"Discovering Cinema: On the Making of Being Me" by Kshitiz Adhiraj

Quite late that evening, the streets of Gaushala were gloomy and dark.The only sentiments attached to life were exhibited from the haywire arrangement of jhilimili batti filling the window panes of dance restaurants along gaushala heading towards battisputali. The two friends accompanying me were high on ghansh and I mostly felt my hearts pumping as I hopped one restaurant to the other searching for nude dances to be caught on tape. A couple of hours from then, my hands shiver with the fear of being caught, and my heart pumps much louder as I hear the words, “Maile dekhein” from a lady dancer with which I officially ended getting caught.  I was making Being Me, and this was only the beginning. 

Being Me as an idea came to life in 2007 but it was long after the series of discomforts raised from discovering new things that the final Being Me came to life. Here are excerpts of that journey I travelled to rediscover me as a filmmaker. 

To start with, the ideas of hope and confusion as a dichotomy on which life revolves had long haunted me. It was something I repeatedly did: see almost all human acts through that vision, perceive how it started with a hope and following its evolution, for me it always ended with confusion.  They were becoming more relevant as time passed and I boarded a flight back from Jumla.

I had boarded a Sita Air flight from Jumla just having shot a person by the name of Yogi Shree Om walking out of a nine feet air tight pit where he meditated for four days far from the discomforts of humanity. The stunt almost reminded me of having watched Sai baba back in sai school but this one unlike sai tricks was happening right in front of me and mostly I was seeing people being touched. The crowd that had gathered were people of all kinds, while some easily were in the mood to buy him as a new spiritual power, some were adamant and blessed him instead. So as I saw it, there was a certain hope factor, a certain social upbringing factor, a certain superstition factor, a certain personal psychological factor, a certain respect factor, a certain being honest factor and a certain let me analyse factor. It was basically amazing an experience. 

Having walked down the tiny ladders of that Dornier “flight something” instead of catching my next plane back to Kathmandu I boarded a bus to dang where my curiousity was to meet Sai bahini( a woman who proclaims to be the sister of Sai baba). But my luck was better, I met Ramji Pant Shastri, a self proclaimed aghori from Benaras.
 
In Dang with Baba Ramji, what happened most was the realization of existence. I met him in a small hotel room in tulsipur with him being surrounded by a son and an old woman who for me desperately were seeking solutions to their personal confusions. This realization was almost a very stark conclusion to what I primarily think of life as a calculated means where the actor has dominant roles and we as one knows what or how we are going to head. The next hour in there and I was much more willing to accept my new belief where I saw life as a mirage of manipulative activities where one has no control. 

I stayed with Ramji for almost 5 hours that day and he talked gibberish most of the time. I would try and ask something but he would say, “shut up, listen to me”. Whatever he maybe, I found the plastic skull on his table very interesting and so I stayed shut. My another realization was a new form of energy projected into humans by beliefs carried by society at large. These are beliefs not exactly ideologies but I was soon realizing this provided a larger oomph to do many things than did ideological bases or stand points. At least, It seemed true from the new picture I had just been aware of.

I had to go on shooting, so ideological thinking couldn’t eat up much of my time. I did what I often did; shot for the next year, mostly on predefined concepts that I saw would fit into the film but also shot a lot of things that just happened to interest me. I think at the core of all the rapid shooting I was doing, I wanted to reveal the real lifestyles of Nepalis, tell the world how it is to be what we are; being a Nepali. This would have to cover real life footages of people in different situations and a lot of interviews where one described what or how his/her life has been like. And I assume I got most of my energy to do so with my background in photography where I almost always thought it was about taking pictures which caught certain moments. Action drove me quite a lot and I for sure searched for it as I held a sony cam in my hand. I saw cinema as a true act only when the images were real and it captured live sentiments. As a filmmaker I was supposed to shoot them well, and edit them according to a flow I could derive where it was to be of prime importance to maintain a flow that the audience understood. The end product would protest a certain societal flaw, while doing so project one that protested.

Working in this structure was lot of fun, the thrill was invincible.  But I was soon realizing that, the forms I would often call films were not exactly forms where I explored an artist in me. I was exploring alright, but I was doing it on the basis of predefined notions where the individual me, primarily as an artist did not exist. I had made documentaries for almost four years before heading to film school; I was back and what I was making was not cinema, or I thought so.

A year into shoot I had some tapes in hand, most of them containing images I know I will never get again. I played them one after the other and quite easily also found myself deleting them. I had not lost interest in my film, but my film had grown inside me. As I watched images of nude women dancing and myself, the director transforming into merely nothing but a flesh monger whose supposed film would barely raise questions on the survival skills of a woman dancer, the zing carried by the image wasn’t what I thought it would be. I was asking myself, “why would I have to show a woman dancer dance nude to tell that she is in pain? or that the system has treated her wrong!” As a matter of fact, is my intention at all to tell her story? Because by then I had realized my presentation in such an order would do nothing than victimize a normal person, and it would be the same person whom in the first place I was thriving to portray as being normal.      

