If you have seen Chhello Show or The Last Film Show or have just watched the trailer, you will appreciate the amalgamation of colour and light. The kids running in the green fields, basking in the yellow sunlight; the tints of blue, white and red at the railway station where nine-year-old protagonist Samay sells tea; the dance of multi-colour grainy images on a bedsheet used by the cinephile squad to make their personal theatre. These are some of the crowning strokes in Pan Nalin's magic of hues, Chhello Show.
“Maybe that’s why I wear black every day. I love so many colours that I can’t choose one,” he says.
The film is India’s official entry to The Academy Awards in the International Feature Film category. Before the news broke, some groups on social media were either rooting for the spectacle RRR or the polarising The Kashmir Files. On the other hand, Chhello Show was a surprise pick for the masses but not for the 17 jury members of the Film Federation of India (FFI), who unanimously chose the film. Its US distributor Samuel Goldwyn Films, and French counterpart Orange Studio also stated that it is a “strong contender” at the Academy. Even Ashutosh Gowariker, the director of Lagaan (2001), one of the three Indian films nominated for the awards, asked Nalin and producer Dheer Momaya to get their suits stitched for the Oscar night when he saw Chhello Show. However, Nalin was not convinced. “I was happier to find a distributor. Samuel Goldwyn was picking an Indian film for the first time, that meant something. We surely were thrilled when the news broke but my focus was always to show the film to more and more people.”
Chhello Show was mired with controversy when it got selected. There were allegations that the film contended last year too and that no film can be in the run twice. It was also labelled as a foreign film because it has a French co-production. “I am an Academy member, the last thing I will do is not follow the guidelines,” says Nalin. “The Academy has gone through a lot of changes in the last two-three years because of the pandemic and the war in Ukraine. They released a circular recently stating that any film which could not be released in 2021 and which is released before November 30, 2022, is eligible to apply. We released the film on October 14, that is our qualification. Secondly, whoever is saying that my film is not Indian should go on the internet and see that my cast and crew are all from different parts of the country.”
Gujarat’s Saurashtra is well-illuminated in Chhello Show. The story of Samay, his discovery of cinema, and his fascination with light are all shared by Nalin. “Not only it is inspired by events in my childhood, but I also ended up shooting in the theatre I used to frequent as a child. Even the galla (money box) shown in the film is my father’s from when we used to sell tea. He saved it and said that it is a reminder of what we were and how far we have come.”
Although Nalin’s film, full of homages to masterpieces like Pather Panchali (1955) and 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), expresses his love for the medium, his first movie-watching experience was both mesmerising and frightening. “Like Samay, my first film was also Jai Mahakali (1951). When I saw it in the theatre and there was a crash zoom on Kaali’s face, I got scared and jumped from my chair. It was a Lumiere brothers’ The Arrival of a Train moment for me,” he recalls. “But when I saw the dust particles being illuminated by the beam coming from the projector room, I was hypnotised.”
The director discovered “English” films only after he went to Baroda and later to Ahmedabad for further studies. “Till then I had only watched Hindi popular cinema or masala films. When I first saw a Western, I was like where are the song and dance sequences? When I went to the National Institute of Design in Ahmedabad I started managing the film club there. I also got a camera and was shooting short films. To fund that, I started working as a wedding photographer. My life was like this: after shooting a proper gujju wedding video, I used to come back and watch a Robert Bresson film in the evening and the next day I went to watch an Amitabh Bacchan film with friends. It was all cinema to me, without barriers,” he says.
But has he ever thought of making a big-budget masala film? “I need to fall in love with the story. I don’t want to do something formulaic. After the pandemic, it is important for filmmakers like me to do a film with a star, a studio or a streamer. But not at the cost of my S, for story.”