Consider two scenes, both in 2021 productions. One is in the fifth episode
of Tabbar, a streaming series set in Jalandhar, Punjab. Omkar (Pavan
Malhotra) is getting drunk in a cheap bar, the kind where water is served in a
bathroom mug. After a while, he gets to his feet unsteadily and starts dancing
around the room. The other is from the film Fire In The Mountains.
Dharam, whose wife runs a modest home-stay in Munsiyari, is entertaining some
guests. He too gets drunk and starts dancing to a rap number, as wild as Omkar
is in control.
Both scenes reveal character through dance and demeanour, but the real link
between them is that they are directed by the same person. Ajitpal Singh is at
the tail end of a breakthrough year. Fire In The Mountains, his first
feature, played at the Sundance Film Festival in February. His short film Rammat
Gammat (2018) was added on MUBI in March. And Tabbar released this
month on SonyLIV.
“Actually, I can’t dance, unless I am really drunk,” Singh laughs, when I
ask him about the two sequences. “Both these scenes were unscripted. When I am
on set I am always thinking, what would the character do in this situation? And
usually, something that you don’t think about works better than the obvious
answer.”
Singh wasn’t initially involved with Tabbar, a slow-burn drama about
a family of four forced to make some dangerous but lifesaving choices. But when
producer Ajay Rai consulted him on the script (Harman Wadala is the series
creator), Singh realised he wanted to direct it; he saw his parents in the
couple played by Malhotra and Supriya Pathak. Having lived in Punjab as a child
and visited regularly since, he also knew this kind of small-town neighbourhood
milieu, with everyone involved in everyone else’s business. He got the job and
directed all eight episodes.
The relatively small number of episodes perhaps forces Tabbar’s plot
to move quicker than the story warrants; there are a lot of twists, some quite
gnarly, to get through in a short time. I was more taken by the performances
and the atmosphere of overwhelming gloom Singh creates. There are barely any
bright colours. The greys and browns are blanched, drained. Singh and
cinematographer Arun Kumar referred to the look of Turkish director Nuri Bilge
Ceylan’s Three Monkeys (2008) and approximated the effect of processes
like bleach bypass. “The metallic feel (of silver nitrate) works because it’s a
thriller,” Singh says. “And the high-contrast bleach bypass is because we
wanted to make faces look like landscapes.”
Singh started off making experimental films before he switched to narrative
cinema in 2009. He was invited to the Sundance Screenwriters Lab in 2012—his
mentors included Guillermo Arriaga (Amores Perros, 21 Grams) and Asif
Kapadia (Senna, Amy). The experience was “overwhelming”, he says, and he
ended up putting too much pressure on himself. His first three short films went
nowhere. The fourth, Rammat Gammat, was received well, and set him on
the road to his first feature.
Fire In The Mountains is the story of Chandra (Vinamrata Rai), who’s
trying to make enough money to get her wheelchair-bound son treated and
educated. The contrast between her world view and that of her husband (Chandan
Bisht)—not an evil man but a lazy and superstitious one—was inspired by the
preventable death of Singh’s cousin. He spent five months in Uttarakhand,
living in villages and small towns, understanding the hill culture. “Directors
can’t just do academic research. You have to do visual research. You have to
get into the rhythm of the place.”
You can see this immersion not just in the disturbing depiction of the
jaagar shamanic ritual but in details like the studious daughter using TikTok
as a means to break out from the monotony of her life. Singh assembled a
non-professional cast, drawing striking performances from Rai and Bisht. He
workshopped the script with the actors in reading sessions and was pleased to
see them take ownership of their characters. Rai, for instance, would refuse to
say and do things that she didn’t believe her character would.
Singh’s three releases offer a snapshot of the avenues open to independent
directors in India today: a short film on MUBI, the only platform that
showcases arthouse, indie and documentary cinema; a feature film that travelled
the festival circuit and is awaiting a digital release; and long-form
storytelling in an OTT “original”. He says that since the pandemic, the OTT
space that offered such promise to indie directors a few years ago has diverted
a lot of its resources to big stars and studios. “They are not realising that
the internet audience watches content from Iran, Japan, France, Germany now,”
he says. “They are looking for something that’s beyond the formulaic writing
and film-making of Bollywood.”
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