AMU
A film by
Shonali Bose
Official Selection: Berlin Film Festival 2005
Official Selection: Toronto Film Festival 2005
Official Selection: AFI Film Festival, 2005
Winner: Fipresci Critics Award 2005
Winner: National Award, India, 2005
Filmmaker contact: /US Distributor:
Jonai Productions / Emerging Pictures(323) 655-1276 / (212) 245-6767
Shonali Bose: / Ira Deutchman: .
http://www.amuthefilm.com/
SYNOPSIS
What starts out seeming like a standard “back to the roots” story, becomes a mystery of both personal and political implications in Shonali Bose’s feature debut Amu.
Amu is the journey of Kajori Roy, a 21-year-old Indian American woman who has lived in the US since the age of 3. After graduating from UCLA, Kaju goes to India to visit her relatives. There she meets Kabir, a college student from an upper class family who is disdainful of Kaju’s wide-eyed wonder at discovering the “real India.” Undeterred, Kaju visits the slums, crowded markets and roadside cafes of Delhi. In one slum she is struck by an odd feeling of déjà vu. Soon after she starts having nightmares. Kabir gets drawn into the mystery of why this is happening particularly when he discovers that she is adopted.
Meanwhile Kaju’s adoptive mother – Keya Roy, a single parent and civil rights activist in LA, arrives unannounced in Delhi. She is shocked to discover that Kaju has been visiting the slums. Although Kaju mistakes her mother’s response to a typical Indian over protectiveness – Keya’s fears are deeper rooted.
Slowly Kaju starts piecing together what happened to her birth parents and mother and daughter clash as Kaju discovers she has been lied to her whole life. What was the truth? Why was it suppressed? As Kaju and Kabir undertake this quest they both discover their families’ involvement with a man made tragedy of immense proportions which took place twenty years ago in the capital city of India: the massacre of thousands of people of the Sikh faith. In a searing climax the young people are forced to confront the reality of the past and how it affects the present.
DIRECTOR’S STATEMENT
I was a 19 year-old student in New Delhi, India, when Prime Minister Indira Gandhi was assassinated by her Sikh bodyguards at the end of October 1984. In the days and nights that followed, thousands of people of the Sikh faith were massacred as “retribution” in a carnage organized by those in political power. The city burned. Like many other people, I worked in the relief camps where survivors languished for months. One of my jobs was transcribing postcards from widows to their relatives, writing down their stories of the horrors that had taken place. It was unforgettable.
Three years later, a personal tragedy compelled me to leave India and I came to the US as a graduate student. Halfway through my PhD at Columbia University in Political Science I realized that I wanted to make films about the issues that I was studying. Academia felt too removed. I wanted to engage with people about struggles and histories that they did not know.
UCLA Film School – the crucible that made me into a filmmaker was hectic and traumatic. I gave birth to three films and two children during my MFA and emerged in 1997 knowing more about diaper rash than how to make a feature film! Making shorts in the safe environs of film school is one thing, a full feature in a competitive, hostile, “real” world quite another. In 1999 when my younger son was two and the adult world seemed a tad closer I decided to take the plunge and discover if I was even capable of writing a feature instead of just cherishing this dream my whole life.
Everyone advised me that a first film should be saleable – a horror, a comedy, a love story – definitely not something political! Bollywood, I was told, was “in”. But the story of the riots and relief camps of 1984 insisted on being told. I knew that was the film I had to make. No matter how hard it was going to be, this was the story I had to write, the film I had to make and show, to a world that didn’t know the suppressed history of that genocide. And so Amu was born.
It took me four years to write and rewrite Amu and look for the financing, all the while bringing up my children as a full-time mother. As a writer I felt I had to write about that which was most painful for me in my life, and so Amu also became the story of a mother-daughter relationship and of maternal loss – the same tragedy that had brought me to America many years ago. It was a deeply personal story, which made the countless rejections and closed doors even harder to face. Most Indian producers felt that it would not be possible to shoot such a film, that if it got made no one would want to see such a film, and that if it released at all the theaters would get burned down.
Finally, in early 2003, an independent producer promised me the entire money and so I started casting. Mid-process, he emailed me to say that Amu was too risky for them, and they would now be investing in a Bollywood film instead. In one fell swoop, all of the money was withdrawn. That night at the kids’ bedtime, as we performed our ritual of sharing our “good thing, bad thing of the day,” I told them my “bad thing.” My younger son immediately handed me his tooth fairy money and my older son, the pocket money he had saved for the last 10 weeks. Later that night at the dining table, when I told my husband what had happened, he passed me a letter he had got in the mail that very evening. It was a royalty check from NASA (where he is a scientist) for his invention of the world’s smallest camera. There was no debate about where the money should go! Armed with this princely sum from my family (barely a tenth of what I needed) I acted as if I had the entire amount and decided to go ahead with pre production. Miraculously the rest fell into place while I chose locations and actors during the children’s school vacation.
Making Amu was very painful and hard and exhilarating at the same time. I had to leave my family in LA and go to India. I promised my kids I would be back after shooting over 10 Sundays (and I was). The first day that I walked onto set I was terrified – I was the only person in the whole cast and crew who had never worked on a professional set. The last set I had been on my husband was the production manager picking up free bagels from Western Bagels Too and my classmates and close friends were the grand six person crew!
