Shonali Bose and the Art of Dying

Shonali Bose was 21 when her beloved mother died. Twenty-five years later, she lost her 16-year-old son to a freak accident. You could say she has been living with death for a large part of her life. But instead of debilitating her, it has given her wings to fly. Literally and metaphorically. In the documentary A Fly on the Wall, she goes gliding in Switzerland to take her mind off the task she is there for — to document on camera the last few days of her friend Chika Kapadia’s life. A good death is hard to achieve but her friend, who is dying of a rare form of cancer, Anaplastic Thyroid Cancer, manages to achieve it with grace and dignity at Dignitas, the Swiss non-profit organisation providing physician-assisted suicide to members with terminal illness or severe physical or mental illness. Bose’s conflict is complex, personally and professionally. As a friend, she wants to support Chika, but as a filmmaker she is also interested in getting the perfect shot. Bose is able to bring humour into what is a dark subject— Chika replacing the Swiss chocolates given to offset the bitter taste of the sodium pentobarbital cocktail with his favourite Parle G biscuits, Chika deciding to lie back on the sofa after the cocktail because it will look better on camera, and Chika ticking death off for creeping up on him. Bose has always sought out the beauty in frailty, mental, emotional and physical, whether it was in Margarita With a Straw (2014) or The Sky is Pink (2019). No wonder Iranian filmmaker Mohsen Makhmalbaf loved A Fly on the Wall when it was screened at the Busan International Film Festival. Says Bose, “He bumped into us in Busan on the road and hugged and kissed me as he recognised me from the film, though I didn’t! Then we figured who it was and he spoke at the award function about our film. It thrilled us.” For Chika and Bose, living a good life is as important as living a good death. Says Bose, “This is the best death. Happiest. You can’t imagine how many young people in Busan and the MAMI Film Festival said the film has eased them on the idea of death. And helped them let go of losses they have had. The craft of this film is much more the work of Nilesh [Maniyar, her co-director] than me. He deserves the credit and Chika whose idea it was —my dead friend and our editor. I’m more a participant [unwilling] than a director.”

Back to the Roots

Rima Das knew she wanted to go back to 10-year-old Dhunu whom she filmed in Village Rockstars in 2017. The sequel, Village Rockstars 2 premiered at the Busan International Film Festival in October and won the Kim Jiseok Award. For Das, Dhunu (Bhanita Das), with her yearning to own a guitar and form a rock band, symbolises the invisible people in India with big dreams and limited means. In a way, it was Das’ story too, as someone who came to Mumbai from Assam to become an actor and finally decided to tell her own stories her way. “When I made Village Rockstars I was returning home for a long period after 12 years, I was rediscovering my roots, my land and my people. This time, I was more engaged, my filming had more layers,” Das says. It was exhausting though, because she was also filming Tora’s Husband, her feature with her brother Abhijit Das, shot during Covid-19. “I took a year-and-a-half to edit Village Rockstars 2. I saw a girl with potential, who loves nature, her mother, who climbs trees, and can fall in love with the moon. These are our untold heroes. No one bothers to acknowledge them,” she says. The response from the men in the audience surprised her the most. “They were crying a lot,” she says. So is this documentary or fiction? Das acknowledges the element of direction, of steering the story in a particular way, of seeing the characters in a particular lens.

Clash of the Cholis

It’s an odd coincidence. The woman who sang the 1993 blockbuster song, ‘Choli ke Peechey’, has written her memoir. So has the man who directed the movie Khal Nayak which featured the controversial song. Ila Arun’s memoir, Parde ke Peechey (Penguin), as told to Anjula Bedi, traces her life from Jaipur to Mumbai, where she achieved fame for her folksy style of singing, while director Subhash Ghai’s memoir, Karma’s Child (Harper Collins), co-written with Suveen Sinha, examines how a boy from Rohtak went to FTII in Pune and between 1976 and 1999, directed 15 movies, with 11—such as Kalicharan, Vidhaata, Hero, Karma, Ram Lakhan, Saudagar, Khal Nayak, and Taal— becoming enormous hits. So, who will win the clash of the cholis?

About The Author

Kaveree Bamzai

Kaveree Bamzai is an author and a contributing writer with Open

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