THIRUVANANTHAPURAM: Hearing filmmaker Anup Singh speak, it would seem he is pitching for the film rights of philosophical classics like Jean-Paul Sartre's Being and Nothingness or Plato's Republic. His words are so full of profound existential conundrums that it is a wonder that he tells touching fictions of loss and yearning through stunning images.
“Are we worthy of ourselves in the given space and time,” Mr Singh asks filmmakers. “I was trying to find the force that was preventing us from moving outside our imaginary borders,” he says about his second film Qissa. The man is so articulate about his mentor Ritwik Ghatak that he takes the charm out of Ghatak’s films. “Ritwikda’s films are full of cultural references but one reference in a scene does not reinforce the other. It in fact works as a counterpoint,” he said.
Nonetheless, Mr Singh said that he did not pose these philosophical questions to himself before sitting down to write a script. “These questions are internalised that I need not repeat them to myself. I follow the imagery and sound,” he said. In fact, Qissa began as a set of scattered images of a lonely woman in a desert and a burnt cloth he had in a dream. In spite of all its philosophical underpinnings, his latest film, The Song of the Scorpion, is told like a folk tale. “But I come back to these existential posers in between just to ensure that I do not wander away from the path I want to take. If I don’t crosscheck, I might perhaps go the way of other mainstream filmmakers,” Mr Singh said.
Mr Singh, a Punjabi, was born in Tanzania but is now based in Geneva, in Switzerland. IN between he had lived in Mumbai, and had studied at FTII, Pune. His condition of virtually being everywhere but not rooted nowhere found resonance in Ritwik Ghatak’s films. “The way he shot the terrain in his films it did not look like Bengal. It could have been anywhere,” Mr Singh said.
“If Ritwikda wanted to show a river, he did not shoot it in a superficial manner. He had the unique ability to capture the inner force that went into the making of the outer surface,” he added.
