Home Shoots

THE COVID-19-INDUCED lockdown has been a pe­riod of creative fulfilment for Gurinder Chadha, director of the award-winning films Bhaji on the Beach (1993) and Bend It Like Beckham (2002). Instead of feeling bogged down by social distanc­ing, she got together with her family and made a heartwarming nine-minute documentary titled Unexpected Gift. It was released on Netflix recently as part of Homemade, a collection of 17 short films about the experience of isolation in various countries.

In an email interaction, Chadha says, ‘When Netflix first approached me about making a Homemade film, I wasn’t sure audiences would actually want to watch other people in lockdown after having had to live through it for so many months.’ She changed her mind once she looked closely at the footage she had already shot with her children Ronak Chadha Berges and Kumiko Chadha Berges at home and realised document­ing the period with them could create a work of art. Chadha’s husband, screen­writer and director Paul MayedaBerges, is also an integral part of the film. Apart from being partners for life, they have also been creative collaborators on mul­tiple projects such as Bride and Prejudice (2004), The Mistress of Spices (2005) and Viceroy’s House (2016).

“I conceived Unexpected Gift as a fam­ily film about what this shared experi­ence has been like for all of us and I got my children involved in the scripting, shooting, narration and editing process. My kids have grown up on my film sets around the world so it was wonderful to be able to tell this story from our home in London together,” says Chadha, who was raised in a Punjabi family that was part of the Indian diaspora in Kenya and moved to London when she was just two years old.

The film chronicles several intimate moments. It begins with remembrance prayers for the death anniversary of Chadha’s mother in March, just before the lockdown started. This gathering, held at a local gurdwara, was meant for 300 relatives and friends but most did not make it for fear of leaving their homes. In the days to come, Chadha lost an aunt to Covid-19. She could not pay a visit but saw her elderly aunt breathe her last on Facetime as the nurses held the patient’s hand. “When people die, they don’t really die because they live in our hearts, don’t they?” says Chadha in the film, after participating in an online prayer meet­ing with relatives scattered all over the world. Her daughter looks on and com­forts her. Later in the film, Chadha loses an uncle in Nairobi to a heart attack, and the family gets to watch the funeral on Facebook Live.

Loss and grief are prominent themes in Unexpected Gift but one comes away feeling grateful not upset. This effect is achieved by Chadha’s ability to weave a narrative that can shoulder the weight of multiple emotions without being overwhelmed. Binge-eating, excessive screen-time, forced homeschooling and children getting on parents’ nerves are experiences that many viewers might find relatable. At the same time, Chadha shows children as emotionally intelligent beings. Giving their mother a pedicure is one of the many ways in which they express their love.

Chadha tells me, “I genuinely feel blessed each day to have a loving family, a home and a job as a filmmaker that I truly love. Although lockdown was hard and we did suffer family losses, my overall feeling is that this intensive time of being together as a family really was an unexpected gift. It has been a time of connection and gratitude and shared family and cultural history that I will cherish for years to come.”

This film is political in a way that is light-hearted and contemplative. It does not get preachy. When Chadha is not poring over photo albums, making aloo parathas, enjoying the jacuzzi or resolv­ing fights between her children, she is cracking up with laughter while watch­ing speeches of British Prime Minister Boris Johnson dubbed in Punjabi.

Unexpected Gift also speaks of how the pandemic affects more people from black and Asian backgrounds but Chadha does not throw a volley of facts and figures at her audience. She makes the point and moves on. She focuses on celebrating her Sikh heritage. “It has taught me to be a warrior who has fought for everything I believe in. I have made films over the past 30 years from a distinct female point of view. It has given me spirituality, strength and a reas­suring sense that home is where your family and community lives.”

Filmmaker Kabir Singh Chowdhry, best known for directing the award-winning mockumentary Mehsampur (2018), has also made a lockdown film with the people he shares a home with in Chandigarh. His 42-minute film Mono Maniacs, available on YouTube, features his mother—theatre director and aca­demic Neelam Mansingh Chowdhry— as well as his pets, the cook, the gardener, the house help and her children. It was shot using a phone camera.

Chowdhry’s film is completely differ­ent from the feel-good fare that Chadha has stitched together. He is interested in raising questions about class privi­lege, police brutality, public health and the migrant crisis. These are explored through an idiosyncratic style of film­making, which blurs the boundaries between live action and animation, feature and documentary, horror and humour. It is bizarre and disorienting. This is not an accident. The filmmaker himself describes it as “the lockdown hallucinating about itself”.

He says, “One day, my brother Angad suggested that I make a film and that shooting during the curfew would be way crazier than the Gonzo style journalism started by Hunter S Thompson which had an exaggerated, non-objective style—often featuring the writer as part of the story.” This pushed Chowdhry to experiment with his own craft as a filmmaker.

Chowdhry also drew inspiration from American writer and literary critic Edgar Allen Poe’s short story ‘Berenice’ (1835) which he read during the lockdown. The macabre elements in Mono Maniacs can be easily traced to this literary influence. He says, “I was like everybody else, incarcerated within the four walls of the house and had to seek my actors and inspiration, from within these constraints. I spent some time observing them and got an insight into their fantasies and dreams and also started having a conversation with them about the film that I was thinking of making.”

MONO MANIACS cannot be neatly explained away with a plot description. It is a provocative meditation on the pandemic itself and how it is affecting the inner lives of people—their aspirations and obsessions, their self-images, their mental health and how they relate to animals and other human beings. It also unravels how our perception of reality is shaped by TikTok videos, television news and our own wild imaginations.

Chowdhry says, “Most of my films blur the lines between fiction and real­ity, between the visible and the unseen, a sort of no-man’s land. My last film, Mehsampur, had a lot of people asking me what the genre of the film was. I used the term ‘cinematic nonfiction’ or ‘ethno-fiction’. I always wanted to be a visual anthropologist, and I think my films really come from that unconscious desire.” Mono Maniacs, to him, is a crea­tive ethnographic record of our times.

Chowdhry made this film without any financial investment or professional equipment. He worked with actors who were readily available and did not hire a crew. He says, “We all struggle to be happy, and my way of dealing with it is through work. This process was most satisfying. It made me realise that so much money, time and effort go in pursuing funders and actors and setting up an infrastructure. This alternative method of filmmaking allows me to be creative and untrammelled.”

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