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Kesang Tseten with Samina Mishra

An Introduction to Kesang Tseten by Samina Mishra

Kesang Tseten is a Tibetan writer and filmmaker from Nepal. He is a graduate of Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism and of Amherst College and he has been working as a writer to begin with, and later as a filmmaker. He made his first film in 1999.

His films include ‘On the road with the red god: Machhendranath’ which follows the jatra of the deity Rato Machhendranath in Nepal and explores the web of human interactions that are tied to the traditional chariot festival. The film was adjudged the best documentary in Nepal in the last ten years by the Nepal Motion Pictures Association in 2005.

He has also made ‘We Homes Chaps’, which is my personal favorite and I am sure of many others in this room, as it was screened earlier today. The film is a documentary about a boarding school, Dr. Graham’s Homes, founded in 1900 by a Scottish Presbyterian Missionary in Kalimpong, to shelter and educate outcast Anglo-Indian, Tibetan refugees and other children of marginal communities.

The film is special in many many ways: not least for its deeply personal voice as Kesang returns to the homes for a centenary celebration with his classmates of twenty-nine years ago. ‘We Homes Chaps’ was screened at the Margaret Mead Film and Video Festival, Mountain film Telluride, Visual Communications in LA and numerous other venues.

Kesang is also a writer, of films and other things. He has written the original screenplay for ‘Mukundo (Mask of Desire)’, which won the Best Script Award from the Nepal Motion Pictures Association in 2000. The film was an Academy Award selection from Nepal. A second feature script ‘Karma’, about an errant Buddhist nun, is presently in production.

His stories have also appeared in anthologies, such as’ An Other Voice: English Writing from Nepal’, which he also co-edited, and ‘Secret Places, New Writing from Nepal’ in Manoa, published by the University of Hawaii.

He is currently working on a trilogy of three separate films about migrant labor in the gulf, the first of which, ‘In Search of Riyal’ will be screened tomorrow.

His films are about human stories that reflect ideas, and not the other way round. It seems to me that he is interested in the stories and so the ideas that come out through them. In many ways they are not just a single idea, but also perhaps a more complex web of ideas.

Often I think documentary films begin the other way round- there is an idea that spurs the filmmaker to look for a story to talk about that idea, and perhaps it is also that way for you, maybe sometimes.

However as a viewer when I am watching your films, I’m completely engrossed in the stories and the lives on screen, and the ideas come to me through that, so it is this layered way of telling the story that I think is quite important.

In terms of subjects for the films, I think his work reflects a concern with what I am going to call the fragility of the human emotional landscape. There is an engagement with ideas of growing up and childhood, and memory of loss and making connections. ‘We Homes Chaps’ is a very clear account of all of these, but even in other films like ‘We Corner People’ and In ‘Frames of War’ these ideas can be seen.

In ‘We Corner People’ for example there is a story of a girl who is washed away by a flooding river and of connections that emerge from living this life and from the building of the bridge. In ‘Frames of War’ again there is loss that connects, but also the hope of building new connections through the traveling exhibition of photographs from Nepal’s long years of armed conflict.

In ‘Listen to the Wind’, which is a fiction film, he deals with the fragility of adolescence and encounters in childhood, which goes on to shape lives. Even as Kesang looks at the inner lives of the characters in his films, he also looks at the collective.

However there are larger ideas: like History, Colonialism, Identity and Development in his work that shape what the collective experiences. I think what his work manages to achieve is a balance between the individual story and how that can resonate for the collective. Achieving this balance is not easy and nor is the resonance a simple one. It can mean different things and be different things to different people.

In the synopsis of ‘We Homes Chaps’, there is a line, about how the film explores a love with an edge – a difficult love. I wanted to bring this line up because I think that Kesang’s work is actually concerned with that difficult edge that makes human choices and actions grey and complicated and not easily explainable in a linear cause and effect way: and so completely human.

