'Gandhi & Ahimsa Cannot Become Outdated': Manish Saini

YOU can speak platitudes about Gandhi and slip up at the slightest excuse or, like the sweetmeat seller Bharat Bhai (an excellent Darshan Jariwala) of Gandhi & Co, nudge a little boy Mintoo (Reyaan Shah) to adopt the small things that make Gandhi big, and give him enough incentive to work towards that thought process. The 2021 Gujarati film by Manish Saini features young children playing gully cricket with rickety old men (even as an elderly lady plays third umpire), and speaks about the choices children make. And, how an affectionate elder can help them do the right thing. All this without being preachy.

This is the film for which Saini, who hails from Ateli Mandi in Haryana and now lives in Ahmedabad, Gujarat, has won a second National Award, this time for Best Children’s Film. His debut Dhh bagged the award for Best Gujarati Film in 2017. There’s one thing that links the films — both are set in the world of children, and possess a certain innocence that is endearing.

What drew someone from Haryana to Gujarat? The National Institution of Design, Ahmedabad, where Saini, 39, studied film and video communication. In the 16-odd years he has lived in Gujarat, Saini absorbed various aspects of life unique to the state. All of these are reflected in his movies. “For instance, I look at how people behave, how they eat. When you know these things, your film will come across as nuanced. And, it will appear as authentic as something made by someone born and brought up in Gujarat.”

In fact, when Dhh released, everyone wondered how someone who was not from Gujarat made a film that was so authentic. “It was just because I observed life here closely. And, some emotions are universal.”

Saini says he is naturally drawn to children and stories featuring children, because their world view is very interesting and uncorrupted. “It helps that my childhood was very interesting. I had so many beautiful experiences that I never saw reflected in cinema. My only exposure was to Hindi films. I never knew English or Iranian cinema. It was in Ahmedabad that I saw Majid Majidi’s Children of Heaven. It shook me. I realised that there are so many stories one could tell, and I decided to tell them. We have movies based on love, romance, crime and horror, but children are not an established genre.”

When Saini decided to make the film in Gujarati, one thought drove him: that he should make movies at a budget where they recover their cost. “And, it was possible to make these films because I thought that way. If I’d thought big and looked at a bigger budget, I’d be making compromises so that we can recover the money,” he adds.

Saini believes that if you find a story drawn from real life, you can go ahead and make your film, without worrying too much about the budget. “There are so many stories in the country’s primary schools, you just have to find the story that works for you.”

Saini speaks Haryanvi, Rajasthani (his father has Rajasthani roots), Punjabi, Marathi and Gujarati. “I think I have a problem with fluent English, though,” he insists. Despite this, to get the dialect and cadence of the language right, Saini writes in Hindi and gets his friends to translate it into Gujarati. Because they intimately know the language, they write with a felicity that makes it understood easily by others too. “This is also why a distinctly Marathi audience at a film festival loved Dhh.”

Saini also understands the power of subtitles, when a film has emotions that are universal. Gandhi & Co has subs in seven languages, including Spanish, French and German.

Working with children comes with its own set of challenges — they can be too child-like or precocious; the latter can especially be grating.

Saini says he has always taken care to ensure the children don’t mimic adults. “For years, we have been shown a child crying with hands in front of their eyes. Which child cries like that? It is very important to represent their innocence on screen. There’s a thin line between realism and fakeness. We should understand that the library of expressions of children is very limited. And they are sometimes keenly conscious of the camera. So, I open them up before shoot with a workshop so that they don’t remember the camera. I try to create a situation where they behave like their character. Reyaan was very sad when he had to cut his hair for the film. I tried to use that sadness and anger during the shoot. He reacted, never acted. Hence, there was no false note. I get really close to the children during the shoot, and they take liberties with me. Sometimes, their parents apologise to me, saying their children usually never speak this way. I tell them they are just sticking to their character. However, before they go back home after the shoot, I ensure they snap out of the character. They go through a reset,” he smiles.

The director also uses some tricks to get kids to behave realistically on screen. There was one scene where Reyaan just could not cry, despite prepping for it. He kept smiling. “I got him to play a game of ‘Who will blink first’. Two minutes into the game, he said his eyes felt wet too, and said, ‘Can we shoot?’”

Sometimes, just sometimes, Saini the director might be unable to get certain expressions from the kids. He then falls back on his avatar as editor. “The editor plays a very important role. Sometimes I don’t tell the actors what we are shooting. I build up the tautness or the drama using casual footage shot during the shoot. Because I edit too, I know exactly what I have to create a moment, nudge the narrative, and make it more real.”

Saini also worked on another Gujarati film Shubh Yatra, a remake of the Tamil original Aandavan Kattalai (directed by M Manikandan). “I never dreamt I would work on a serious subject such as this. But, this film was meant to be re-made in Gujarat, because we have a similar issue with illegal immigration. Manikandan’s was a fine piece of writing and I felt we should tell this story,” says Saini, who is next working on a satire and a silent drama.

After that, a movie in Haryanvi? Saini laughs. “I’ve thought about it. But, will it connect with the target audience is the big question. Also, it has to recover enough so I can make my next film.”

Finally, we veer back to Gandhi & Co, scheduled for a theatrical release on October 27. What gave Saini the confidence that Gandhi will still evoke curiosity and joy in the audience, at a time when he is not spoken of kindly? “Because Gandhi cannot be outdated. Ahimsa cannot be outdated. The elderly man in the movie believes Gandhi is a superhero, who won without fighting. He was a superhero.”