Content is the ‘Queen’

Being a short filmmaker can be lonely… I’m very grateful for this recognition and the fact that the film is being seen,” says Karishma Dev Dube, a New York-based Indian filmmaker whose short film Bittu—about two young girls, Bittu and Chand, from the hinterlands—is among the ten shortlisted for Live Action Short Film category at the 93rd Academy Awards to be held on April 25 this year.

Bittu has already won the Students Oscar and Karishma bagged the ‘Best Asian American Student Filmmaker Award in the East Region’. Her Oscar run is being supported by Indian Women Rising, a collective started by Guneet Monga, Ekta Kapoor and Tahira Kashyap in January this year to discover and encourage Indian female filmmaking talent.

Being an Academy voter herself, Monga first saw the film when it was screened for the Students Oscar. She fell in love with it and has been Dube’s ally ever since. Interestingly, while Monga, Kashyap and Kapoor had been talking about IWR for the past year or so, it finally materialized when Dube reached out to Monga in January this year for backing her Oscar campaign.

“While researching on something, I figured that less than five per cent of Indian directors are women and that made me introspect as a producer. I talked about this with Tahira and she brought the same energy to the conversation—that we needed to do something about this. When we saw Bittu, all of this got very real and our sole purpose now is to amplify, shine light, distribute and get any piece of content that has female storytellers into the mainstream,” says Monga.

Kashyap agrees: “We’re getting a lot of love and support and we’ll definitely capitalise on that to empower more women.” She believes that the reason three people with different core abilities have come together is because of their common love for women and cinema.

Bittu is a film based on a 2013 incident of food poisoning in a school in Bihar, but it takes the viewer through a journey much greater than just that. “I think somewhere subconsciously I wanted to portray the lives of people in its entirety—to demonstrate that they were real people and not just figures in a tragic event. They had dreams, relationships, ambitions. I’m well aware of the stereotype of tough narratives like this stemming from developing places like India. I wanted this film to subvert an audience’s expectation from what you might expect from a film like this,” says Dube.

Challenging stereotypes is a driving force. “We want to break the stereotype that women are either revolutionaries or tragic queens, there is so much in between. We are going to make, promote, distribute, all films that are brilliant. We can’t put anything in boxes,” says Kashyap

“I totally believe that when one woman rises or opens a door, she makes way for five more. It builds conversations and communities. I’ve been on this journey- pushing independent filmmakers- and it’s very isolating. But now we’re a group, hustling together and it’s magical. One plus one indeed makes three,” says Monga.

“We are not producers, just presenters. People are talking about Bittu because we made so much noise about it. It’s great for the film, for Karishma and the two lovely girls. We’ve come together for a very specific reason- amplifying these stories,” she adds. IWR has had several sleepless nights in the last month. All the back and forth for marketing has been happening online and in London and L.A. time.

Dube talks about why she didn’t cast any professional actors, except the one playing the role of the teacher. “The film demanded actors that were of the place, with an inherent relationship with each other. I wanted to preserve this authenticity. I didn’t think I could derive that kind of performance from a professionally trained child actor. I also enjoy working with first-time performers a lot, the process of finding the character with them excites me as a director.”

Dube likes picking up unconventional topics, zooming in on the most conservative of societies. “I always begin writing a film for an audience of one, primarily for me to understand and investigate things I question as a person. With Bittu, I was trying to honour the individualism that exists in all of us as kids, which is often squished by the world around us. I try to not be didactic with my films. I love where I grew up and how I grew up but I am not afraid to talk about the society I was conditioned in.”

Dube’s movies revolve mostly around women. “I’m interested in creating matriarchal worlds, and often just put them all [the women] in a room and make them have uncomfortable conversations. I think creating a world of women still does not translate into an absence of men or patriarchy. I’m interested in investigating how the patriarchy seeps in us women even when no one is watching,” she says.