BackOut of the woods
Out of the woods
PremiumNature first: A still from the film.
Four years—“if you count the making"—is how long it has taken The Forest to see the light of day, says Ashvin Kumar of his first feature film. But if his time as a film-maker has taught Kumar anything, it’s patience.
Little Terrorist looked at cross-border paranoia when a young boy accidentally crosses the border between India and Pakistan to retrieve his cricket ball. Political themes were more starkly explored in Inshallah Football, which Kumar describes as “a deeply personal narrative about father and son, the devastating conflict of Kashmir and the state of Indian democracy", and its sequel Inshallah, Kashmir: Living Terror, which weaves together stories of brutality and terror by the Armed Forces and militants in Kashmir.
And after four years of sanity-testing disappointment, a re-edit of the film, another round of dead-end meetings and souring deals with distributors, Kumar has finally partnered with PVR Director’s Rare to release his ecological thriller The Forest on 4 May.
While making his film, Kumar was adamant that he would use real animals. So a pair of trained leopards was flown from Paris to Thailand, where they were filmed. “If the leopard was not real, the film would have fallen apart," says Kumar. “Being in the presence of live animals changes equations—even when actors look at real animals, they react differently. There is a scene where the animal and an actor are together. He’s alone on the tree with the leopard, and the leopard almost goes for him. We had to capture that scene in three takes. The Bedi brothers did a great job capturing images of tigers and other wildlife in Bandhavgarh National Park."
In the four years since filming The Forest, Kumar cut his film down to a tight 86 minutes. “It was painful amputating but it made a huge difference to the quality of the film. The distance gave objectivity...a positive fallout of the waiting period," says Kumar, adding: “The Forest is a thriller moulded as a Hitchcockian classic—there is jealousy, love, and a force greater than the characters at work. There are elemental, mythological themes. That kind of storytelling withstands the test of time." The thrills are built on the subtext of ecology and conservation.
This done, Kumar is already working on the script of his next feature-length film titled Hype. The film is a female-centric coming-of-age film about Indian youth and their subculture, set in Delhi. This will be Kumar’s most mainstream and commercial project yet. “Hype is a film about love that looks at a lifestyle of drugs and farm parties; it’s a fashionable, edgy milieu centred around a chick on a bike who lives life on her own terms. It blows up every myth of masculinity, especially in the world of Jats," says Kumar, who was raised in Delhi but now calls Goa home.
The Forest releases in India on 4 May.
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