A slice of Assamese life in Village Rockstars

Rima Das, the one-woman army behind Village Rockstars talks about the making of her critically acclaimed Assamese film

When she turned to filmmaking after an unfulfilling stint in acting, Rima Das decided to put herself in the shoes of the very first people who made movies. The director of Village Rockstars, which is garnering applause in the festival circuit this year, felt it was too late for her to enrol in a film school to learn the ABC of cinema. Armed with lessons learnt in Mumbai after an exposure to world cinema, the professional environment of Prithvi Theatre and trials in the cut-throat world of Bollywood and advertising, she returned to her roots in Assam’s Kamrup district to tell stories with a do-it-yourself approach that is both incongruous and eminently possible today.
 
The striking aspect of Village Rockstars is that it’s a virtually one-woman crew and lacks any professional in the film’s cast, except for a guest role. Bhanita Das, the girl playing the protagonist who dreams of becoming a guitarist and having her band, is a relative of Das. Along with Bhanita, Das went by her instinct as she picked five boys for the other central characters — all belonging to her ancestral village of Kaladia in Chaygaon, about 25 km from Guwahati. “It was a challenge for me because I didn’t have the confidence to do a feature film all alone. So, three to four months went into figuring out whether I could do it,” says Das. Luckily for her, most of the children turned out to be a natural in front of the camera.
 

Das began shooting in mid-2014 and initially drew upon her lessons from workshops she had attended in Mumbai to train her bunch of actors before assigning roles suited to each. “But the training was indoors and for not more than four days. I had absolute freedom in terms of duration, so every scene was like a workshop,” Das says. She finally shot for 150-odd days over three years.
 

In about six months, the children also became her crew members. From helping her with setting up the tripod to hauling a boat amid flooded fields as part of a scene, it turned out to be a fun-filled job with her retinue including tots who weren’t part of the movie but were ready to volunteer. It also helped that Das handed a small camera to the children to let them explore by turns during shooting. “I didn’t go to a film school but maybe they will one day,” she says.
 
A majority of the adults in the village who she approached for the movie were also more than willing to act. A cousin, who is in college, was her assistant throughout. “She doesn’t know anything about films but she is always with me to arrange costumes or locations. She even recorded sound and is now quite good with the camera.”
 
Das grew up on a diet of Bollywood and Doordarshan and did well in both academics and acting. Her father taught in a school, while her mother ran a printing press and book shop. After graduating from Guwahati’s Cotton College, she went to Pune for a postgraduate course in sociology. She shifted to Mumbai in 2002, but remained confused about where she was headed professionally. Short acting assignments, modelling and an association with theatre didn’t reap much reward. So she returned home and began to consider direction seriously.
 
It was clear to her that in Mumbai a director has several assistants, and even to get to the level of the first assistant one has to slog away. “I wanted to create something on my own. I thought to myself the first people who made movies didn’t belong to any school, and thanks to the internet, we can study a lot of things ourselves,” she says. In 2009, she made her first short film, Pratha, also set in the same village.
 
In 2011, she started writing her first feature film, Antardrishti (Man with the Binoculars), and towards the end of 2013 she filmed it in Kaladia in 33 days. For her debut, which had its world premiere last October, she had a small crew including an editor and a cinematographer and a cast with a mix of amateurs from the village and professional actors. With support from her parents, she has produced both her films, but with Village Rockstars she couldn’t afford a crew. Although it meant that she had to learn the basics of cinematography and editing — despite an aversion to machines — Das says she wouldn’t want to trade it for the creative freedom and satisfaction it allowed her.
 
Kulada Bhattacharjee, a veteran in Assamese theatre and cinema who had a minor role in Village Rockstars, is all praise for young directors. “Today’s directors are adopting new styles and do not necessarily follow the conventions we used to. One may not be able to make a movie like this if we worry about audience expectations alone.”
 
Das feels the onus is on filmmakers and all the other stakeholders to make good movies, publicise them and increase the number of theatres so that local cinema thrives in Assam. While the lack of commercial success has frustrated serious filmmakers in the past, Das bears the optimism of a rookie. She refuses to criticise audiences, and at the same time doesn’t buy into the defensive mindset that has at times gripped the Assamese audience so that they root for local films over others, regardless of merit. Having seen how her looks or broken Hindi in the past went against her while chasing roles in Mumbai, and now being in the director’s chair, she has a practical understanding of what a script demands.
 
Meanwhile, she has begun shooting for her third venture, a teenage love story.
 
The village, for now, is set to remain at the heart of her filmic journey. Kaladia is also prefixed with Dogaon (deep village) by locals. The yearly floods do not hit Chaygaon as hard as they do some other places in the state. But among the cluster of villages, Kaladia is at a lower altitude. So the floodwaters collect there a fortnight longer, affecting the farmers more. The villagers ruefully wish the damage was greater because it falls short of being recognised by the state for compensation packages. No wonder Das talks of hope among hardship as a message she sought to convey through Village Rockstars, without slipping into poverty porn.