» Bill Cowell, Founder of The Buffalo Niagara
Film Festival is proud to announce a victorious
return for #2.
Bill pledges that this will be a spectacular 2nd year with large events and big
surprises to be talked about for years to come. Enjoyment to all, and to all
an enjoyable plight. See you soon.
The film depicts the death
of the feudal system that existed among the
Tulu speaking community in coastal Karnataka
and the impact the land ceiling act, ushered
during the sixties and seventies, has had
on its social structure. It is the story
of modern India – of changing caste
equations and a realisation of the reality
among the land owning class, albeit a bit
late. Though the film is set in a remote
village near Mangalore, it could well have
happened in any other village elsewhere in
India.
DIRECTOR STATEMENT
Tulu is a language spoken by the people in the two districts in Coastal Karnataka
in Southern India. It has no script of its own, but is highly evolved. Tulu
films are made once in three to four years, and are very few in number.
Over the past two years, I was on the look out for a story that could lend
itself to a no budget DV film. With “Bojja”, a play written by Narayana
Nandalike, my search came to an end. The play is about a joint family who had
once owned large tracts of land, but now was left with a few because they had
to surrender their rights, by law, their tenants. They play was about the family
sticking on to the legacy of their feudal past. Their failure to come to terms
with their present reality was a condition that I was too familiar with – for
I too belonged to an erstwhile landlord family that had lost its land.
My assistant Surendra Kumar caught on to the idea and it was decided that we
would shoot in and around an old crumbling house in his village called Marnad,
near Mangalore. We shot for seventeen days. Available lights, available costumes,
available properties, no make up… The locals first wondered if we were
shooting a film at all! The actors were perplexed. They began demanding that
we hire a make up guy from the local drama troupe. One actress even went to the
extent of purchasing some fancy cloths for herself, thinking that she was the
heroine of the film and that she needed to be neatly dressed in song sequences!
The first few days our average shooting ratio would be fifteen to seventeen takes.
None of the actors had done any film work. They were amateur theater artists,
who were used to theater projection. Initially, they simply were finding it difficult
to tone it down. But by the end of the shooting we were down to an average of
seven takes.
Initially the crew consisted of myself, my associate director cum co-producer
Surendra Kumar, my cameraman and colleague from the film school Sameer Mahajan
and my sound recordist Santosh Kumar. Then we trained a few volunteers from the
local Youth Club into holding boom rod, make shift reflectors and thermocol sheets.
There are times when I really was thinking if it was worth to shoot a feature
film in such non-professional conditions. Sometimes when things were not going
the way you wanted it to, it was very frustrating! Finally it took me seventeen
days to complete the shoot, although we had only planned for thirteen days.
The post–production took almost a year. I was editing, sound designing,
track laying, subtitling, color correcting all by myself.
Reactions to the film during trial screenings were positive and that was when
I felt that it was actually worth the trouble my crew and myself had taken for
two years in the making and completion of this film.
