After Jallikattu dropped out of the Oscars race, director Karishma Dev Dube’s Bittu is the one keeping India’s hopes alive.
The short film is part of the International Feature Film shortlist for the 93rd Academy Awards and is inspired by the accidental midday meal poisoning of 23 primary school students in Bihar’s Gandaman village in 2013.
Not an investigative drama, the film rather centers itself on the close friendship between two girls and we watch that friendship being eclipsed because of the accidental poisoning. At its heart, it’s about their most formative friendships when growing up.
The award-winning filmmaker had to find the cast of the film herself, so it was just her and a friend playing with kids from government schools and giving them some kind of co-curricular activities to do because they had holidays at that time.
“We would structure something that looks like a theatre workshop and in that way we would audition them in our heads and see who would fit the bill. Rani (who plays Bittu) emerged a couple of weeks into that process, and I just knew that she was the one. She was creative, very confident and loved an audience,” explains Karishma, whose sister Shreya is the cinematographer.
The film was shot in only six days in a really small mountain village called Cody, about 45-minute drive from Dehradun. Karishma stayed in an organic farm which was converted into a homestay, 15 minutes from the shoot location.
She herself went to a boarding school in Dehradun, which she says had a lot of surprising similarities with government schools which are in the middle of nowhere. And that aspect is what she depicts through her film—the quiet resentment she felt against the power dynamics that exist between authoritative figures and those below them.
“I always resented the one-way street kind of conversation that happened with authoritative figures with logic and emotionality going out of the window. It was always like a question in my head, and I think Bittu does the same, she’s constantly questioning things and often she is misunderstood,” says Karishma.
In the two months spent for casting, both sides revealed much about their life to each other and created a sense of trust and a lot of memories. Bittu and Chand (her friend) were from the same community, but the rest of the class was cast from a different school since Karishma wanted that there should be an aesthetic element which showed that the two stood out from that class.
“I made sure I didn’t teach Rani the kind of things that she was supposed to look clueless for in the classroom, which really helped in front of cameras, because she was genuinely confused. Otherwise, she learns everything very quickly. Chand was a little younger, she was six when we shot, so the method of teaching her was as different as it could be—a little bit more hand-holding. But both the girls were super, sensitive and very intuitive,” says Karishma.
Bittu has been screened at the BFI London Film Festival, Palm Springs Shortfest and HollyShorts among others. In India it was seen at the Dharamshala International Film Festival. The film is being presented by Tahira Kashyap, Guneet Monga and Ekta Kapoor, under the Indian Women Rising initiative.
Currently based out of New York, Karishma had moved in with her sister Shreya to Mumbai for her undergrad in History at St Xavier’s. She credits her sister for being constantly surrounded by directors, screenwriters and actors, which helped demystify the world for her because of which she started considering it as a career. Karishma received a full scholarship at the film making course in New York University and has been writing, directing, producing and editing films for six years.
The second round of voting for this awards category shall begin on March 5, short-listing five films which will lead to March 15 when the winner shall be announced. Period. End of Sentence, Monga’s 2018 film, had won the Oscar for Best Documentary Short Subject in 2019. In a few weeks we shall know if Bittu makes it to the top too, regardless of which, it seems we all should watch this 17-minute emotional tale.