The Weird Relationship Between Movies and the Mountains

I walk down the Tibetan market that lines Naini Lake—the nucleus of Nainital that incessantly draws in holidaymakers—trying not to succumb to the temptation of picking up woolies that I will possibly never wear in the city I live in: Mumbai. I am late for the movie that is being screened at the only cinema hall in town. The red-and-white structure of the New Capitol Cinema is set quite majestically against the backdrop of the mountains, with the poster of Bollywood movie Sui Dhaaga erected at its apex but with mysterious rectangular holes punctured throughout it.

I shell out ₹170 for a Gold seat (the Platinum ones cost ₹200), a little surprised at what I had assumed would be a cheaper moviegoing experience. It’s all Christmas-y red-and-white inside the theatre as well, with cushy seats and plentiful leg space. After some adverts that see a couple of PSAs and local businesses selling more woolies, the movie starts off. The theatre is sparsely crowded, and I have company in a middle-aged lady to my right and a pair of girls in smart school uniforms in front of me. In the intermission, I get myself some popcorn but I could’ve got waffles (!) too. While going to the movies alone has been no big deal in the metropolis I live in, I must admit about having been anxious about how doing so in a much smaller town would turn out. Well, it was pretty incident-free and normal.

“This cinema used to be an assembly hall to host parties for the British,” the friendly cinema manager tells me after the well-meaning entertainer ends. He points upwards to the part of the stone structure which still spells out its original function.

“It was shut for nine years before opening up in March 2016. We wanted to change its name and make it a double screen but because it’s a heritage structure, we couldn’t.” He is apologetic even as I find myself letting out a sigh of relief. Do you play Garhwali or Kumaoni cinema from the state, I ask him. “Only when there is local pressure to do so,” he replies. “We don’t prefer it because the ‘incoming’ is less.” He can only remember playing Mission Tiger (2016) for a week, a Hindi-language movie penned by TR Bijulal, a Divisional Forest Officer (Nainital). But with the cast and crew not hailing from the region, the film probably doesn’t even qualify as one from the region.

That evening, I head to the sprawling Manu Maharani hotel for a session on ‘Cinema in Uttarakhand’, as part of the Himalayan Echoes literature and arts festival that took place a couple of weekends ago. I catch one of its speakers, Lalit Joshi, after his talk. Joshi, a professor of film history and culture at the University of Allahabad, has been keenly following the developments of Uttarakhand cinema. “You have to remember that this cinema is newly-born, and give it some time to catch up,” he tells me.

New Kid On The Block
The first Garhwali film, Jagwal (translates to ‘The Long Wait’, quite ironically), was made as recently as 1983 while the first Kumaoni-language film, Megha Aaa, hit theatres in 1987. Jagwal was made against several setbacks, from financers backing out to a producer eloping with one of the leading ladies. But when it was released in a Delhi cinema, thousands of diasporic Garhwalis descended to catch the first movie made in their language. Tickets usually priced at ₹5 were sold for a hefty ₹100.

But even though the movie came with the promise of kickstarting cinema that would tell stories from this region, the cinema halls across the mountain state were closing down. According to the Uttaranchal Cinema Federation, more than 48 of the 70 cinema halls of the hill state have shut down over the years after struggling with a long bout of negligence, revenue losses and government apathy. A few, like Capitol, have been revived but the process is a painfully slow one.

Moving Forward
“The good news here is that we are in 2018, and watching a movie inside a cinema hall is just part of the story,” says Joshi. “There are about 35-40 films made in the state each year, but you can catch them on VCDs, DVDs, YouTube and television.” Small and big problems hinder the growth of these films to places and people beyond. Small and easily resolvable ones like not subtitling the film but bigger ones like not having the infrastructure to make good films.

“You now have incentives from the government if you make a film in the state, and process it here itself. But a lot of directors are trained outside Uttarakhand and still have that Bollywood mindset that this is a decentralised region best meant to shoot songs and dances. There is this unfortunate notion of shooting a film here for its scenic locations and not because its stories need to be told. Also, Hindi has been so dominant in the minds of north Indians that they see it as a language of hegemony. The latent ambition of most directors from the state is to be known as Bollywood directors. The rest is mimetic.”

There have been small steps ahead. In June this year, the behemoth that is FTII (Film and Television Institute of India) conducted a short five-day film appreciation course in collaboration with Uttarakhand Film Development Council, in Dehradun. There are plans to start short filmmaking courses in the state, even as the current film industry is taken over by videos shot on cheap digital cameras and distributed in the form of VCDs.

The state is slowly becoming a part of scripts of big-budget movies from other film industries as well. In the recent film Batti Gul, Meter Chalu, which was shot in Tehri, both the leading actors are portrayed as Garhwalis. But will a day soon come when someone hailing from Garhwal will play a Garhwali in a movie that will be watched by people not hailing from the state as well? “I am an optimist,” smiles Joshi. “I think a Ghatak or a Ray is hiding somewhere in the hills, and we will soon see a movie using cultural tropes of the region. As long as there is a human context that binds all of us, a Kumaoni or Garhwali movie can have a viewership that transcends the boundaries, like the mountain air itself.”

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