Tarsem Singh, ‘Dear Jassi’, and Lillah Halla, ‘Power Alley’

0:12Hello and welcome to the special episode of the Monaco Weekly. I'm Fernando Gusto Pacheco and for today's show I speak with the directors of two excellent films that were part of the London Film Festival this year. The first one is by Indian director Tarzan Singh with Dear Jesse. A Romeo and Juliet-like story where a well-to-do Canadian Punjabi girl falls in love with a rickshaw driver. Let's hear from Tarzan.

0:44Welcome to Monocle Radio. Let's talk about your film, Dear Jesse. And I have to say, I didn't actually know much about the original story that inspired the film. It's interesting, you take us to this beautiful, innocent love, and suddenly we are devastated. But before we talk about this, tell us about your experience with this particular story. And since when you said, you know what, I want to make a film out of this. It was, I think, about 23 years ago when the event actually happened that I heard about this conversation that was had between a mother and the people that she and her brother had hired to kill her, I would say, son-in-law and her daughter because she didn't approve the marriage.

1:25And on the telephone, the people that were trying to negotiate something and she said certain things. When I heard about that conversation, I said, of course, you take it with a grain of salt, thinking the other people were not convicted. Did that conversation really happen? But it just felt so true to me that I just thought, okay, if you made a film about what would be a place where these people thought that it was normal to have a conversation like that, that they thought it was okay. And then I called my brother and I just said, like, either we make this movie right now, we wait for two decades.

1:57And then I made The Fall and then I went and did some Hollywood films. And some people from India asked if I was interested in doing any commercial cinema there. I said, actually, I do. I said, pa, again, I have this monkey on my back that I need to get off. And it's this particular story. And I'm obsessed with this conversation that the mother had. And I want to know where that was normal. Because the events happened pretty close to the area in Punjab where I was born. And half of it in Canada, where it just had gone through Canada. There were a lot of nieces and nephews there. So I just thought, how does this become normal?

2:25So to answer your question, you just said that it looks quite lovely. Is that they fell in love. They were just without a different economic status and all that. and then the ending result was so harsh. So I had the idea all that time, kept it in the back pocket and then suddenly Gulsion Grover and a friend from India introduced me to Wakao films and they said, you know, if you'll do anything commercial that you want to do and I just said, before we go there, there's this story. They said, we're in. And then suddenly, after 23 years, it just got done within a few months. We just went at it and made the movie.

2:56And of course, now knowing more about the real history, now I can see why there's some comparisons with Romeo and Juliet. Of course, different, but similar, right? It's true. The funny thing is it is only much later that a friend of mine pointed out how similar it was to Romeo and Juliet. And, you know, the bar that we have in the front and the back during the intro and the outro was referring to Hiranja or Soni Maywal, which, you know, the Sufis are such a great group that when they kind of believe that any song that they sing, when it's about lovers, it's equivalent to the closest you'd ever get to God.

3:30That's why the hardcore fundamentalist on either side never liked them because they believe God is not in a temple, not in a mosque, but he's basically when lovers love, that's where he is. So it was coming from there that I just thought that he was referring to Hiranja, and I'd left it there, and then a friend of mine pointed out how close it was to Romeo and Juliet. So then in the subtitling, I changed it to say, like, instead of Hiranja, to say Romeo and Juliet, so the Western audiences kind of understand that, okay, we understand that particular play, but everything that you think is made up in this film, I can guarantee you that it was a real event.

4:03So my friend said that they were from this thing, where they used to meet, they had a chair window that was next to a cornfield, used to come and hide and talk to her through that. Then he said, what about the drugging of the family? And I said, they couldn't get together. He literally used cow tranquilizers kind of stuff to give to the family so that he could get into the house. So all that was real. And when he pointed that out, then I kind of realized how much of similarities there were between that tale. And I can guarantee you that Mitu, the farmer boy in India, would have never heard of Rumi and Julia.

4:32He would have heard of Hiranja and everything, which is the local one of that place. And Tarzan, it's interesting. I have a long career with films like The Cell, which was a massive hit. Really, really enjoyed. A lot of video clips as well. But that's your first film in India, right? That is the first film I've done in India. And the films that I've usually done before, I'm kind of known for... That's why the critics always go after me. They're known for eye candy. because I grew up all my life. I was in a boarding school in the Himalayas, but wherever I went to school, when the school was snowed in, we used to go to Iran, and I saw all my cinema and every film that I ever saw was always watching in a language that didn't understand.