Film Stills:

    

Being Me is a film about Nepal, about life forming the country. And it is not a documentary. In a larger part of me I had made myself clear that documentary with its contemporary characteristics was not something I wanted to do again. And this in relation to Being Me was quite clear as I finished writing the opening lines of the film before envisioning the complete film. That led to a contextual conflict, between what I was shooting or doing with the camera and the situation I was in. I knew I was not making a documentary as I didn’t believe it meant freedom, I didn’t want to have actors because I wasn’t ready to work with them but as it turned out the people I was shooting were real which gave me an assumption that this was again becoming a documentary. As I see documentary cinema as a genre, it projects reality, making people believe it is real; which of course based on all the manipulation that goes into making a film wouldn’t be correct. Reality as I see is contextual and it is in individual perceptions and visions that reality exists- this meant the film I would do had to allow the people to independently relate to the film thus finding conclusions on their own.
 
My “no genre” film would have chapters and as I initially thought it would oppose the documentary genre. But life or the portrayal of it through chapters, as it would eventually unfold was more than just opposing genres. It would have to mean I as a filmmaker feel life in the first place, see thoughts that lead to cultures and study cultures that lead to systems before it could go any further. Being Me had to answer most of these. A quick FAQ and I knew I needed to start writing. So I wrote of almost everything I thought would hit me in the course of the film. I had to cross ideological bumps for the content in this film to make sense. My thoughts on faith, on thoughts itself, on cultures and systems would have to be dealth with. These thoughts then as I plotted would inscribe itself as the driving philosophy of the film. Here I eventually figured I was not in need of any script because Being Me was about the philosophy of existence and its point of view on Nepali life. It was with this realization I figured that ideas such as genre, or structures are merely nothing but systems laid by ones in power to manipulate observations limiting the field of both expression from the direction and absorption from the audience. As an artist if film is an art, it is to express and be true only to myself, and that truth is born out of a social pretext so there is of course a societal obedience but that should not be confused with genre or obedience leading to ideological slavery. For me, genre mostly refers to the system of oppression built through cinema.  In my new film, and an idea formed through the evolution I had been through, truth meant being everything that you are: first as an individual and then as a person living with others.

Before I commenced my stage two shoot, Being Me was now a film about existence, and of an individual living against odds most importantly being a Nepali. Here the individual could not be any character but the content would have to relate to the audience enabling him/her to be the main subject which was the “me” factor. The film is about Nepal and a Nepali, which is a universal feeling. Upon characterization the ideological value of being Nepali would be transferred completely into the character where the audience would react to it on the terms laid by the character. Manipulation exists but it can be limited was the mantra. The chapter ideology had grown strong and I believed it would also ensure no audience would be blindfolded into one specific direction. Sivalinga, Huree, Bagh- Matee would come together to make Being Me- the film and the closing chapter.

Here ‘Sivalinga’ would establish notions of belief and faith, ‘Huree-’ would represent the transformation of faith into systems and ‘Baghmatee’ would pickup segments of oppression based on the evolved system. The final chapter Being Me would be the director’s take on the larger picture. Of one of the driving ideas about my selected options were the belief that thoughts come in bundles, at any given time people have multiple thoughts and it is due to a specific time and space relation that s/he selects one doing further things with it. As a film of reality, Being Me was to allow multiple thoughts building at any given time. The chapters would once again help me attain them in a much larger scale. 

When I refer to a film as an art I am mostly looking at the director speaking beyond boundaries, the screen screening without any financial, political or social confines and the audience relating completely on his/her own abilities of judgment free from prior experiences of film viewership. As a director I never was willing to compromise. I was not experimenting but rather doing what I thought was the only way to address the ideology that had been born into me. We screened the film first into streets where our entire crew sat to freely communicate and be slapped if needed. Our experiences except certain messages on the board weren’t so bad. But yes we have been labeled the worst film ever made, and we wish to thank the ones who wrote that.                                

Funded by us with budgets less than 50,000 Being Me met some 10,000 audiences in the first round of screening last May. The bug of doing independent and running out of screens to project is always there but mostly we enjoy our share. Over the last one year, I have heard many thoughts and ideas from people and I primarily think Being Me owes most of the credits. At the end of the day, a film is born and we as filmmakers are able to communicate- not in any language but forms that are open only to the reader.

For correspondence with the director you may write directly to adhirajenator(at)gmail.com
Being Me will soon be available on DVD's. For festival updates please visit the offocial page of the film at: http://docskool.org/content_pages/view/16