Kesang looks for those grey areas and looks at those grey areas and he does it with an extremely gentle gaze that allows the viewer to experience that difficult edge in a very sensory way. We all have a difficult edge in our lives and I think his work touches that part of us, and then therefore resonates for us.

How did you really come to documentary film making, especially because you say you only started that in 1999?

Kesang: I tried to be a writer, was a writer, called myself a writer, and I spent eight years writing a book that finally didn’t get published. I generally tend to respond toquestions often looking at the circumstance of situations. I feel the surface is as important as the essence as there really is no difference between surface and essence. Therefore circumstantially when the book didn’t get published and I was asked to make two little films of the Lechas of Sikkim and the Nagas of Nagaland I agreed not really knowing what it entailed and thinking that I had roped in someone who knew more about films than I did. So off we went and did the films in Sikkim and Nagaland absolutely not knowing what we were doing and the films came out in a manner of speaking as films – they had a beginning, middle and end.

A few years, and a few films later maybe I was still doing this kind of thing, not really knowing what I was doing. But maybe now there’s some sense and some sort of clarity and intention, some sort of an effort in being deliberate in what I was trying to do. It was really circumstantially that I began making films, as I reached a dead end in my other pursuit of writing, and then the chance came to me, so I made films.

So when you started, or even now, do you follow your instinct about a hidden story, or is it an idea that spurs you, or is there a bit of both? Is it wrong for you to make these distinct compartments?

It’s not wrong, but it is hard to differentiate between what an idea is and what an instinct is. An instinct is maybe a lesser-developed idea. To be very honest, some of the films that I made were commissioned. Somebody said will you make a film and I did, and I don’t feel any shame in saying that.

I feel that I have a job, just like anybody else, and my job offers me certain privileges. To me if there’s any creativity it is to do with sometimes the given. And what are you given? You are given the constraints, and you have to see how you treat it. So I don’t really talk about films that are close to my heart and so on.

Some films are close to my heart but I tend to be more circumstantial and matter of fact in my responses on why I do a certain film. In reality, some films were commissioned. It doesn’t mean the commissioner scripted the films, and it doesn’t mean that I dint put my heart into it or find out how I wanted to personally create that work.

In that process, because your story telling is quite layered, even when you are commissioned a film, how do you go about making it yours?

In the film called ‘We Corner People’, a development organization asked me to make a film about a suspension bridge that was being made in a village. For about a year, I didn’t want to do it because they built 3000 of such bridges.

Now when we are talking about documentary practice in a sense I think we’re cousins of journalism maybe, depending on how we do our films. So we try to do something that is unique, find a bridge that is the shortest or the tallest or the most bizarre in someway. I very much hesitated to do the film because 3000 bridges had been built and I was thinking how do I make a film about the 3000 and first bridge?

At the end, because of livelihood and so forth I agreed to make it and went to the village. As it happens in reality, when you sit in a bus and make conversation with the person next to you, something happens which is always something new: something unaccounted before. Which is what happened.

In a sense, depending on where you’re speaking from, you go to a village that is a day and a half away; and when you go there the specifics are different, just like the person sitting next to you on the bus.

So I thought, well let’s see what happens, and underneath there was a feeling that something will develop, something will happen. When I went there for the first time we did the routine things such as ask – why are you building the bridge, what’s it for, what are the benefits – the idea was just the conventional thing. Then you look for the so-called layering, if there’s layering.
In that first meeting I overheard someone saying that a girl was swept away by the floods that came down and that’s why the bridge was needed. So it created an unconscious impressions and I took a mental footnote of that.

The second time I went, the filming, as happens in such projects, had some constraints. The village was far away, the bridge was being built in a certain formatted manner: stage one, stage two… to stage five and we had to go with the organization that was helping to build the bridge. However those constraints I accept completely, in fact I am happy that I get them, as it is within these constraints that you can eliminate certain choices and then look for possible avenues of your own.

