In May 2012, filmmaker Anurag Kashyap descended on the French Riviera with his cast and crew to screen his magnum opus Gangs of Wasseypur at the Director’s Fortnight section of the Cannes Film Festival. A member of that team was marketing manager Neeraj Ghaywan, who had quit his corporate life to assist Kashyap on the film. Three years later, Ghaywan will be back at the French film festival this May, but this time with his own directorial feature film Masaan, which will be a part of the esteemed Un Certain Regard section. Films shown in this section are eligible for a prize of €30,000 as well as other prizes such as the Camera D’Or, awarded to the best first feature. Other recent Indian films screened in this section included Vikramaditya Motwane’s Udaan , Ashim Ahluwalia’s Miss Lovely and Kanu Behl’s Titli .

Apart from Masaan , filmmaker Gurvinder Singh’s Punjabi film Chauthi Koot , based on the short stories of Waryam Singh Sandhu, will also be screened in the same section at Cannes. Miyan Kal Aana , a short movie by Shamas Siddiqui, younger brother of actor Nawazuddin Siddiqui, will be a part of the Short Film Catalog of the festival. “This is very encouraging to see,” explains Ghaywan, “this year the big films haven’t worked. Instead it is films like Dum Laga ke Haisha and NH10 that have worked well in the box office. People want to see good stories.”

Lately, there’s been good news all around for the small independent film. Last week, the two significant releases in the theatres were Chaitanya Tamhane’s Court and Shonali Bose’s Margarita with a Straw . Both these films released in India after generating a positive buzz in the festival circuit.

Ghaywan’s film maps the lives of four people who live in Varanasi, and the common thread that binds their stories is the Ganga river. The fulcrum of Masaan , which means crematorium, is the lives of those who cremate bodies in the ghats for a living. “A major part of India doesn’t even know about this world. I was staying in a hostel in that area with Varun (Grover, the writer of the film) and we’d go and speak to the people at the ghat, and record our conversations with them. Our screenplay was based on those interviews,” he says. Ghaywan has previously made an award-winning short film Shor , also about a young couple from Varanasi who move to Mumbai to make a living.

Down to earth

The common thread running through Indian films that have left a lasting impression at film festivals — The Lunchbox , Qissa and Court to name a few — is that they all told stories that were real and rooted. A few years ago, Cannes festival director Thierry Fremaux said that the festival was keen to showcase the works of this “new generation” of Indian filmmakers rather than big Bollywood productions. Yet, Ghaywan was careful not to make a film that connected with the West, but his own people. “During the making of this film, we had decided that we are not going to make something that caters to the diaspora. So we’ve stayed away from the template of films in Varanasi — holiness, sadhus and gaanja ,” says Ghaywan.

The litmus test was screening the film for his office staff, including the watchmen and drivers, who have no exposure to world cinema. “Thankfully the film has been liked by everyone,” he says. “A film should not be arty to the point that it bores you. It needs to move you.”

Around six years back, Ghaywan was a freshly-minted MBA graduate in Pune, managing a marketing team. To get away from the boredom of his day job, he wrote for a website called Passion for Cinema, where he reviewed world cinema. He then decided to join the marketing team of a film production house, hoping that would satiate his love for movies and justify his degree at the same time. That didn’t work either. Eventually, Kashyap convinced Ghaywan to quit and give cinema a serious shot. “Working with Anurag on GoW was like my film school. The biggest lesson I learnt from him is how to deal with people. I wanted to imbibe the kindness with which he treats his team, the way he inspires them and that there are no hierarchies on his set. I wanted the same kind of energy on my film set too,” he says.

As he prepares for the Cannes gala, Ghaywan is in high spirits. He has the backing of a host of co-producers such as Sikhya Entertainment, Phantom Films and Manish Mundhra, among others.

He’s not only optimistic about the fate of the film but is hoping for a big release at the end of this year. For Ghaywan, this is the best reward for the life he’s left behind.

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