friends began thinking about making a documentary, it naturally came to me.”
The film has been produced by Achu Ullatil and K M Gafoor. Discussions continued for months before filming began. The real challenge was deciding what could fit into an hour.
“He has written so much, travelled so widely and experienced so much. We had nearly 40 hours of footage,” she says. “But we were clear that this was not a conventional profile. The focus was on Zacharia as a writer — how he sees writing, his engagement with politics and society, his travels and the people who influenced him.”
The film, made over nearly a year and a half, also sees Zacharia revisit ideas such as Christianity, communism and misogyny.
Facing the camera for a shoot, however, was unfamiliar ground for Zacharia. “When the idea first came to me, I felt rather inhibited. Pen and paper have always been my world,” he says.
Shiny, he recalls, quickly put him at ease. “ She told me, ‘You won’t feel out of place. You will be comfortable, and we will keep things easy-going.’ I told her I could not act. She said, ‘You don’t have to act. Just answer the questions.’ That was how she convinced me. She and her team eventually created magic.”
Watching the completed documentary on the big screen, he says, gave him an “unusual experience”. “I felt great joy seeing my life recreated so creatively on the big screen. What struck me most was the way my stories and my life moved together, almost like a work of fiction,” Zacharia says.
“Maybe one day I will write an autobiography, or perhaps somebody will write my biography. But those would remain words on paper. This is a digital flight, something only a camera, along with music and all the other elements of cinema, can create.”