Kumbh, Goopy & Partition stories in Toronto film fest

When Pan Nalin saw a middle-aged mendicant feeding a child in the middle of a sea of devotees at this year’s Kumbh Mela, he roared, “Action”.

In Allahabad for shooting a documentary on the largest religious gathering on earth, the Gujarat-born filmmaker had run into the sanyasi and the child while looking for a “unique point of view” of the pilgrimage.

“I wanted to show what is happening to the power of faith in modern times and was spellbound by the devotion of this yogi to the boy he found abandoned as a newborn three years ago,” said Nalin, who did 35 days of non-stop shooting to make Faith Connections.

The 115-minute film, an India-France co-production about Surya Kant Das, the sanyasi, and six other stories of intrigue-filled characters like him, will have its world premiere at the 38th Toronto International Film Festival beginning on Thursday.

The festival opens with The Fifth Estate, a new film on WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange presented by Reliance Entertainment and DreamWorks. Toronto Festival’s artistic director Cameron Bailey, who saw the rough cut of Faith Connections at a preview theatre in Andheri in June while he was in India scouting for movies, described the documentary as “a spectacular exploration of varied paths of devotion that converge at one of the world’s most extraordinary religious events”.

Faith Connections is among the four Indian films chosen for world premiere by the Toronto festival, which sets the momentum for the year’s Oscar race.

Among them is Indian Institute of Technology, Bombay, teacher Shilpa Ranade’s animated feature film based on Satyajit Ray’s 1969 movie Goopy Gyne Bagha Byne.

Mumbai was the Toronto festival’s focus last year in its ‘City to City’ programme with a whopping 10 films from the metropolis. “Three years ago, I was illustrating a book in Hindi by Gulzar on the story of Goopy and Bagha and the text seemed to get animated as I read it,” said Ranade, who teaches at IIT, Bombay’s industrial design centre.

“I thought this would make a really good animated film,” added the debutante director, an accomplished animator and illustrator.

Another Indian entry is Anup Singh’s Qissa, a Punjabi partition drama. The Geneva-based Singh is nervous ahead of the world premiere in a city with a sizeable Punjabi immigrant population.

“I will immediately know the fate of the film if I am invited to a true Punjabi meal after the screenings,” joked Singh, a Pune film institute alumnus, who invoked Ritwik Ghatak as his teacher, though the iconic filmmaker died 8 years before he joined the institute.

The film, a journey into the epic landscape of Punjab where history, memory and folklore meet, is the story of a Sikh (played by Irrfan Khan) who begins a new life in India after being uprooted during Partition.

Like his first feature film, the award-winning Ekti Nadir Naam (The Name of a River) that explores a lost homeland, Qissa too is Singh’s response to Ghatak’s daunting question: “Who is not a refugee?”

Legendary director Mani Kaul’s daughter Shambhavi Kaul, who lives in the United States, joins the Indian lineup in Toronto with her short film Mount Song, which the festival is touting as “deceptively disorienting and visually entrancing”. 

Mount Song is part of the festival’s Wavelengths section that tries to expand the notion of cinema with films of varying lengths.

Ritesh Batra’s Irrfan Khan-starring The Lunchbox is another entry from India this year along with Bollywood director Maneesh Sharma’s Shuddh Desi Romance and Canadian filmmaker Richie Mehta’s Siddharth, which is set in Delhi.