The second time it came up that the river had struck the girl, I thought – OK I’ve got a film! Because besides what might come about the building of the bridge, besides knowing the people in the village, there was no element. And I thought that the story of a bridge coming to a village might be a profound thing in reality, but in form and story it doesn’t necessarily work. There is a difference between reality and representation of reality I think, and in film or stories what we are trying to do is stylize and confine this representation so that it has a shape and so that there’s compression and revelation and some kind of meaning that comes out.

I felt that I was in good territory because there’s a person who died, there’s a person who she was close to, there’s somebody who has been affected, so I felt the confidence that this village is no more just a village that’s getting a bridge. Something happened to somebody, some emotion resides in some individual, and that’s where I felt the film comes alive.

The rest of the idea was to try to interweave and balance the collective, because we live in a century where we think: so what if a bridge is coming to a village, it’s the 3000 and first one. But for the village folk, it is important, so I wanted to try and see ways to decentralize myself.

Before I make a film, I live a certain way and I’m located in a certain place. In embarking in a film how do I question or alter that? Do I trigger a change in looking at the situation?

And therefore the story of a person dying, which you might see as a report in the newspaper, might be met with “Oh a bus falls down the road every second day, or someone swept by a flood every second day” but for me, my encounter with this began to change, and I took a different complexion at the task at hand.

(Screening of ‘We Corner People’)

We hear the story of the girl who got swept away, many times in the film. Once in the opening, where its just mentioned to the people recounting it and their connection to it, and also following that through the course of the film. Is it the individual story of the girl getting swept away or is the memory of that incident also an attempt of connecting that to the collective?

It’s a story because were talking about an impoverished village that needs a bridge but what’s more compelling or what brings more sympathy is seeing somebody who dies because of a bridge, rather than the benefits – which of course also mean a lot. There are, no doubt, clear advantages for the village: they can take their animals up that part of the land, when it rains they don’t have to detour for four hours and so on; but again in film and in representation, we are bombarded with so many situations that are sad, that it doesn’t affect one anymore. So, I think the filmmaker must look for the emotion residing in the story.

Also, in that village they were very poor. They were impoverished and there was a woman who came into that stream and was bathing and threw things on her hair and she threw her shoes off and so forth. To me that gave the sense of a village that was not only poor but also had fear of death, with the floods. It was a fact that they don’t have many advantages and they fear nature. We then see the clip where it turned out that 60% of the village converted to Christianity so you get a sense of a vulnerable people who have borne an onslaught of many kinds, from nature, from ideology, from the lack of resources, so that sense would be underscored very strongly by something as emotional as a young girl being swept away by the river.

Is there an intent behind why we hear this story many times? Was it included because you wanted it to work as a kind of reminder? Or is it that you’re trying to make a connection by opening out that one story to a larger body?

We do hear the story many times, but we always hear it from a different perspective. There is a circumstance in which the girl died and that’s important for the person who’s wife she was, particularly as they were shifting house and were dancing and partying and then the rains came and probably a flash flood came.

All this partying was happening in a village where there were 60% Christians and there was no work and far from any tourist trekking trail and so on and while the party is going on a girl disappears because she is on the wrong side of the river. So the story does develop in the sense that even thought there is no dramatic quality there is an emotional quality depending on who’s telling it.

This is again I think what I wanted to do, which was to try and get it to the level of the people in that place and show it like how they see the incident. For me, in a sense that incident and the culture there reflect the belief that there are spirits in the rivers and that they can haunt people and so forth. The image that I have of this village is one that is sort of haunted by the death of the girl, and the practicality of building a bridge in a way salvages the village and wards the spirit.

It’s a film about how a bridge can bring change and is sort of a development idea, and still you include the conflict in the process of bridge making. You also showed a lot about the conversion to Christianity. Why was it important to show those layers?

What you put in the film is obviously what moves you in real life. If there is one criterion: it’s what touches you. A film to me is just putting what reaches out to you on a screen. That’s why I little bit object to the division of words like visual as opposed to something else. You are sitting in front of me – that is not merely a visual that I am encountering – it is something much more than a visual. Of course there is a discipline with the aesthetics of visuals and all that, but for me its what affects me in real life, I would obviously choose to have in my film.

