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AMOL GUPTE THE CHILD SPEAKS …. AT BAISCOPE EVENT

“BAISCOPE ENTERTAINMENT Presents In Association with PVR CINEMAS

Children in Cinema – Innocence & its Essence

A workshop with Amol Gupte & Deepa Bhatia
( Creative Director, Taare Zameen Per & Editor, Taare Zameen Per )

And NO…… This is NOT about the TZP controversies !!

An afternoon exploring the art and the process of working with children.

* The Orchestral Beauty of emotion
* Fake & Real Innocence – Its cinematic interpretation
* Guarding the Child

The workshop will also include an interactive session with Amol, Deepa and the audience (the film fraternity & the children accompanying them) .
It will be an organic process in working with children”

That was the event which immideately drew to our attention (mine and Phonix) and we landed up on the D day with our eyes and ears open and pen paper ready …. all set to listen to the man behind the much talked about film of recent times - Taare Zameen Par …

We rushed in late and found to our pleasant surprise Amol Gupte was standing out side almost as casually as a child .. wearing loose T shirt half trousers and chappals with surprising ease and an air of affability. Amole was with Rajan Khosa (who’s Dance of the Wind was being talked about the night before …at a pfc get together )

I was nervous as usual but Phonix got talking to him (he had done a brilliant interview-post of sorts for PFC with Amole Gupte ..in case you haven’t read it yet .. do read it )

Amole Gupte was talking about his next film (which is DELIBERATLY NOT BASED ON CHILDREN MIND YOU !!!) called ‘UnderBelly’ - which is a “comic caper post card” film about food (Food is another passion in Amole’s life besides films and of course children) tentatively starring Ritesh Deshmukh, Boman Irani, Bipasaha basu.

He was getting lot of offers to do children’s films but both he and Deepa (his wife, co researcher and Editor of Taare… Deepa Bhatia) decided deliberately not to ‘cash in’ on the lets-make-another-sensitive-children’s-film-for-the-sake-of-it. Lot of producers have come up with proposing with the trend but both decided to not make any children’s for the time being.

Amole and Deepa have invested a major portion of their lives with children. The Biascope workshop was a treat for us. Here’s to Amol -

“It’s silly to take educated audience through cinema essence on innocence wrt children. It’s easy to connecvt to children but the fact is even we adults are innocent. Any member of mankind can hold to his/her innocence and not just children.
Children are defranchised from decesion making for themselves. We adults demand the right to speak and freedom etc.. but that right is not given to children.”

After that, Amole showed a clip from a Majid Majidi film called The Colour of Paradise

The scene where a teacher offers cookies to kids in the school … there were blind kids among them. And then when the summer vacation break is announced, and the kids are waiting for their parents to come and pick them up. All the kids’ parents turn up and take the much delighted kids away, but the protaginist (a blind kid - Mohammad) waits for his father to come but to no avail. He goes to and hears a young sparrow offspring which has fallen from the nest in tree and protects its from the local purrinng cat. Mohammed then climds the tree and then safely deposits the offspring onto the nest.

After this scene, Amole asked for audience’ responses. An elderly gentleman remarked that may be the child isnt as innocent and can make out that his father hadnt come to recieve him because he (ie. Mohammed the kid) is blind.

At this point the elderly gentleman’s grand daughter was asked about the scene by Amole and she too said the same.

Amole then talked about his love for Majidi’s films. “Majidi comes from a philosophy of love for children and added to that, he is a beautiful cine poet. I’ve seen Colour of Paradise 20-25 times and my intention to show you this clip was to just gauge the knee jerk reaction. In COP the innocence of the director is amazing and so raw. Majidi is a sage like with a balance between stylistic expression and pure raw pearls of aesthetic moments. The innocence of the director is the cherry on the cake.”

And then Amole showed the scene from COP where Mohammed is taken to the a wood workshop and then the kid cries there in front of the worker… telling him how bad he feels because his family doesnt love (due to his blindness).

That very scene made me heavy eyed too …. I was watching COP (and an iranian film for the first time) and Im pretty sure the normally outspoken Phonix who mustve seen this film few times before, was rendered speechless as well.

After that clip, Amole immideatly started looking for audience’ reactions.

The same grand daughter then remarked ” I wouldnt want to see this film. I feel bad and sad.”
Someobody said ” I wouldnt want to take my daughter to see this film, its a rude shock for them”

Amole smiled and then said that we always try to ‘insulate’ our children. “The fact is my 5 yr old kid loves this film. COP is his favorite film. Children at young age when they see this film, they love it. But they may not like films like COP when they grow up and get used to Harry Porter films.

Truth is Majidi is a master of Observation and Absorption.”

