Home Ground
Nitin Chandra’s Bring Back Bihar, a 98-minute headline-making documentary features vignettes of the violence against Bihari migrants and the state’s economic woes. The film interviews people from all walks of life and has been extensively shot in some of the most troubled areas. After its recent successful showing in Los Angeles, Chandra is now starting a series of screenings in Patna, followed by Delhi and Mumbai later this month. So is it the not-so-distant brutality against fellow Biharis that sparked off the idea? “I had dealt with a similar subject in my first short film The Outsider, which was based on the incident where about a dozen Bihari students were beaten up by a certain political group when they had come to give a railway recruitment exam. But the atrocities the migrant workers faced this time were unbelievable. I have always experienced a minor form of ‘untouchability’. No matter how educated you are or what designation you hold, the minute you say you are a Bihari, people draw a mental picture,” says the young Mumbai-based director. The film-maker who has assisted Dibakar Banerjee (Khosla Ka Ghosla) and Tanuja Chandra feels the fault lies in Bihar itself.

“Only five per cent of youth is left in Patna. How can a state progress if its youth is elsewhere?” He has hope though, now that MNCs have begun arriving in Bihar. The film portrays the skewed policies of powerful people who could have shaped its golden destiny, but instead scripted its downfall with corrupt and impotent political leadership. “As a film-maker I have a certain responsibility not just to my native state, but to my country. I’ll always use my craft for that purpose.”

Flying Straight
I never wanted to come back to ‘Bollywood’. I wanted to come back to India.” Sudipto Chattopadhyay corrects me when I ask him what prompted this Rhodes Scholar who studied film at FTI, Australia, to make a Bipasha Basu starrer. The soon to-be-released movie from White Feather Films is titled Pankh. It’s not art house and it’s not Bollywood. ‘Indian’ works just fine. Pankh is about a famous child actor Jerry (Maradona Rebello) who always played girls’ roles and was known as Baby Kusum. He grows up to fantasise about a starlet Nandini (Bipasha Basu). The gender-confused boy wants to be her, wants to possess her and is also mothered by her. The Freudian furniture in his head keeps rearranging itself till his attraction for Nandini becomes diabolical and Oedipus comes to claim him.

Chattopadhyay, who has written and directed the movie, understands how fluid gender can be. “Jerry is not transgendered, homosexual or a hermaphrodite. The world perceives him to be so because of his roles as the girl child. It is not in his control.”

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