So conflict was there, and there is always an argument going on inside your head on why we choose to put something in. Our kind and we have certain preconceptions, certain assumptions about life, about the village, about where we are, about others. So in a way it’s sort of an argument and counter argument.

There’s this village that’s receiving aid and the villagers come out to volunteer, but in fact they are too poor to even volunteer so they only contribute about five percent, rather than the equal donor cum village partnership. The reality is different and I think of a line that is written by Shiva Naipaul, brother of V.S Naipaul, “The greatest respect you can bestow on a people is to accept them with all their specificities” and to me that is a very guiding line.

You let whatever happens, happen. It’s your job as a filmmaker to try and make use of it rather than, saying this doesn’t fit into my visual. Why would anyone start with an idea that they want to paint a pretty picture? So you encounter whatever comes your way, you’re lucky as a filmmaker to see some reality, which is conflict!

This is a question that is often asked to makers of documentary films. How do you start the process of interaction? How much research and preparation and what kind of relationship do you need, how does it work for you?

That’s a very interesting question, because I have my views on it. It’s a little bit of what Gargi said, because in a sense documentary filmmakers have this extra social purpose attached to them and you are often questioned.

I didn’t really go to film school and all that, and for a long time I don’t know how I made films, but my sense is that the real strength and the real uniqueness of the documentary is to capture actuality.

To capture it, does not matter where somebody is sitting, in his or her office, at home, it doesn’t matter, but just the particular quality of the voice, of the gesture – that matters. That is what is really special of the documentary I think.

I remember a conversation with Ranjan Palit, who was talking about some reservations as a documentary filmmaker and he said something with the effect that maybe we all want to be fiction filmmakers and that’s why we are looking for images and forms that seem like fiction.

I thought about that and I realized that I am not really interested in that. I maybe interested in following the principles of fiction in terms of dramatic elements, but using actuality. Therefore I am not particularly good at it and I don’t particularly care for pretty visuals but it is really the story line. The story line here doesn’t mean just the story, in terms of the plot, but in terms of the actuality of the moment. For me that’s what is really interesting.

Maybe its just a different way as some people might want to enhance reality and say that there is not real difference between documentary and fiction: that’s fine, I love some of that stuff. Errol Morris’ Thin Blue Line was wonderful; it opened my eyes to documentary.

But I particularly like the actuality of the situation and therefore I don’t really like to do much research, I don’t think its necessary. Because when you say actuality then you’re sympathetic to them and all of that stuff. That for me is an extra curricular activity of the filmmaker. I think the encounter is really the most potentially yielding thing that the documentary situation awards.

I don’t think I see it separately, essentially. Because when we are filming the documentary in the case of ‘We Corner People’, and when I heard the story of the girl who was swept away, immediately I thought, oh here’s a dramatic element. So I can imagine that is similar to the process a scriptwriter uses when he is thinking up situations in his own room.

But the only difference I see is that of the surface. The surface of the documentary is preoccupied with a situation imbedded in a specific time with a specific people: I think that’s where you might get something that is replicated in fiction, but in documentary you’re not doing fiction, right? That’s where the true yield comes from.

In my mind I might have been worried, whether I was going to get a film or not, but in the process of filming, something happens and there’s a little gauge in your mind that’s saying good, not bad or you are getting more hopeful that you’re getting the flow. So your not really scripting it but you are responding to it, potentially like a scriptwriter would, till you feel – Ah there’s an element that can be used!

So it is like your gaze is that of a scriptwriter: you’re attuned to looking, in that way. Is it?

Well, your gaze is like that of a writer, of a storyteller, yes. But story teller or not, I’m Kesang, a human being and my interests are such: my work or my writing, comes from that right? So when I encounter a situation like this my interest is drawn, then is it as a storywriter or is it as me? So you see it’s not like I’m thinking in a formatted sense that oh I’m thinking like a scriptwriter. What I write about is also things that just interest me in real life, as I am. Maybe because as I am, I’m interested in those things, whatever they are. And then you think oh how would this fit into a film.

