Anup Singh’s third feature film, The Song of Scorpions, starring Irrfan Khan, Golshifteh Farahani, and Waheeda Rahman, recently had its world premiere at Locarno International Film Festival. It was also screened to a packed house at the MAMI Film Festival in Mumbai.
An FTII graduate, Singh was born in Dar-es-Salaam, Tanzania, and has lived in Mumbai, taught cinema at various universities and film schools in the UK, before moving to Geneva to take up a teaching assignment at an arts school. “That’s how I first went to Geneva and have now been living there for nearly 20 years,” he says.
He believes that cinema’s the only art that confronts and questions one physically, conceptually, and spiritually about living within the limits and possibilities of time. “Cinema foregrounds time with an urgency that no other art does. It confronts us directly with our mortality and questions us persistently.”
The primal question leads the filmmaker to explore themes of violence, boundaries, exile, and the play of gender—like he did in his films—The Name of a River and Qissa. In his latest, he has added the theme of healing.
“Given the world of violence we live in, we are breathing in poison at every moment. The critical question not only for me but for all of us today is: when we breathe out, do we want to breathe out the same poison we have breathed in? Or do we choose, instead, to breathe out a song?” he asks.
While writing Qissa, he had Balraj Sahni in mind, but as he was no more, Irrfan was his obvious choice. “I needed an actor who could carry an immense secret hurt within himself even as he did some horrendous things within his family. I wanted the actor to carry both fragilities as well as the threat,” he says.
Initially, Irrfan was hesitant. Singh made the actor watch recordings of Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan to get him onboard. “I pointed out the agony and almost a kind of violence in Nusrat sa’ab’s face and body as he sang. But the song that emerged from him was fragile and affirmative. Irrfan understood the point,” he says. This is a love story that questions the very basis of love. And yet affirms love as our most creative gift, says the filmmaker on what makes it a must-watch.
Singh enjoys writing for the solitary struggle with himself but loves directing for the creative exchange with a diverse group of extraordinary talents. But to do the kind of films he makes, “everything takes a special effort!”
Cinema has been his home, even as he keeps shuffling between Europe and India. “All my films have been set in India, while most of my writing and the raising of money happens in Europe. I do travel a lot to India for research, to look at locations, to begin the casting process. And, of course, when I’m ready to shoot,” he smiles.