Oscar-nominated documentary filmmaker Lucy Walker began a Saturday panel discussion on stories that travel by describing her own wanderlust backstory.
“As a girl growing up in London, I didn’t have enough money to travel. And I didn’t think being on vacation was the most interesting way to see the world. And yet I really wanted to travel and work and understand people, so I’ve designed myself a job making documentary films where I get to travel the world,” said Walker, who arrived at the International Film Festival of India in Goa having earlier this week won another award, in New York, for her Nepal-set tale “Mountain Queen: The Summits of Lakhpa Sherpa.”
“When I make a film, I always have a question, one that I’ll drop everything to find out about: what’s going to happen? Will they be able to climb the mountain? Will they be okay?,” Walker continued.
She was speaking on a panel alongside writer and commissioner Farrukh Dhondy, producer Anna Saura, actor Tannishtha Chatterjee, actor and activist Vani Tripathi Tikoo and veteran producer Bobby Bedi.
After suggesting that most filmmakers in India do not think outside of national borders, Bedi sought to break down the components of frontier-crossing narratives into content and structure.
“Some stories will always have an international audience, those of displacement, romance, close family relations – we all understand these, [and which are epitomized by] Mira Nair’s ‘Monsoon Wedding.’ Then there is the form,” Bedi suggested.
He tried to provoke a reaction by describing “Avatar” as “a small tribal story” that gets told on a multi-million-dollar scale.
Walker was the only speaker who joined Bedi in exploring the issue of scale. “Often people approach me and say, this is very important topic. Please make a film about it. I have made that mistake a couple of times. But I’ve really learned that if I take a big topic and try to turn it into a film that people want to watch, it is a really uphill battle,” said Walker. “That’s because stories are inherently our narrative. We care about people, following them, and can get involved. It’s so much easier to care about one person than a whole lot of people.”
Tikoo also tried to define the meaning of storytelling. “Stories are actually these things which have no boundaries. They reach out to each other for love, emotion, grief, sadness [..] They can be in any language, they can be in any country, but it will be the language of that universality which speaks to each other, whether the form is theatre or cinema or pure writing. It can be sheer gold,” she said.
Dhondy brought the loftiest analysis of the problem, variously citing Indian mythology, Greek mythology, veteran Indian actor and filmmaker Raj Kapoor and the iconic Satyajit Ray.
“Kapoor’s films were about how the peasantry, the urban poor, fought for existence, fought for advancement. The villains were always the men in suits. His films won prizes not in St Petersburg or Moscow, but in the poorer places where they could identify with the peasantry of the Soviet Union,” he said.
Dhondy was also the most bitingly political of the panellists. “Sanskrit says that all humanity is one family. But I’d rather not belong to the same family as Trump or Netanyahu,” he said at one point.
Chatterjee explained the difference between story-telling in India and overseas. “India is very television friendly. Theatrical cinema is loud and celebratory. It is very obvious. In the west emotions are more subtle,” she said. “But the more they can be local and specific and [combine] a universal theme, the more they can travel.”
Dhondy summed up the local versus universal dichotomy that several of the speakers touched on and drew gasps and laughs with his sting in the tail.
“That universal theme is perhaps best illustrated not by a film, but a song, a song genre called reggae. Bob Marley’s songs are extremely specific to Trench Town [Jamaica]. But when Marley says, ‘No Woman, No Cry,’ everybody in the world understands what he’s talking about. When he says, ‘Get up, stand up. Stand up for your rights,’ even somebody like Elon Musk thinks he’s standing up for his rights, fighting the unions because I need to be a billionaire.”
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