5:07It was never dubbed. It was never subtitled. So I always loved visual storytelling. So all the other stories that I've done tend to be a lot more fantastical for lack of a better word. But this story, I had decided needed to be told in a much more plainer sense because I was so familiar with what the cow dung in both the places smelled like. I just said, like, no, it needs to be, let the people be in front of the camera and record. At the same time, my DNA tends to make things a lot more composed than most people like, so I didn't want it to be like it was shot through a grandmother's telephone.

5:39So it ended up having the style that it does. It does look beautiful. I mean, I have to say, I want to talk about the cast as well because I was there at your Q &A. I had no idea the main actor who plays in Me Too. I think his name's Yergan Sood. he only spoke Punjabi he didn't speak English and that was his first role, that's impressive true because I just didn't believe that dialect is so complex, Punjabi is not a dialect, but even in Punjabi itself when you kind of see people who speak from the village and people who speak from the city there's such a big difference that I didn't want there to be particularly acting so everybody who came in for the casting, I just realized they were getting it all wrong because they're all city boys who think I can do this I can do that.

6:22And I just said, no, no, okay, then forget the actors. And I just said, go to the local sports where they play Kabaddi, this very villagey tag game. And they found this guy. So I had one look at him and I just said, he's the guy. Just don't give him the script, whatever we can do right now, take him away from actors. I'm just going to create the situation kind of like what I did in the fall with a little girl that didn't speak English. And I just said, we shoot the movie in sequence. The first time he meets that person, the first time he meets us, So we shot this romance in sequence. And then I started looking for the girl.

6:51And one girl that I had before in Canada, kind of for different reasons, they had to drop out because the mother and all couldn't get holidays at the same time. And then I started looking very desperately because we had 24 hours to find a girl. And then I took all sorts of Bhangra dance groups and everything in Canada. And everybody said, I'll call you back in this much. I said, no, no, I need it within the next 10 hours. Whoever would give me a number, then I found a Bhangra group who knew somebody who knew somebody. The 15th call turned out to be, yes, I kind of met a girl once who came in dance who was interested in acting.

7:19But I think she moved to L.A. She's studying law. So I got that girl's photo and I called her and I was cycling to my son in Montreal. And I talked to her on the headphone and I saw her photo and I just said, talk to me. And when she spoke, I just said, OK, I'll work everything out. But if you're going to basically get on a plane, we're going to make this movie in India. Then I found out she had done a music video and she had done a small role in some Disney something, some sort of a TV show. But she also was completely inexperienced. But she spoke English and a little bit of Punjabi, which is what the real characters were like.

7:49And he only spoke Punjabi. It's funny you mentioned Disney because I did love that in the film, the contrast of the beautiful innocent love. Because, you know, the beginning is very gentle, like you start getting to know them. It's quite different from some of the films I've seen recently. It was a beautiful love story. And I think I love that contrast. It's like, I mean, it's not your fault that you wanted to shock, but it did shock. I didn't intend to shock. In fact, I did everything that I could by telling people what the movie is about, by switching one scene from the beginning, putting it in the end, the narrator talking about and tell you this thing in the beginning.

8:22But it is true that it is quite jarring. I tried to take a lot more of the shock out by using some of the audio from the end. Then I just thought, like, you didn't have enough time to fall in love with these people because this was a girl in a joint family where you live with nine other girls, five other cousins. They've always very conservative, one household with 29 bedrooms on top. The farmers in Canada, probably a lot more conservative than the Indians in India, which tends to be a very immigrant kind of problem that you get away from a place that you think you have a lot of problems in. When you go away, you do nothing but glorify that place and just hold on to cultural identities as straws.

8:57And then the place back home has moved on. They're a lot more liberal. And you are this capsule of an information that just basically feels like, oh, no, no, this is how it's done. I'm going to happen to the Irish. You know, you just want to get away from the potato famine. And then suddenly you're in Boston and you're supporting a group that you know very little about in Boston. So the Punjabis are doing very similar stuff. You go to Canada and they live in this particular capsule. And it's so much more traditional than the absolute illiterate people of India that when you go back there. So I was trying to address that.

9:27That's a really interesting take on some migrant communities. It's true because they remember the country they left. Much more romantically. All they want to do is get away from there and then forever sing songs about how great the oak tree was under which they used to do nothing. So it's basically that kind of stuff. And I saw a lot of my aunts when I would go to Canada that they would be these women that have been there for 30 years. They wouldn't speak a lick of English. The next generation then suddenly born and brought up there, no matter how conservative you keep them, are going through ether, get this information on what can be normal in the new place.

