There are quite a few striking moments in Sreemoyee Singh’s personal-meets-political documentary And, Towards Happy Alleys (currently streaming on Mubi), where she points her camera onto the internal dynamics of Iranian society through the framework of the country’s rich tradition of poetry and films.
She meets filmmakers, feminist activists and scholars in order to explore patriarchy and the extreme conservatism that pervades Iran. However, what made a filmmaker from India so deeply interested in making a film about a ‘distant country’?
Iran never felt like a far-off land to Sreemoyee. She found many similarities in its geography and culture with India. “We are so close to each other,” says Sreemoyee, who also learnt Persian to make the film. For her, even the language didn’t seem alien.
“Persian was a court language in India and it has influences on many other languages spoken in the subcontinent. Since I speak Hindi, Urdu, and Bangla, I was able to pick up Persian faster.” Sreemoyee feels that learning the language is important to understanding the culture of Iran. “So much is lost when you cannot speak the native tongue or if you don’t even make the effort to learn it while filming in a different cultural setting.”
It was cinema itself that started her fascination with the country. Sreemoyee was introduced to Iranian films while doing her post-graduation in Film Studies at Jadavpur University. “I hadn’t watched films like that before,” she says, mentioning the masters of the Iranian New Wave, Abbas Kiarostami and Mohsen Makhmalbaf as influences.
“Living in a place that faces so much censorship, you can still see that their films are all about finding hope,” says the filmmaker. After this, she enrolled for PhD at the university and started to save money to visit Iran. Along with Iranian cinema, Sreemoyee was inspired by the poetry of feminist poet Forough Farrokhzad, which also finds a special place in her film. “When I read Forough’s poetry for the first time, or when I watched these films of the New Wave, it never felt like somebody else’s story. I always felt that Forough was directly talking to me,” she says.
At times, Sreemoyee’s film feels like a love letter to Forough, as she meanders in the same lanes where the poet once lived; trying to find spaces she had inhabited and people she had encountered, to understand the place through words and feelings left behind. And, Towards Happy Alleys started filming in 2016 and just on her third day of shoot, Sreemoyee faced a dilemma. In a pivotal scene in the film, she points the camera at people while commuting on a bus in Tehran.
One woman looks directly into the camera and asks her if she is shooting, making Sreemoyee stop recording instantly. “At that point, it hit me that I cannot merely observe and make a film. The camera cannot merely be a tool that records,” she says. Moving ahead, she started to have conversations with everyone she met. “Through the camera, I bring myself into the film. I interject the reality that is around me and become a character in the story.” Sreemoyee recalls how some people told her not to have this scene in the film, but she wanted to keep it.
“This is the first film I have made and I wanted to bring attention to that moment where I felt something happened within me.” After this, the film becomes a personal journey to understand the nuances of Iran. Sreemoyee reveals that she informed the same to her editors while putting together the footage, which was shot between 2016 and 2019. “I told my editors to treat it like a journey and the experience should be that of walking. There may not be a specific destination in mind, but the act of walking becomes important, where you walk and you meet people and everyone gives you something,” she says.
Among the major highlights of this ‘journey’ is the conversations she shares with Iranian director Jafar Panahi, known for making politically-charged films like Offside (2006), Taxi (2015), and The Circle (2000). It is joyous to see the filmmaker in his most spirited state, as he drives with her through Iran to meet people and places. Sreemoyee recalls that it took her over three months to get to him.
“But, once I met him, it was like a breeze. He made me feel extremely comfortable.” She says that it was his sense of humour and pleasant appeal that made it exciting to be around him. Along with that, he helped her throughout the filming in many ways. “He knew what I wanted because this is how he has been making his films. And maybe he looked at me as a younger version. As someone who is starting off,” she concludes.