Nimtoh quietly reveals the dark undercurrents of rural India
An interview with filmmaker Saurav Rai whose film is set to close for Images Festival in Toronto.
When Saurav Rai was creating Nimtoh (Invitation) with his film school friends, he never thought that the film would be closing for Images Festival, the largest festival of experimental film and video in North America.
The Bombay-based filmmaker was supposed to appear in Toronto for the Canadian premiere of his debut feature, Nimtoh (Invitation). The coronavirus pandemic, alas, did not make that possible. The film is still on schedule to close the festival, which has now gone online and is running completely free.
Nimtoh is set in a remote mountain village near Darjeeling, India, where director Saurav Rai grew up. Tashi, the protagonist, is a young boy who lives and works on a cardamom orchard with his ageing grandmother. There is no official landlord-tenant or employer-employee relationship between the owners of the plantation and Tashi’s family. However, there are unspoken yet apparent distinctions between the two families. They belong to different castes and classes.
When the patrons of the orchard announce their son’s marriage, Tashi wonders whether his family will receive an invitation. What follows is a series of misunderstandings that reveal the power hierarchies in this peaceful and serene village. Rai takes off the illusion of naivety in a sensitive and nuanced way, perhaps only possible through the quiet observations and understated dialogues of Nimtoh.
Filmed with long takes along the bendy, hillside roads, Nimtoh is laced with class and caste anxiety felt from the young boy’s perspective. Rai fleshes out Tashi’s character as a mischievous and intelligent, free-spirited boy who knows the hilly terrains of the cardamom orchard like the back of his hand.
But the village and its inhabitants are complicated. There are spaces that the young boy cannot occupy and boundaries that he is expected to respect. “I perceived my village to be a very simple place.” Rai admits, “But I was concerned about this undercurrent between the haves and have-nots.”
Although inspired by an incident that occurred during the filmmaker’s own wedding, Saurav Rai had no screenplay or plot in mind when he decided to return to his childhood home with a film crew. “There were days when we would go on location, which was the cardamom plantation, and nothing would come out,” the director recalls, “But at the same time, we were trying to make cinema that is not bogged down by its narrative construction. I wanted the process to be organic.”
The desire to create something genuine led to Rai casting his extended family and himself as key characters in the film. Using non-actors is a method thoroughly favoured by the filmmaker who learnt his craft from the Satyajit Ray Film and Television Institute in Calcutta. “I prefer under-acting than over-acting,” he adds.
However, the absence of a script created unforeseen challenges for the largely non-professional cast. “It was odd and difficult,” confesses Rai, who had to utilized rolls of unstructured footage to create his final storyline.
The decision to cast his family proved to be a cathartic process for the ones involved. It allowed them to learn from the actual incident and heal from it. “It’s almost like a mockumentary at this point,” comments Rai.
Putting a critical lens on his community was a difficult task for Rai. “Even my own perception of the incident was going through multiple transitions throughout the filming process,” he says, “As a director, I also have a position in this narrative. The person who is making the film is ultimately making a judgement.”
Rai’s Nepali-language film extends the personal into the aesthetic. The silence of the hills, the murmur of nature, the mischief of the protagonist, add to the pastoral imagination of remote villages. Yet his urge to make a film that is “real” confronts the invisible realities underneath such idyllic display.
“I knew that there was a cinematic voice that I wanted to bring out and I knew that I wanted to work with this incident,” he shares, “I somehow wanted to express the politics that exist in even the naïve corners of a peaceful and serene Indian village.”
