When Nithin Lukose wanted to make his first feature film, he didn’t have to look far for a perfect project. For the Film and Television Institute of India graduate, who had grown up listening to his grandmother’s tales of their settler community in Kerala’s Wayanad district, the same stories provided the subject of the script. The location came from his village. At the recently-concluded Toronto International Film Festival, Paka (English title River of Blood), Lukose’s directorial debut, was an instant hit with the large South Asian community. His grandmother, who has acted in the Malayalam movie, won the hearts of the audience for her role as a domineering matriarch.
Many recent films made in languages as varying as Assamese to Malalayam and Khasi to Kannada reveal an increasing trend of an emerging cottage film industry—movies made in the hometowns and villages of the filmmakers. Triggered by the needs of an industry constrained by the pandemic, directors are adapting to new production processes suited to a local setting. The changes, which are cost-effective and benefit locals, could mark a new way of storytelling in Indian cinema.
“Paka is the story of our village,” says Lukose, whose grandparents were among the initial settlers in Wayanad in the ’50s. In Paka, nearly all actors were selected from Mananthavady, a small village in Wayanad. “I can be truthful to the subject because of my devotion to my roots. I personally know the actors,” adds the filmmaker whose work in sound design include Ram Reddy’s Kannada film Thithi (2015) and Dibakar Banerjee’s Sandeep Aur Pinky Faraar (2019).
Then there is Assamese filmmaker Kulanandini Mahanta, a graduate in cinematography from the Colorado Film School, Denver in the US, who is giving the final touches to her first feature film, Emuthi Puthi, entirely shot on an iPhone. Mahanta was living in Mumbai, after returning from the US five years ago, when she was roped in as a camera assistant in Bhaskar Hazarika’s Aamis (2019). Emuthi Puthi is written by Hazarika.
“It is about a road journey from Bongaigaon to Majlis in Assam by three members of a dysfunctional family,” says Mahanta. “It was an adventurous journey for all of us in the production. I hadn’t travelled such a long distance in my state before,” adds the director-cinematographer born in Guwahati. The production of Emuthi Puthi, which has a mostly women cast and crew, began in February last year.
In the neighbouring Garo Hills of Meghalaya, filmmaker Dominic Sanga has relaunched the production of his sophomore feature, Rimdogittanga (Rapture) in Khasi language, which was stopped when the pandemic hit last year. “You have to adapt to the situation,” says Sanga, who studied direction at the Satyajit Ray Film and Television Institute, Kolkata, about the pandemic stretching limits of production. “You have to evolve and find ways to shoot beyond the limits,” adds the director of Ma.Ama (2018). “We can’t depend on people from Mumbai or Kolkata, we have to start working with our own people.” Rimdogittanga, about the disappearance of a boy when villagers are busy collecting cicadas in the forest, has actors—all non-professionals—from the director’s Nongthymmai Garo village, the adjacent Umdem, and Selbagre.
Kannada filmmaker Natesh Hegde shot his first feature film, Pedro, entirely in Kothali in Karnataka’s Belgaum district, which lies in the Western Ghats. “The starting point of the film is my village,” says Hegde. “The village isn’t the setting, it is the story. The place comes first and then the characters,” he adds about the film, which is about a middle-aged electrician (played by his father Gopal Hegde) who is pronounced an outcast after he accidentally kills the cow of a landlord. The film premiered at the Busan International Film Festival and has only two professional actors, one of them being Kannada actor-director Raj B Shetty.
Dehradun-based filmmaker Ajay Govind returned to his home state of Kerala for his second feature film, Madappally United, about a children’s cricket team. Govind shot the film in Madappally, a small town 50 km from Kozhikode. “Filmmakers like me will benefit if we look for local stories and resources,” says Govind, whose first film, After the Third Bell, a murder mystery in Hindi and English, was made seven years ago. In Assam, Hazarika has already recruited a group of youngsters to train them in filmmaking. “The idea is to build capacities locally in the next two years.” And the camera goes vocal for local!