Then Deepa started talking about TZP.
“Everyday someone or the other calls … ‘this happened .. my kid .. or my friends kid .. or my cousin’s daughter saw TZP and felt so touched’.There’s an Ishaan in everyone’s life. If you are truthful to what you are saying then everyone will connect to it. We need to take it to each and every person and for that person a starr is needed. We’ve got so many blessings and so much goodwill after TZP.”

Amole then remarked, “please don’t think we are equating us with Majidi or the masters of Cinema. Pls don’t connect these two… We just wanted you all to connect with the innocent in Majidi’s films and thats why we showed clips of COP.”

“There are a group friends who have been working for the past 31 yrs holding Olympics for the hearing impaired. 400m and 100m races and relays etc. They’ve been conducting this in the University Grounds in mumbai and the only schools that participate are schools for hearing impaired. There is no spectator except the participants themselves. The event is not at all reported by the Media despite the fact that the fastest clock time reported for some of these races is only 1-2 seconds more than the World Record for hearing impaired Olmypics. There is zero buzz about this event, zero awareness. They only have the deaf mute for the company.How can you then expect people to come forward and see children’s films without a star ?? ”

On the danger of ending up making a melodramatic film, Amole said
“We’ve had a history of that in Indian Cinema. For eg the marathi film Sant Tukaram
and Tapasya. Tapasya ran for 75 weeks.

We tried to to avoid emotional exploitation in TZP as far as possible. The intent and content were constantly sieved. The ‘Ma’ song is probably the highest point of melodrama.”

At this Deepa added
“I had read an autobiography of Akira Kurosawa called Somewhat an Autobiography

High Jump wasnt about winning the contest but it was about acceptance. If a child who according to you hasn’t any points of excellence then I’m (i.e the filmaker is) at fault. If Ishaan isnt DaVinci/Eienstein then so what ??? This is just the warped mainstream need for winners that we wanted to address.”

Amole elaborated “We wanted to look at children who’ve won. The more we worked on research we realised its not good enough to work on story but to also actually research with kids. Academic work is a fraction. Experience is what we fed into the film. We wanted to preserve the originality, purity and honesty of the experience of interacting with children that we had, and work around with that, incorporating all of it in the film.”

On the entire title track when Aamir offers tea and biscuit to the child labourer, and the visuals of the challenged children dancing etc at the Annual Day of Tulip School -
“Those images are of my children. For use, these are for whom we made the film. We could not shut them out. I tried to make it work with all the permutations and combinations. It took 2 months to edit that scene to balance it..”

Alternate Ending
“There was a need for acceptence. Acceptence doesn’t mean “pat on the back” or “Awards” or a “peck on the cheek”. A boy of 9 made the flip book after seperation. Be it Syd Field or William Goldman, the paradigm is the seperation and reunioun. There was no need for a competition but then others might have said - ‘they’ve made an intellectual film’.”

After that came a break. We were generally discussing and listening to reactions (most where praising and gushing) some of the audience members gave to Amole Gupte.

THE HIGH POINT OF THE BREAK WAS, AMOLE GUPTE ASKING ME FOR A CIGGERETTE, AND ME OFFERING HIM ONE !!! WOW.. what a kick for me !!!

Post Break session was when Amole shared with us some of the videos of his interactions with his children at the workshops he used to conduct with them. Some of the games and excercises he used to with the children were completly out of the box.

For Eg: He wore a T Shirt with a Revolver pointing out imprinted on it and asked all the children what all they could see in the T shirt. Some could see a Ganesha while saw a table lamp, a Tree, a Joker etc. Eventually, Amole said “What you see is what you believe“.

In another instance, there was an excercise, where all the children (and Amole himself) were to talk for 15 mins in only gibberish … meaningless senseless talk.

Then there were painting excercises and mime excercises.

After that there were discussions on why some of the prestigous schools deny admission to ’special children’ despite the fact that the indian constituion gurantees a holistic education for every child. And how 15 of such children have been integrated into the mainstream education system after repeated efforts.

I couldnt write it all because here the session was thrown open.

After the session ended, it was a pleasure to meet them again and talk about cinema. Amole regarded Manirathnam’s ‘Peck on the Cheek’ has one of the best films on children in india. [ How can manirathnam's name not feature when you're talking about Cinema and children !!! That too when I'm a part of the conversation :-) ]

Also, Amole raved about Santosh Sivan’s Halo and Malli (again both brilliant films on children)

Amole also felt Masoom was one of the best hindi films dealing with children. In fact it was even better than Man Woman Child

The discussion went on and on, touching bengali cinema, tamil films, hindi films and was mesmerising. Both Amole and Deepa are so grounded that you feel completly at ease talking to them.

Thanks Amole Gupte and Deepa bhatia
And a special thanks to Biascope.

(Sorry for the delay in posting, had been caught up with office work and life in general. In case you are excited about the next Biascope event, do watch out the Buzz section)