9:59and that little clash that happens. That's why I think the film is not particularly a religious problem. It's particularly a cultural problem and it's a toxic environment that you create when you go to a new place and you know you're going to spend the rest of your time there. But, you know, like you're just going to say, no, we are not going to adapt to this new place. So it was that question that I was addressing more than saying it's a religious problem because the Muslims do it, Sikhs do it, Hindus do it. They have this horrible word for it that I hope somebody in the next year can change because I'm going out to journalists telling it all the time, when they use the word, you know, honor killing.

10:31I mean, the West has always been great at using nomenclature to mean different things. Like, you know, if a bomb falls into school, instead of saying children are dead, you just call it collateral damage kind of stuff. And I'm really trying to encourage Indian journalists and I'll say, please, when somebody kills their child because they're married out of the system, stop using the word like honor killing to tell from the other side. There is really no reason to. So I'm hoping in a year somebody comes up with a better name to just call it much more like of a murderous name than to call it something like that.

11:03I agree with you. And I have a question about the film. What do you think is the role of, say, narrator, but also musician at the end? I mean, it's a beautiful scene. I don't want to give any spoilers here, but what do you think that is? Is it to bring a little bit of some of the folklore or how do you perceive that? That was kind of brought in because the story, when the event happened, as horrendous as it is, and much more horrible stuff happened to the guy. And I just couldn't get that story in. So when I looked at it, it's two hours and about like, you know, 10 minutes. And I just looked at that and I just thought, how do I abbreviate it?

11:37So then I came up, I'd seen this mystic Sufi one time perform and he kind of would put this thing on his head and he just like covered his eyes and went into this zone while singing. And I just thought, okay, I'll get a person like that. And when I got him to tell me the introduction to them, I didn't have to deal with the childhood. You don't have to show how Juliet grew up and she had this hard time and then Romeo grew up here. And that's where the script was full of. So I took out about 20 pages of that. It's quite a harsh end. And no matter how much you prepare people for it, it needed this, I think I never used the word, decompression time.

12:08And you needed that for this guy to come in and just say, hey, if you really are interested in what happened, like you can read about this on the Internet because it's a true tale. So I could have made a happy ending. I could have anything. But, you know, I didn't want to. This is how the story ended. So I left it there. So the Mystic Wars, the intro and the outro. And I realized that probably in Shakespeare's time it would have been fine. But among Indian villages, you have that a lot, especially pre-cinema and everything where somebody comes to your village and will tell you a tale that you already know.

12:35But with one string instrument or anything, he will tell you the story of Soni Maywal, which is their local Romeo and Juliet, and Hiranja and everything and tell you tales. And you'd cry. You'd do everything with it. So I just thought that would be a great way to encapsulate and put bookends to the film as such, to have this Sufi singer to come and just give the intro now. Because the movie has no music, which was quite harsh when I told my crew that this movie is not going to have no music. There is no background music. There is no nothing. It's going to be like if you imagine, you know, Hannah Kay and Gasper Noir were writing a script and it got made by one of the Iranian women.

13:09You know, Ushir Nishat, who if there's anything dangerous going on here, she's just going to do a close up on that door. So you don't address it because the Iranians will make cinema. That is, they can take a boy's lost homework or a lost bicycle or a divorce and make it like it's the end of the universe. Whereas Haneke and Gaspar Noir will deal with such violent subject matter that a lot of people will just get shocked from the very beginning. So I just thought, like, imagine the story is theirs, but it's told by this filmmaker. That's the brief that I had in me. So I only have one small brief of actual violent thing in there, but there's a lot more an impotence that you feel by not seeing what you want to see.

13:47Is the film, perhaps maybe it did already, but will the film be released in India as well? I hope so. I think it will be. We're trying to go for next year. So this year, we are doing all the festival rounds. And so this is the second one we won in Toronto. And now, hopefully we do well here. And then in the next couple of months, we will see when we release it in India, and then look for an international marketer, because I would like it ideally not to be dubbed at all. So it's just something that everybody would have loved if I'd made it in Hindi. Just I knew these two words so well that I said, you know, I know how the kardang smells in both those places.

