India’s Short at the Oscars

Twenty-two-year-old Bombay native Subhashish Bhutiani has always wanted to make films. Now, his short film Kush is in the running for an Oscar

Subhashish Bhutiani is anxious at the prospect of talking about himself for 90 minutes. “What do you want to know?” asks the 22-year-old filmmaker. “Seedha saadha ladka hoon main (I am a simple guy).” It has taken nearly two weeks of email exchange to pin him down to a date and time. Shubhashish has been flooded with screening requests from film festivals. He has also been coordinating with cast, crew, festival managers and his producer parents to get his debut film Kush maximum visibility.

Being shortlisted for an Oscar does that to you, I suppose.

Speaking over Skype, I can see the exhaustion writ large on his face; the contents of his white coffee cup having to work extra hard to keep him going. It is the second week of December, and Subhashish is in New York City at an apartment he shares with a friend. He has had a long night at the South Asian Film Festival, where Kush premiered the previous evening. As we speak, he admits counting the days till he is back in Mumbai, his hometown.

“I wanna just read a book or something,” he says. “Maybe watch a movie. I am tired. Maybe I will just go to Goa.” A much-deserved break for a guy who has spent every vacation since the age of 16 working on a film set.

A graduate of the School of Visual Arts in New York, where he studied filmmaking for four years, Shubhashish has devoted the better part of the last year-and-a-half to the single-minded pursuit of perfecting his 25-minute thesis. Set in 1984, Kush is a time capsule of the turbulent period that saw widespread violence against Sikhs after the assassination of then Prime Minister Indira Gandhi. Lavishly shot and crisply edited, the bittersweet drama unfolds in the hills of North India, the geography established only by the accents of characters. It is the tale of a teacher struggling to shield the 17 children she has taken on a field trip from the communal frenzy endangering the life of her only Sikh student, Kush.

Kush is a true story, says the director, based on the experience of his economics teacher. She had mentioned the incident in passing during one of her classes at Woodstock School in Mussoorie, and though it had lodged itself in his mind then, it was only a year later, in his final year at school, that Shubhashish realised the story’s cinematic appeal. Since then, he had been chewing on the idea, always one step short of taking the ambitious project head on.

Shot on the fringes of Mumbai and Lonavla, the shoot took all of five days in January earlier this year. The next five months were spent at the chopping board, putting the film together. “We were rolling all the time,” says Shubhashish, which is why the editing was a gargantuan task.

All that effort seems to have paid off, however. Kush has made it to the final ten films in the running for an Academy Award for Best Short Film.

On a bookshelf in Subhashish’s sparse room in New York, between an 8 mm film projector and what looks like a small treasure chest, is a typewriter. “Sometimes, I do it for fun,” he says on being asked if his approach to writing is old school. “I feel cool when I do it.”

He is at ease with himself, admitting he is as much in awe of the works of Wong Kar Wai and Asghar Farhadi as he is of the chick-flick Mean Girls. “I love Mean Girls. I can quote Mean Girls. It’s great filmmaking,” he says, and you know he’s not just being gallant.

During his time in the United States, the running joke was to associate him with whatever Indian stereotype was the flavour of the season. Over the years, he has answered to all kinds of names—Slumdog, Pi and now, Miss America. “All of us are the biggest racists with each other,” he laughs, referring to his college friends. All bases were covered during their graduation ceremony when the speakers burst into the song Jai Ho.

Having been a writer for several years, filmmaking was a natural progression for Shubhashish. At the age of 16, Vishal Bhardwaj took him under his wing for a brief while on the sets of Kaminey. The sheer amount of work was an eye-opener, shattering his romantic notions of filmmaking. But this only spurred him on, and a year later, in his final year of school, he directed a cast and crew of 100 people in a stage-adaptation of Peter Pan. Seeing this, his parents began to think differently about his career trajectory.

“My dad said, ‘Math toh aata nahi hai, science nahi kar sakta, history mein kuch kar nahi sakte, economics mein duba dega. Filmein bana’ (You can’t handle mathematics, science, history or economics. Go make films),” he chuckles. “But honestly, it’s all I have known. Every time I have spoken to my dad, even when I was I was a kid, we used to talk about movies. I like working with people. So it was right up my alley.”

Shubhasish doesn’t think much about all the aces his film has been scoring. Kush has festivals in Moscow, Tokyo and Milan lined up for the next two months, but Subhashish shrugs all that off: “I’m just lucky right now.”

“I have seen the movie so many times. Last night I saw it again at the festival. I couldn’t watch it. I saw so many mistakes in it. If you ask me what I was doing yesterday, I was editing the film. I do that because if I see flaws, I don’t want to ignore [them].”

Back in school, Shubhasish would never have imagined he would find himself at the geek table. But college changed that. “Everywhere I went, I had a backpack with me. I had a laptop. I had two books at all times. I could be bored of one book but I’d have another option. I’d always have five or six DVDs. That was like my woman’s bag with all the essentials in it. That’s what New York provided me—I didn’t have to think of anything but movies,” he says.

It took him almost two years to write Kush, while simultaneously battling other demons—not just budgetary constraints, but also the logistics and sheer scale of the movie. He was bent on getting everything right, but he was still short of a cinematographer to complement his vision. A month into his thesis, he found the perfect fit.

“One day, I was moving from the dorms to my first apartment in New York. I had packed my suitcases and it started raining. The apartment was five or six blocks away. The bags were heavy, so [I was going to drag them] all the way because paise bachane hain taxi ke (to save money on a taxi). Then I saw a car pull up in front of the dorm. [Inside] I [saw] this guy who I [knew] from the elevators. I said, ‘Look, I will give you 10 bucks or 20 bucks or two beers or something, can you drop me to my apartment?’ He looked irritated but dropped me to my place.”

“That’s the first time I met Mike Sweeny,” says Shubhashish. “He is the man I call on a rainy day.”

“The first time he told me the story, I told him we should abandon it,” says Sanjay Bhutiani, owner of Red Carpet Moving Pictures, producer of Kush and Subhashish’s father. We are sitting in the living room of his seventh floor apartment in Jogeshwari.

The winged lion trophy Subhashish won for Best Short Film at Venice looks regally down at us from the showcase, along with various other awards his son has won for direction and acting.

Shubhashish is looking resolutely away, visibly awkward at the full-throttle praise his parents have been lavishing on him all through the meeting.

“I loved the script. But if we were talking of so many people, we couldn’t afford it,” explains Bhutiani senior. But Shubhashish was bent on making it happen. It took three grants from his cinema school and a generous contribution from his grandfather for the project, budgeted at around Rs 10 lakh, to unfurl.

When his son started landing the grants, Sanjay had a change of heart. The prospect of flying Sweeny down from the US, hiring a lighting technician from Sweden and assembling a cast and crew of over 60 people was taken in stride.

With parents who have matched every one birthday wish over the years—from a Walkman to a portable DVD player to an iPod to a camera and finally, his labour of love Kush—it is little surprise when Shubhashish says, “I am very fortunate.”

The most substantial obstacle to his passion was in high school, when his hostel warden would repeatedly confiscate his portable DVD player. “That’s my struggle story,” he grins. “It was an endless Tom & Jerry [show] going on.”

So far, it’s been smooth sailing. But now, the family’s focus is locked on 16 January 2014, 5 pm IST, when the final five Oscar nominations for Best Short Film will be announced.

About The Author

Omkar Khandekar

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