BENGALURU: Critically acclaimed film CRD, by Kranti Kanade, which received reviews that called it “audacious”, “irreverent and character-defying”, will be screened in the city today. The movie was inspired from real-life, of a rebel student who challenges an experienced theatre artiste and wins at a prestigious fest.
Kanade says that a similar incident happened when he was to participate in an inter-collegiate theatre competition in Pune. “When I was 16, I was Chetan (the lead character in the play),” says the director. “They didn’t let me write the play for the college, instead they got it written by an established senior writer of that time. He would deliver hit topical plays for a certain amount, there are many colleges in Pune who continue this unethical tradition of hiring senior writers and directors to come and stage an ‘award winning’ play. Winning this particular fest is an obsession rather that artistic exploration… Therefore, ironically, the best inter-collegiate theatre competition in Maharashtra has not produced a single great writer in the last 25 years!”
The movie has been applauded for its out-of-the-box format. The director says that he let the film flow “fluid”, as his mind and imagination would. “In a mad-mixed good-crazy times of truth and fake we are living in, how can you use the forties’s neo-realism technique to tell a story,” he asks, adding, “We have had so many different forms in theater and novels. Why not in films? After German Expressionism (Cabinet Of Dr Caligari) in 1930’s why didn’t we explore more forms in cinema? Even film festivals are lazily obsessed with simplicity, simplicity of what? When the India around me is crumbling from all sides, philosophies are cascading, I had to find a new form to express myself.”
Kanade dismisses the need for a plot. “A film requires a ‘concern’. A great concern for the subject you are trying to depict or communicate,” he says. “Anything you are concerned about will naturally have an antagonist. Once you know what you care for and how to care for it, a character will be born, story and plot will follow.”
He believes that this fire is seen mostly in non-fiction narratives of Anand Patwardhan and Michael Moore’s documentaries.”I am not sure we have that sort of courage in our fiction films,” he says. “In recent times, there has been nothing as subversive as Louise Bunuel films like Discreet Charm Of The Bourgeois or That Obscure Object Of Desire.”
There is a running thread of humour and irreverence in his movies. But the director says that he has had no trouble from the “traditional stone mobs”. “I have received backlash from some film festival organisers and curators and not from ground-level guardians of culture,” he says.
What I wish for
One movie I wish I had made: ‘I, Daniel Blake’ by Ken Loach.
One director I want to be for a day: British Director Ken Loach. I would like to have his heart. It’s not the technique of cinema one should learn from others unlike it is taught in film schools. It is the worldview, the ability to care and cry for others that we need to learn from directors like him.
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