You need a body, you need images, and you need a manifest of things that is going to be firm, or captured on audio or video. But what you are really looking for is something that will provide a pulse, which will change the configuration of that work. So when you say your going to do a film on a bridge, then obviously you have to ask what’s the purpose of this bridge and so forth. Then you find things that are being said, and that mean something to them, but they are not profound. If someone says, because of this bridge, I don’t have to walk an extra four hours – for us hearing it, it doesn’t really create any impact. I think that’s just the way we hear or view anything, even in our conversation with others. Your attention is only perked up sometimes and otherwise it is only on a passive mode or cruise mode. But when you hear that then you think, Oh! Right?

When I said I didn’t prescript it, it meant that until I heard the story it was not scripted. But once I heard the story of the girl I began scripting it and therefore I went looking for those views and stories. When I went to investigate the issue of the bridge obviously people didn’t just come forward and say, well she’s the one who died. So I had to excavate that story, which shows that the script is being written in the process of forming that story and in the process of filming.

What exactly do you mean by research?

By research I mean, spending a month in advance in the village, finding the contours of the village, talking to people and seeing who later on with the camera crew will you come in to shoot. That’s all. I didn’t do any “research” per se. Following this I went to the village and began filming.

Here another very interesting element comes about for me, which is that I think I try to film as a way of research. Because again the point of actuality is that you don’t know what you will get when you talk to whom. So obviously, you do make a decision by saying this is potentially worthwhile. It’s like casting a safety net as wide as possible, and filming, looking for the matter as it exists.

I think the interest is to not make the mistake of diffusing potentially interesting situations and emotions, because you just cant get it back. This is to me the crucial difference between enactment or a fiction film and a documentary.

I’m not saying which is superior and which is inferior but in doing documentary, what I want is to try and capture is pieces of actuality. The first time is as good as the second time, just as in real life.

Say when we meet, our relationship takes on a certain form. There’s no seniority whether you said this three weeks ago or now, there’s no value to what someone might say on the first day as opposed to the fifth day of knowing him or her. Sometimes, no new information is exchanged when you know people for a long time. There’s no hierarchy in terms of what you get based on how long you know somebody.

Especially if a documentary is a form to do with doubt, to do with maybe a question or a non-conclusive conclusion, then it seems as if you are interfering with your own process of what you want by researching and going to the villages, getting to know them and then going with the camera and saying: Oh now we are going to shoot you.

A lot of films do happen in that way, maybe because we start the other way round. There is an idea, and then you are going out to look for a story, so your research often is research into finding a story. Whereas what you are saying is that you just land up there and you waited for the story to happen.

Audience: Somehow I feel that the minute my attention is getting peaked, it becomes my story. And with this engagement, I will interfere with the process that the subjects of the documentary are going through. Every documentary filmmaker has that dilemma, where he wonders if he is just telling a story that is his or is he telling the story as it exists. So at what point can we say that ok what I am doing is really their story and I’m just an observer to what is happening, or I need something that can peak my interest and then I can tell a story from that place?

When I’m filming something I don’t see it that way: that it is their story and now it’s becoming my story. Literally it is their story right? If they say something happened in the village then that’s their story.

I don’t think documentary filmmakers are ever neutral: I don’t mean in terms of the values, but we are responding to the situation. I usually keep quiet and try not to interfere with the situation as much as possible, but as you suggest you are already interfering with the situation, just by being there and choosing to film that particular thing.

But actively interfering is different from responding. You are responding to the situations, which does not necessarily mean you are interfering. That is the only guide you have to make the form: to decide if you should shoot more or stop. Your only guide is your sense, which is absolutely not neutral and cannot be neutral.

(Screening of ‘We Homes Chaps’)

My first question is about the individual stories and the collective, so what spurred and drove the film and how?

