12X12 Untitled

A death photographer clicks the last photographs of the dead brought for cremation at Varanasi’s burning banks. He charges differently for different sizes. When I met a real death photographer during a trip to Banaras, I saw an immense cinematic potential. I wanted to know how he frames his subjects, how he adjusts the exposure on his camera, where he focuses and above all how he copes with the fact that he is clicking dummies whom he can never instruct or ask to smile!

I decided to weave the contemporary realities of Varanasi, an ancient town stuck in a time bubble, around this character. I believe old Kashi is migrating into oblivion in order to make way for the new, modern Varanasi. River Ganges is a witness to this migration. The town thrives on death. And death, according to Hindu belief, is a migration to the other form or world. Thus, very organically, migration became the underlying theme of my film. Every single character of the film including the protagonist goes through a migration.

Very early in the writing stage I decided that I have to shoot this film on celluloid. I wanted to document the transitional phase Kashi is going through on film. The protagonist’ father’s death is a major event in the film. I have shot the before of the event on one lens and the after on a different focal length. The color palette is warm in and around the ghats (burning banks) and gets cooler in the vicinity of the protagonist’s house. The pace of the film is languid and its tone meditative. The script, though fiction, was written like a documentary and we followed a documentary approach while filming, especially in exteriors. It wasn’t easy staging scenes at the bustling and melting cremation ghats of Manikarnika. There was ash, fire, smoke, dead bodies, mourning relatives and cattle all around. But I had to shoot at the real cremation grounds since my protagonist works there. The result was the most compelling mise-en-scene. I could feel the raw energy of the place even while watching rushes!

Though the film is inherently realistic the soundscape is very designed. I wanted people to get a feeling of a town crumbling or disintegrating when they hear the film. I wanted them to hear those wings being cut. An intricate sound design coupled with an emotional, almost haunting soundtrack will make the viewer feel the dilemma of my protagonist and experience a strange conundrum I felt while making the film!