I Write Screenplays With Love For Images & Sound: Nidhi Saxena

NEW DELHI, (IANS) – The film is the one that falls into the category of personal cinema. It is about loneliness, anxiety, and mostly memories. Now memories do not have any order, at times they can be ‘false’, sometimes carry an air of uncertainty, and many times are blurry. But there are also instances when they are clearer than the present…

Nidhi Saxena’s film ‘Sad Letters of an Imaginary Woman’ which has won the Asian Cinema Fund 2024 and will have its World Premiere at the Busan International Film Festival is tied by phone calls coming from the future to the past, where older Nidhi connects with the younger one, as she has no one else to talk to. The slow passage of time in the house feels like an illness, and the pace of the film reflects this melancholy.

“I wanted viewers to feel the boredom-filled monotony of being trapped for years in an old, abandoned house. In some scenes, adult Nidhi and the child Nidhi are in the same scene, symbolizing that the past is standing alongside her in her present. The ending of the film is special with a juxtaposition of sadness and happiness where she chooses a mysterious ritual to get over all the lifelong sadness,” she said.

Excited over winning the prize, the filmmaker admits that she has always loved Asian cinema the most: From Hong Kong, Korea, Malaysia, Taiwan, and Sri Lanka, and stresses we have something that Europe does not.

“Look at Tsai Ming-Liang and Apichatpong; maybe it is because of the Buddha. So, I am happy to be a part of Asia’s biggest festival. It is a link in the chain of this lineage that I feel more connected to. Busan is such a prestigious platform, and for my first film, it is a great acknowledgment that gives me a lot of belief in my vision as a filmmaker.”

While she studied writing at the Film and Television Institute of India in Pune, her education before that was in fine arts. Saxena feels there were some expressions she just could not achieve in painting and sculpture and to bring them out from within, she needed moving images and sound, thus her shift to cinema.

“And I think films have much more to do with painting, sculpture, and music than with storytelling. There can be a thread of a story in images and sound, or there might not be. But reducing it to just a story is unfair. Dialogue can be a part of the sound but cannot overpower it.

“I write stories too, but a screenplay does not match a story. While writing a screenplay, I am a filmmaker, not a storyteller or writer. So, I write screenplays with a love for images and sound.

“Most of the things, I wrote were more like a series of imagery than just a story of characters. Everything visible on the screen is a character, and all of that cannot be written in a screenplay. I realized that writing a novel or a story, which I wrote earlier, was not like writing a screenplay. I do not see the film as just a medium to tell an interesting story; as it is seen on a screen, watching every scene is and must be a unique experience, invoking senses that the viewer has never experienced before.”

Believing that filmmaking as a medium needs to be democratized and made available to many young people across age groups, Saxena does workshops with girls from tribal and rural areas, giving cameras in their hands and mentoring them for 3-4 weeks while they learn and put into action the new skills.

“The stories that come out from them are amazing – challenging all structures, giving us all new ways to look at visual communication in the form we call cinema. Why should someone come from outside and claim to make a film about you? With an outside gaze, they make films on women and tribals, what will they gain from your gaze? Why not make them capable enough to make a film about themselves or even about you? Yes, it is paramount to set up more film schools in India,” she stresses.

She has already started recce for her next project surreal story of women’s longing and desire hidden underneath societal norms, and the interplay of mythological and the carnal.

“Though contemporary, it boasts of much magic realism and will be set in the Himalayas. I have already started a dialogue with various potential partners and actors.”

The trained writer asserts that for now, she has a lot of her material to film, but a time will come when she starts finding something in others’ screenplays or stories with the camera.

“I want to use the camera like a brush, to find what is unknown. My top priority is to develop through various stories, the formidable voice of women that is unheard in our societies and so in our films also. That voice is very stereotypical, not genuinely coming from a female heart and her lived reality, but more from how society wants to see women and their various emotions.”

It is tough not to ask her if she is a ‘method director’, considering she lived in an old haveli for months with her mother before shooting ‘Sad Letters of an Imaginary Woman’.

“Before arriving at the old house, I had not made the entire screenplay but only outlines. The house was dark, dingy and almost dead, but had a character that it had witnessed in a past era. I could feel that the walls were whispering some past events to me, and every corner, even though dark, was expressing an event that occurred there once. I have brought all that in the visual design in this film, where the house itself is a character, present in every scene, telling its own story and adding its layer in the already layered journey of these characters.”

Optimistic about the indie scene in India which she says is evolving and witnessing more acceptance, Saxena says one would always want, as an indie filmmaker, to have more system-generated support systems for such ventures, including the availability of finances or easy subsidies and support systems.

“There are so many artists who would like to showcase their art if a more friendly and empowering environment develops in India also for indie films,” she concludes.