This was a story waiting to happen. The story was already there, the film was there, in the sense that everyone was so in love with the school. I know that everyone is fond of his or her school and everyone feels that their school is to be cherished. But I felt that the Homes guys were more in love with their school than anyone else was with theirs. I also had the experience that Homes was a very difficult place to grow up in. I don’t regret it, because it was a very special place, I think difficult things are always special. I think it was because people came from very difficult and broken and sad backgrounds. There was really a shame in it.

I think you have a very complex and special relationship with experiences that mark you and generally experiences that mark you are the ones that impinge on your sense of identity. In a way your own ego is drawn to your own self. This may sound like a lot of psychobabble but I felt there was this tremendous love but in a very edged relation to the school.

Therefore I sensed that all I had to do was go there, take a crew, and though it was very early in my little years of filmmaking I had the privilege of having some really good people there. It made me be myself as it were, because there’s the tricky thing. You are going to be in your own film, of course you are not sure how much you’re going to be in it, but it is certain that this is the story and you have to be in it.

Once that decision was made, I think it was just a matter of again casting the net as wide as I can. So, the film really didn’t have to be made in a sense of the stories.

There is a bittersweet mix of memory in that film. Were you already in that space or did it reveal itself in the process?

I think I was already in that space, and frankly speaking I don’t think there is a huge difference when it comes to all the other people. A lot of people feel the same way but it’s just a slight degree of articulating it and deciding that what you feel is of this nature and where it is coming from. So maybe the fact that I made the film or decided to make a representation of it means that I felt it was worth telling and that it would mean something.

Once the camera was put to people, they all spoke in the same way, in their own words of course. In the scene with class of 1971, you feel as though you are watching a confession or a session of some sort. They were all talking about love and how much they love their school so obviously it was already there in most people’s minds.

I think you do have some extreme people who later reacted to this film for instance with feelings that the image of their school and what it meant for them in their hearts was violated by the suggestions of this film that it was a cruel place. Not the place itself but that our childhoods were difficult and that the place had something to do with it.
So, is the film totally about the school? Not really, it’s about the meaning created by you and your history in that school.

How did you pick the people?

Well I wrote to a few people and after one or two emails, I did not want to in a sense delve in research as I said before. So I just got a crew and went there. I didn’t originally mean for my brother and sister to be a part of the characters so to say, but they were sticking to us and they were there with us and so we filmed them.

What I feel is that lots of people who came back and lots of people who didn’t come back have that story, and it was just a question of circumstance. I just had to consider things like who do know, who do you begin filming, without it being difficult. There are two three people who we interviewed but we didn’t use in the end. But otherwise everything was that way, very potent in terms of film material.

Was there anybody who wasn’t comfortable with the idea?

There were some people who said they didn’t want to be filmed, but I think people did want to talk and broach the subject. They came back at a reunion and they came with a certain emotion and I think the emotion was about all the things that were in the film. So I think anyone who has emotions actually is dying for a chance for that conversation, to talk about those things.

What was it like to put yourself in your own film?

During the filming I felt like most of these people did. I felt the emotions they felt, more or less to the same degree. But when we were editing of course the issues came up and I didn’t want to be that much in the film and so on so forth. But that is of a different order.

While your part of the reality that the camera was citing, it was real. And if it is real there’s nothing easier than being a part of things, in a sense. Something is happening, you are encountering it, you don’t have to rehearse, its simple.

But in the making of it you are reconsidering and you are thinking and you are saying I don’t want to be a part of it because I don’t look good or I don’t want to reveal myself or whatever. At the end, hopefully, the filmmakers’ considerations emerge as the more dominant ones.

You knew in a sense when you started out with the film, that it would include all these things, right? How much did it actually change from what was in your head when you started out?

It’s a complicated thing because the fact that I went to film it and decided that I would make a film at that level, I was sure that material of this sort would come out. But when you’re actually going through day by day, and deciding what to shoot or how to construct this thing, obviously it becomes more confusing and you don’t quite know what to do.

It’s not like it was all heard before and it was just going to be a rehearsal. Its just that you know enough to feel that there are things that are potent and in the air, in peoples minds, in their mouths almost, but you haven’t completed it.