14:20I just can't if you made it into Hindi and you change the environment. I don't know how to make that film. So let's just scale the budget to a small budget. But just tell the story as truthfully as I think I could. And also perhaps a reminder to people that India is such a vast country with different kind of languages, different types of film, right? Because there's There's a perception that people think of an Indian film, Bollywood, which is fun, which is great. But not all of it. Yeah, it's just like when you go, you know, 300 kilometers away from one place in India, they speak a completely different language, not a different dialect, a different language.

14:51So when you say, you know, Punjabi, you know, by definition, languages, you know, something with a script is different. It is different. A very small percentage of Indians speak Punjabi, but that's still 64 million. So when you go to those numbers, it is a lot of people purchased, you know, by Indian standard, by percentage, it becomes quite small. Otherwise, it is a massive number. I mean, more people in India speak English than all of Europe. You might not understand their accent, but yes, they do. So it's just because the government language is English. So just in those particular places, when you move from one place, they tend to be very regional.

15:24And Hindi is the one that kind of crosses over, probably English too. But this was just something, like I said, had needed to be in Punjabi. Thank you very much, Tarzan Singh, director of Dear Jassy. And now we move on to my home country, Brazil, to speak with the director of a powerful energetic film called Power Alley, or Levant, in Portuguese. The film tells the story of a promising volleyball player facing an unwanted pregnancy. I had the pleasure to speak with the director, Lila Hala.

16:02Lila Hala, a pleasure to have you here. I saw Power Alley. What a fantastic film. It's very fresh, energetic, and also very current from what we see in Brazil, right? Thank you for having me here. It is a very big pleasure to present the film at the BFI. We had the screening yesterday with an incredible audience, very warm, curious audience. We had great fun at the Q &A. We have another session of the film on Sunday the 8th at 8 o 'clock. It's sold out, but I'm sure we can still find tickets for whoever is willing to see it. The film will also be released here in England. So for anyone who also wants to have a little bit of this strong energy.

16:54Lots of strong energy because the film talks about very difficult topics. I mean, women's rights, abortion in Brazil, but at the same time, it managed to be joyful. The group of friends, I love how they support each other. Yes, this was a very important part of the film for me because in the last years of Brazil, we've been going through a paralyzation from fear, from menaces, from isolation and from lack of support. and the deeper we went down, the more clear it became for me that this film should be truly political, needed to have collectiveness, affection and joy as political power. So finding these points between what we're criticizing but also the world we want to envision for the future was very important.

18:01And this is how we have this incredible cast with this amazing energy. They didn't know each other before. Now they're a very tight bonding group. The whole process has been very beautiful working with them. Very inspiring for me as well as a person and as a director. This is your debut feature. I know you did some short films and plenty of other projects, but that's your very first long film, right? Yes, exactly. It took me eight years to make. Very long journey. Also, a very long journey in political terms. Everything that Brazil has been through, everything that the culture in Brazil has suffered in the last years.

18:47and now this re-beginning and restarting. And we shot in very difficult times. We weren't sure what was going to happen to Brazil by the time the film is ready. That's also why there are so much support from international co-productions and fundings and labs. and this film was a puzzle to make in those difficult times, but this is also part of the way we collectively worked to bring this topic, to bring this energy, to bring this premise out in its importance.

19:40Has it been released in Brazil, the film yet? No, we will have our premiere in Festival do Rio next Friday, 13th, a lucky number. And this is going to be the national premiere of the film where we'll get together with the team again. They were in Cannes, most of the actors and actresses. And from then on, yes, the film will also have its theatrical release in Brazil. And my final question, the soundtrack, it's so fun. I think it plays a big role in the film as well. Are you a big fan of that music? How was it to curate? The process was very collaborative with Maria Beraldo, who signs the soundtrack.

20:28We knew from the beginning we would have all those different voices playing inside the film. and she was the person making this curation as well as the actors because during the whole process of rehearsing and creating the film I would ask them for playlists and who they were listening to so the film is very embedded in this spirit of the people we're working with And then throughout the post-production time, Maria was making this big research. Bad Sister had already worked with us inside the filming, creating tracks for the volleyball team to sing inside the film. and some of the lyrics are made by actors of the film and actresses, especially Ona, who is an actress who wrote one of the beautiful songs we have.

21:33And the film becomes, as in the image and with the volleyball team and this idea of a collective voice, a collective strategy, music also works in this way. So we decided not to translate the music in the subtitles but the lyrics also mean a lot and the song, the final song of Sofia towards the end of the film is a song specially written for her in this moment also written by many hands, many voices sang by Jussara Marçal and it's this collective power guidance by Maria Beraldo who did this incredible curation work

22:21Levante em mim