Above; Director Anup Singh (middle) with Irrfan Khan and Rasika Duggal.
Partition
Anup Singh's Film QISS Premieres in Toronto Film Fest Today
ASIAN CULTURE VULTURE
Life is a journey, whether that involves physical movement of one kind or another.
For some it was the defining experience of the 20th century with huge displacements of people – sometimes from one continent to another.
A film, which has its world premiere at the Toronto International Film Festival (TIFF) on September 8 & 9, ‘Qissa’, is set in the aftermath of one of the most haunting periods of world history.
Partition – when India and Pakistan were carved out of the British Raj – remains a wound on the conscience of a generation, now slowly slipping from view.
It also tackles head on another huge subject – the obsession with having male heirs.
Director Anup Singh has mined his own deeply personal experiences of displacement and new beginnings to explore the psychology and trauma of that tumultuous event and weaves a personal tale of loss, lament and redemption.
Anup Singh said he is delighted to be showing ‘Qissa’ (which means folktale) in Toronto.
“I’ll immediately know the fate of the film if I’m invited or not to a true Punjabi meal after the screening,” he jokes.
He is thrilled about being able to share his vision and passion on an important stage for world cinema.
“I believe Qissa unfolds those secret and fragile aspects of our life that we are unable to share with others in our daily living.
“I believe an audience that remains vulnerable to its inner spirit and is fearless about celebrating life in all its complexity will find Qissa an experience that they will carry with them for the rest of their lives.”
His own parents were part of the exodus from East Africa and moved to the UK, when he was a boy and it resonated with the experience of his late grandfather who had experienced the horror and fallout of Partition.
Anup Singh explains: “I have a memory of my grandfather from my childhood: he was a tall, powerful old Sikh, with a wild beard.
“I remember him weeping. I remember him telling me tales of the partition and weeping. As a child, I was horrified to see such a formidable man break down so utterly.”
His grandfather is the inspiration behind the central character of Umber Singh in ‘Qissa’, played by Irrfan Khan.
Anup Singh’s grandfather was a man of ‘immense journeys’.
From Rawalpindi, Punjab, in what became Pakistan, he moved to Africa, making a home there, before going to Mumbai and raising eight children there.
Later in his life he moved to the United Kingdom, where he died.
This nomadic restlessness, suggests Anup Singh, was a reaction to something deep and abiding – a kind of forgetting of what had happened and a hope in new starts.
Inspired by the Bengali filmmaker Ritwik Ghatak, Anup Singh explored what he feels is his mentor’s ‘very simple but frightening question, “Who isn't a refugee?”’
“Throughout his life, my grandfather carried a bitter resentment about his loss of home. It tore him apart and often he could not help but turn on his own family with a kind of despairing violence. Somehow, any which way, he needed to avenge his loss,” revealed Anup Singh.
He describes the film as ‘gentle’, even though it has incredibly painful subjects at its core and says the ‘violence’ within Umber and his family is redeemed by the women around him.
“Qissa does not thump out any agenda. It is not cynical. It is not bitter. It suggests through its women characters the possibility of tenderness and redemption.”
Yet, there is no denying some deep lying sense of loss and rejection for Umber and Anup Singh seeks to ask a powerful question in all this.
“Over the last few decades, so many other nations have been torn apart, so many other peoples butchered, scattered as refugees and so many simply lost.
“In Qissa, the tale does ask the question as to just how much each one of us is culpable?”
He challenges us to change and actively wrestle with beliefs and practices that, while at one level seem outmoded and worn, we refuse to tackle.
“Isn’t it true that despite our laments about the savage and violent world we inhabit today, we are unable to give up our communal or caste or class prejudices?
“We are unable to tear out the patriarchy that keeps brutalising women as much on public buses as in our families, schools and where not?”
For Anup Singh, the sensitivities and care with which we approach some topics has a faint whiff of hypocrisy and delusion.
“So many of these sensitivities simply mask guilt and culpability.”
He also experienced the loss of home, having to move as a young boy from Africa, where his parents were settled, to the UK, but the journey also kindled something very profound and inspiring, stirring the very ambition to make films.
“My parents and I were forced to leave Africa in my adolescence and, later in life, forced to leave India.
“These were devastating journeys of homelessness.
“But, with all the pain, I also always carry with me another memory – the memory of those enchanted nights on the vast ocean between Africa and India when a screen was raised on the deck of the ship and a film flickered between the infinite sky above and the boundless sea below.
“And I knew at that moment that as long as I could invoke this experience of cinema, where it pulsed as a part of the larger cosmos, I would never be homeless.”
At its essence, he argued, ‘Qissa’ played to those two emotions – the voyage of despair, the lust for vengeance and the other of affirmation and redemption.
In choosing Irrfan Khan to play Umber Singh there was a very clear line of thinking.
Anup Singh explains: “When I was writing Qissa, I wanted Balraj Sahni for the main lead.
“Unfortunately, he was dead already more than 30 years then. By the time Qissa was actually ready to be cast, I knew it could only be Irrfan.
“To me, he’s one of the rare actors after Balraj Sahni who does not belittle our sense of the human spirit with humbug emotions.“
Anup Singh feels too much of the time actors are conveying ‘pre-packaged emotions’ in a ‘world of flimflam’, but that an actor of Irrfan’s class brought ‘the inner truth of emotion and unruffled imagination’ that made a difference and would allow audiences to feel engaged and connected.
Anup Singh disclosed that they had cast the net wide in looking for actors: auditioning in Mumbai, Delhi, across Punjab and even London.
Tisca Chopra, Tillotama Shome, Rasika Dugal, playing three of the main women parts, all had the subtlety and emotional dexterity that was necessary, he explained.
The very fulsome praise for his actors is too long to replicate here, but he said their performances evoked ‘music’, ‘a fluent expressiveness of nature’ and ‘exhilaration’.
Anup Singh spent many years living in London as a nascent filmmaker, directing TV productions and working as a screen journalist and BBC2 consultant, before taking up a film teaching post in Geneva, where he is now based.
His first film, ‘The Name of a River’ (2002), was a huge critical success, won several international awards and is out on DVD as part of the British Film Institute’s collection.
‘Qissa’ has been financed from Germany (Heimat Films), India (National Film Development Corporation of India), Holland and France.
It is expected to be released in India next year, while Anup Singh hopes he will be able to secure a deal for the UK after Toronto.
SCREENINGS
Sat Sept 7 15.45h Scotiabank 7 Press & Industry
Sun Sept 8 18.15h Isabel Bader Theatre Public
Mon Sept 9 12.30h TIFF Bell Lightbox 2 Public
Tue Sept 10 16.15h Scotiabank 5 Press & Industry
Sat Sept 14 13.00h Scotiabank 4 Public
[Courtesy: Asian Culture Vulture. Edited for sikhchic.com.]
September 8, 2013