The film is a form that completes the expectations, the completion of the idea: of an unusual upbringing, an unusual place. Actually going and filming it gave that reality a form. Reality once given a form becomes an objective thing and when you give it a label, as objective things have, then it becomes better known to you.

Its like sometimes when you are in the process your following instinct and your sense and only at the end when its all done and wrapped up, you get a sense of what it is really all about.

Absolutely, but in the process you do begin to get a sense of the emotional terrain and the shape of it becomes evident fairly early on. It was very easy for people to start talking so you get a map of the terrain. Of course when you actually construct the piece, then you begin to know your terrain better and give it a shape with an intention of giving it a level of precision.

Audience: In this film, you do have an appearance, but you are otherwise absent in all your other work. Why is that so?

I think in the other films, for instance, ‘On the road with the red god: Machhendranath’, there is a huge cultural subject that we are filming so really I felt that there was no room for me, but there was room for me in the form of my eye. So it’s not really a personal view at all, but I don’t think there is any room or any emotionally reflected sense or relation to the festival that needs to be brought out. So in those cases, what we do is construct the film through our view of it, but we don’t have to be in it. But in ‘We Homes’, there was a need for it.

I didn’t feel that personally connected to any other film or any of the issues for me to be directly present as a role in these films. Although every film is personal and that is problematic because when we say personal we mean some sort of inflexion of you in the film. So that distinction I think exists when you are bodily and emotionally involved and your objective position is also intricately related with the subject.

I think when I say personal as I talk about ‘We Homes Chaps’, I refer to the process of putting myself upfront as part of the film rather than my intellectual outlook and my ideas about the presentation of the subject and so forth.

(Screening of ‘Machhendranath: On the road with the red god’)

Why didn’t you use your own voice is this film?

Here again I don’t think it’s a very personal film, because I think personal is not just your perspective but where you stand in the make up of the film. I used that voice because I thought it was an easier way to access a kind of every man who perhaps belongs more to the modern sector than the traditional devotes and so forth. I thought I wanted the perspective of someone who doesn’t know the festival, and who is not a devotee in the strict sense of the word.

I tried to read up several books on it and tried to understand the rituals but I understood very early on, that that was not the kind of film I could make or I wanted to make and that once again what was on the surface was exciting enough.

Where does your interest in character driven narratives come from, and are you trying other forms of storytelling now?

Everybody is interested in character driven narratives because that’s a classical way and that’s the effective way and so forth. Also when you encounter a character so strong, the story is embodied in that character. However, I don’t think I’m particularly only looking for that and I think you are lucky if you find a character that fits the bill.

In my film, ‘In search of the Riyal’, many people were disappointed by the disruptions of the characters and so forth. I feel that each production of a film is very much constrained by its own circumstances.

In ‘On the road with the red God..’, the guru was the nerve centre of the jatra, and I had good access to him so therefore he came in. In the case of the migrations to the gulf, it was impossible to stay with any character, or find one that was powerful enough so that’s the way the material shaped out to be.

It needn’t be that way, somebody else might have done it differently so that they might have had a character, but my attitude to the subject was that it was really sociology in a way and lots of people want to go out and work, it involves thousands, millions and therefore I didn’t find and neither did I want to centre on one person to tell the story.

When you are working on a new idea, are you consciously striving towards or thinking of these things simultaneously or are you letting the material guide you?

Definitely the latter. There is nothing to think about until you encounter the subject or material. As we discussed earlier, as you film, things come up and you script it in a sense and shape the filming thenceforth.

In that sense you are scripting it in very lose way and thinking about it and you really are very imprisoned, at least I am. Maybe I am a bit of a passive filmmaker but I go about trying to understand, at least on my level, especially the subjects that are external and political, which I don’t necessarily have a close affinity to. I just feel like capturing-hearing-capturing-hearing and seeing where the story might create some sort of rhythm or might add up to something larger than the individual parts.

25 February 2010, Conversations on Documentary Practice, Persistence Resistance 2010