The face that launched a thousand inane questions -- Being a woman, Anjali found society was more interested in her personal life than in her profession
I catch up with Anjali Menon in the middle of one of her many journeys.
The young director is rushing out of Chennai after a hard night's work. She has just completed the audio recording of Kerala Cafe, a first-of-its-kind film in Malayalam, which sees Anjali teaming up with nine other directors. Each of them has directed a short film woven around a common theme - Yatra (Journey).
Over a dosa and a ride to the airport, in a conversation that leaps from the personal to the professional and back, we constantly return to the topic.
After all, it has also been the theme of her first full-length feature film as a director, and of much of her life.
It has taken her to cities as varied and wonderful as Dubai, London, Kozhikode and Pune, and led her on the biggest journey of them all - the leap of faith she took when she decided to follow her heart and become a filmmaker.
Anjali first caught the attention of film buffs in Kerala after her debut film, Manjadikuru (Lucky Red Seeds), premiered at the International Film Festival of Kerala late last year.
It instantly won rave reviews and awards.
The press in Kerala, thrilled with what they saw as home-grown talent, toasted her success. Anjali recalls that she seemed to be on many covers, many television interviews.
Not many journalists could figure out how to handle a director who happened to be a woman, though.
The reports focussed on the way she looked, and the interviews bordered on the trivial and the bizarre: "Married?" "Do you have children?" "Are you a feminist?" "If you're not a feminist, what are you?" "What issues do you want to highlight through your films?"...
"Issues? I tried telling them that all I want to do is tell good stories. There's nothing else I'd rather be doing than making films," she says, letting on that she loves the chaos and madness behind the making of every film: "Cajoling actors, changing dialogues, choosing a costume, reading a legal document, signing a cheque, calming fraying tempers, finding the right lens, waiting for the right light, running from the rain, cutting out a scene...."
It wasn't always this way, though.
Who wears the pants around here?: Anjali shooting her award-winning debut feature film, Manjadikuru
While growing up in Dubai, a career as a filmmaker was certainly not on her wish list. Family and friends took it for granted that she would run the family business some day. "We were groomed for that, but I was always attracted to fiction," she recounts.
Anjali had always excelled in academics, and her decision to graduate in commerce added to their expectations. But while number crunching, organisational skills and management theories came easy to her, so did other things. Dancing, for instance. And music, dramatics and creative writing.
After her graduation, she was expected to do that MBA - no one really thought of asking if her dreams were elsewhere. Except for an uncle in Pune, who urged her to listen to the voice within, and encouraged her to explore a new Mass Communication course that had just begun at Pune University.
Her parents thought it was a phase she would grow out of. Until, that is, she passed out and set her sights on the London Film School - even though it meant she returned to Dubai and worked hard to raise enough money to pay her tuition fee.
"With filmmaking, I was able to focus and combine all my varied interests... At the London Film School, you were exposed to every aspect of film making... right from costumes to set designs to scripts and direction," recalls Anjali, who went on to graduate with top honours, and won critical acclaim for a short film she worked on at the end of the course. "It was the story of an Indian in London who lets the women around him make all the key decisions in his life."
Many more award-winning short films, commercials and documentaries later, she started her own venture, Little Films, in Mumbai in 2006.
And then came the project that changed things all over again.
A Little-Films-NFDC-Mirchi Movies collaboration, Manjadikuru was the story of a homecoming. The film, partly set in the late 1970s, showcases 10-year-old Vicky's observations of his disjointed, extended family who meet at his grandparents' home in Kerala to attend a funeral.
Some of the best actors from Kerala - Urvashi, Prithviraj, Murali, Thilakan, Padmapriya and Kaviyoor Ponnamma - were roped in, and Anjali dived into the shoot with passion.
"What is it that makes us want to rise at 4.59 a.m., reach the location at 6 a.m. and work till 10 p.m. only to return the next day where every possible variable would have changed? And yet we aim to find that continuity to everything as the day before and the day before that," she wrote in her blog during the making of her first film. "Surely, there is a streak of masochism in everyone who willingly works on a film set... The phenomenon seems to be alive whether one is a spot boy, a prop master, a boom swinger or a director."
At our meeting, she talks of how just being on the sets transforms her.
"The strange thing is that while you're making the movie, all that matters is what happens within the frame. There could be someone falling sick or crying out loud in the same room... but so long as they're out of the frame, we're good."
Anjali's cinematic influences range from Krystof Kieslowski, Jane Campion, Marion Hansel and Martin Scorcese to Padmarajan and Bharathan, two popular Malayalam filmmakers who stood out in the 1980s and early 1990s with their offbeat approach to story, script, direction and cinematography.
Little wonder, then, that her style of storytelling came in for high praise at the International Film Festival of Kerala.
"Let's hope that Anjali Menon's Lucky Red Seeds points to a larger renewal of Malayalam cinema and is not merely an isolated triumph by a gifted and intelligent first-time filmmaker," wrote Chris Fujiwara of the International Federation of Film Critics.
Manjadikuru went on to win the Hassan Kutty Award for the Best Debut Film and is the only Indian film to have won a FIPRESCI Award since last year.
But most of all, says Anjali, she treasures the reactions of the people who watched it.
"People across the world told me about how the film made them weep, and it made them go back to their childhood. They spoke about how strongly they could connect to it - despite it being set in a different culture," she recalls.
And then, there are those unexpected moments from the shoot.
"I remember how I captured a bat flying against the moon - it was totally accidental, but it turned out to be one of my favourite shots," she says.
But fans of Malayalam cinema who have been waiting to watch what this young director has to offer have reason to rejoice this week. Kerala Cafe has already premiered at the Abu Dhabi International Film Festival, and will hit Indian screens on October 30.
Despite the presence of several top-notch Malayali film directors in the project, there is a buzz around her short film, Happy Journey. "It's a quirky take on male-female power play in our society" is all that Anjali is willing to reveal for now.
First published on sify.com in 2014
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