Kochi: Outside the new Apollo Dimora Hotel, Kamal Swaroop is finishing a smoke. He watches the sky, cloudy after a small shower. Mumbai-based Kamal likes the weather in Kerala, and its multi-floor buildings. He has been to many film festivals across the world but he is attending one in Kerala for the first time, and is a jury member for the fiction category.
The jury work begins on Saturday, and so Friday has been a day to watch the films at the ninth International Documentary and Short Film Festival screened at the Kairali-Sree-Nila complex in Thiruvananthapuram. Kamal could have brought his banned documentary film The Battle For Banaras and screened it in Kerala.
There would not have been any objections despite the film not getting a censor certificate. But he wants to follow the rules and after getting rejected by two censor committees, he with producer Manu Kumaran, is taking it to the High Court. The film which covers the 2014 general elections from Varanasi, from where Prime Minister Narendra Modi had contested, did not get anything in writing after the first rejection. The second committee, however, wrote that there was derogatory language accusing political leaders, comments about political parties and communities.
“Unofficially though I came to know that it was because they felt Modiji was shown in a bad light, and it might be pro-Kejriwal. But it is not,” says Kamal. “It covers 40 days of the elections, including the public rallies, of all political parties and the independent candidates. The Muslims had felt that none of the parties had helped them so far, so they root for Kejriwal. Realising this, the BJP tries to woo a united Hindi community, all castes included. And it is not my observations but of the man on the street.”
He mentions Elias Canetti’s book ‘Crowds and Power’ that inspired him to make the film. “It is about the various kinds of crowds and their relationship with the leader. I wanted to explore that idea.”
He got his ‘crowd obsession’ after working as a crowd controller and interpreter of speeches in Richard Attenborough’s Gandhi. Next came his first film ‘Om-Dar-B-Dar’ that had to wait 26 years for a release, becoming a sort of predecessor for his Banaras film. But this was a post-modernist film about a boy who could hold his breath for a long time. The reason he got for its rejection of a censor board certificate is ‘it may have hidden messages.’ But this changed in 2014 when the NFDC took over as producer and brought it out.
This man whose films had gone through years of shelf life, enjoying a screening only at festivals abroad, does not believe Udta Punjab, the newest film battling with the censor board, falls into the same category. “It’s because it is coming at the same time as the Punjab elections, otherwise the film would have passed with a few cuts.”
In Kerala, Kamal has busy days ahead but then it is not a new place for him. He has many friends here, students too, like Bina Paul Venugopal, film editor and artistic director of many editions of the International Film Festival of Kerala, and her husband, cinematographer-director Venu. He knows the films of this place - Adoor’s all, Aravindan’s all. And John Abraham had been a close friend.
