I wish to maintain a mirror to the society: Pinki Elli director Prithvi Konanur

If cinematically one thing good got here of 2020, it’s within the variety of high quality non-Hindi movies being made. Among them is Prithvi Konanur’s third characteristic, Kannada movie Pinki Elli? (Where’s Pinki?), which was screened on the just-concluded 51st International Film Festival of India in Goa.
The movie unfolds as a whirlpool, with eight-month-old Pinki at its centre. The unaware, harmless, bawling toddler is faultless however creates a ruckus within the lives of these round by simply present. Her mom Bindushree (actor Akshatha Pandavapura) is a working girl. Her father by no means visited her since her mother and father separated. Her mum’s male good friend doesn’t look after her. Pinki’s caretaker, Sannamma, spikes her milk with alcohol and lends her to her cousin Anusuya to go beg on the streets for a fast buck. The spaced-out Anusuya leaves her unattended and goes for a swig of arrack. A motherless sweeper-woman carries her away, needs to maintain her as her personal, and, later, agrees to promote her for adoption, however Pinki doesn’t look poor and unique sufficient. The police detain the native transpersons for the kidnapping. The baby welfare committee is to determine who will get Pinki’s custody. Each is a sufferer of their very own scenario.
As a dad or mum’s worst nightmare comes true, the gritty 107-minute-long social-realist thriller – shot on handheld digital camera on actual location – isn’t a mere black-and-white telling. It’s not simply in regards to the crime (albeit a widespread one) and criminals, however what follows and the way it disrupts the lives of these concerned. “I had read in a newspaper about this incident of a baby being rented out and it had remained in my mind for many years. I was interested in exploring what happens afterwards,” says Bengaluru-based Konanur, 41, who needed to take the narrative within the path of adoption, not baby trafficking, which “is also a big part of it, but has already been explored on screen many times”. He integrates sure components when a narrative requires it, like within the case of Railway Children (2016) to point out kids as being weak to drug abuse, sexual harassment and different crimes. That movie, which gained the National Film Award for Best Child Artist in 2016, relies on a real story, impressed from Lalitha Iyer and Malcolm Harper’s e book of case research Rescuing Railway Children (2013). “It happens not so much in Bengaluru but is a big problem in Delhi, Mumbai and Hyderabad,” he says.
Children within the face of peril are on the centre of Konanur’s movies. Whether runaways or kidnapped, on the streets or at sea, the tales he tells of them are off-beat. The days of how Satyajit Ray made cinema round kids are lengthy gone. Children in Indian cinema – if in any respect proven – most of the time, stay a mere blur, except it’s a kids’s movie. Western life like custom (Iranian, Italian, Brazilian) has proven kids as steering narratives for ideological ends, whether or not to talk of a systemic degeneration/oppression in a much less direct manner or upend their idealising by exhibiting them as adult-like – corruptible and malevolent. With a shift in his methods, Konanur’s storytelling has additionally moved from fantastical escapades (the Children’s Film Society-produced Alegalu/Waves, 2012) to actuality’s trappings (Railway Children and Pinki Elli?).
Pinki Elli?, whose international-distribution rights have been purchased by Berlin’s Picture Tree International, was offered as a work-in-progress on the 2019 NFDC’s Film Bazaar Recommends in Goa. The movie had its world premiere in October on the Busan International Film Festival.
Konanur makes a cameo, too, as a intermediary who comes to take a look at Pinki for potential adoption by an Australian household. The director trains the lens on dysfunctional fashionable nuclear households, class economics, gender politics, the saga of migrant employees (a glimpse at their hard-up lives), administrative inefficacies and systemic injustice. Like in Railway Children, the characters have been performed by non-actors (the protagonist got here from a Don Bosco Centre childcare), most actors in Pinki Elli?, too, besides those that play the mother and father, are non-actors.
Kannada movie Pinki Elli? (Where’s Pinki?) is Prithvi Konanur’s third characteristic.
Sannamma and Anusuya are real-life cousins, who work as home assist, and are available from slums close to the taking pictures location in Bengaluru, “so we had to work around their time, they worked till 2-3 pm, we could only shoot after 3 pm, and they couldn’t travel, so we had to go near them. The aim was to keep things simple and real. The challenge was to make them trust you, they feel you are out to scam them,” says Konanur, who stop his software program job in Europe, and wrote a Hollywood-oriented English script which by no means noticed the sunshine of the day. He then did a diploma on the New York Film Academy and returned to India to make movies. Back house, he walked into Girish Kasaravalli’s set. Gulabi Talkies (2008) had already gone into manufacturing, so Konanur turned the clapper boy. But the fashion of their filmmaking is completely different. While Kasaravalli is extra visible, and works with metaphors, Konanur lets his characters pilot the story.

Konanur, who made a brief Tamil drama, A Conditional Truce, in Sri Lanka in 2008, says, “I actually want to make serious documentaries but it’s extremely difficult to get funding for documentaries in India. Globally, there are funds, but there is equally a tough competition.”

About making movies on these both on the margins or common folks and quotidian life, he says, “I don’t know if it’s a conscious choice of mine. Given the country we live in, the contrast between haves and have-nots has to come through. Giving a statement/message doesn’t work as an artist or filmmaker, though it’s the artist’s duty to hold a mirror to the society, and that’s what I want to do.”