The process of shooting was difficult enough with the daily technical challenges like working with recalcitrant toddlers and shooting sync sound in noisy marketplaces and train stations amidst crowds of onlookers. But the first real threat came when I had to shoot the riot sequences. I had deliberately kept these scenes for the end, and the entire cast and crew had signed contracts stating that they would not speak to the press or to anyone about the film. Still, within an hour of starting to shoot the riot sequence, some hoodlums showed up on the set with a “message” for me from their boss – a well-known politician who had been involved in organizing the killings in ’84. “A film on the 1984 riots cannot be made. Shut down immediately.”
“Riots? What riots?” I said “This is a love story with some random violence in the background. I’m from America – I have no idea what you’re talking about!” I knew that my diplomacy and pretended naiveté could only buy me a little time. We got the bare minimum and stopped shooting “riots.” Within a week I was back in LA with my negative.
As the producer of Amu – it didn’t end for me with picture lock. In India the Censor Board took three months to clear the film. If I ever had any doubts that a cover-up of history had taken place, they were set to rest when the Censors informed me that I would have to change five crucial lines of dialogue into something “acceptable.” They were all lines that dealt with the complicity of the government and state in the violence. Instead of changing and redubbing the lines I decided to mute the sound instead. In Indian theaters – where the film ran to packed houses - audiences watched the actors playing the Sikh widows silently mouth their indictment of the state. And a whisper, “censor, censor” would go through the theater as audiences realized what had happened. Far more pernicious than these cuts was the Censor Board verdict that the film would have an “A” (NC 17) certificate. I asked them why, as there was no sex and violence in the film. They replied - “Why should young people know a history that is better buried and forgotten?”
Such a history cannot be buried and forgotten. Young people cannot make their future or understand their present without knowing the past. Today, twenty-two years after an elected government massacred its own people in full view of the world, no one has been punished. And as a result, the cycle of violence has continued against other communities. What kind of political system is this in which those in power can get away with such crimes again and again? This is the question Amu leaves the young protagonists with as they walk down a railway track into the future. This is why I made Amu. So that people all over the world will ask the question.
The way the film has been received has been beyond my wildest expectations. I had no idea how unknown this history was until I faced the questions of audiences all over India. Since young people were barred from seeing the film in theaters, I went to schools and colleges and their responses were the most moving and powerful. My biggest fear was how the Sikh community would receive the film. Would they turn around and say that this was too painful – let bygones be bygones, why was I putting salt in the wound? I had met with the survivors in Delhi when I was writing the script and received their blessing. But I had no idea how the community abroad would react. I needn’t have worried. They have shown their support in myriad ways, including raising money for the release of the film. In spite of various offers for a theatrical release we made the decision to self release the film so that we could control the kind of release it was. We knew – from the festival experience – that this was a film, which appealed to wide audiences beyond the South Asian community. We did not want to take the chance of the film being shelved or postponed or given short shrift because a distributor found something else more “appealing” as can be the case with independent film makers. So we partnered with our producers rep – Emerging Pictures to release the film and started the cycle of fundraising again. In Toronto I participated in radiothons where Sikh taxi drivers called in pledges of $50 and a $100 each. As a result of this grassroots support, Amu will release in 10 cities across Canada and 10 cities across the US in January 2007.
I started this journey not knowing if I could make a film. I have come through this fire with a passion to tell more stories. The film I am working on now is called Chittagong: Strike One (the first of a trilogy which starts in 1930 and ends in the present). It is the true story of a school master in Bengal who organized 68 teenagers to stand up to the mighty British Empire in 1932. Inspired by the Irish Easter Rebellion, their motto was to “do and die.” They felt that if, as in Dublin, they could liberate one town in Bengal, they could set an example for the whole of India to rise up and overthrow their colonial rulers. After defeating the British army in a pitched battle, the group went underground, though many would go on to be caught and imprisoned. They carried on their resistance, however, because of the participation of two sixteen-year-old girls. Chittagong: Strike One is the dramatic enactment of this powerful and successful resistance – which finds no mention beyond one sentence in Indian history books, as it was reviled as “revolutionary terrorism.”
The youngest participant in the uprising was fourteen years old at the time. I interviewed him on camera in August of this year when I was visiting India, and promised him that this story would be told to inspire the youth of today. He gave me his blessings. At the age of 92 he smiled toothlessly into the camera and with glistening eyes reminisced about how he had felt during the Battle of Jalalabad, as he confronted death. “As I faced the British bullets my mother’s face swam before my eyes – would I see her again?” he said. Two weeks after the interview, he died. He was the last survivor of Chittagong and should have been a national hero, but the mainstream news didn’t even report his death. But Chittagong will ensure that Jhunku Roy’s story and the stories of Masterda, of the young women and the teenagers of the struggle, don’t die with him. My promise to him has made this film a commitment beyond me. Like Amu I am compelled to make it. And I will.
Shonali Bose
DELHI 1984 ….
Few people in India – let alone in the world – know that over twenty years ago, right in the heart of Delhi, the capital city of India, more than five thousand people of the Sikh faith were murdered in a deadly carnage. Tens of thousands were injured, and many more families were torn apart or dislocated.