By Nabamita Mitra
Dominic Megam Sangma is a nou-veau storyteller who uses the stron-gest medium to unfold his tales of human emotions and takes you to the brink of a void, that of his heart. As a pro-fessional storyteller, who improvises his nar-ration with every character and yet keeps the string of thoughts intact, Sangma uses images that together connect one to the yearning of his lonely heart from where rises a rainbow of short films. The 30-year-old filmmaker says he grew up amid storytellers who deeply influenced him in his childhood. “My grandfather and uncle were storytellers, a tradition in the Garo Hills that is dying now,” he says. His insurmountable loss as a child — his mother passed away when he was only three and he lost some of his close friends even be-fore he reached teenage — made him reclusive and a loner. “Besides my imaginative friends, which were characters from the stories that I heard from my grandfather and uncle, most of my friends were older than me. I would be-friend them because they could tell stories and that fascinated me,” says Sangma, who grew up in Nongthymmai Garo in Ri Bhoi district. Sangma was drawn towards the art of sto-rytelling at an early age. But he wanted a dif-ferent medium to portray his stories but could not decide till he was in high school. While in Class XI, he stumbled into a film workshop near his school in Shillong in 2007. “Till then, I never knew there was a thing like a film school where you can study. I was really moved by the ability of a film to create stories through image and sound. Then I searched on the internet and found information on courses in filmmaking. After my graduation I wrote the entrance at Satyajit Ray Film and Televi-sion Institute (SRFTI),” says the young direc-tor, who was so determined to make films that he wrote the word ‘director’ on his desk and chair when he was in Class XI. That was the beginning of his journey as a storyteller who found a vent to his emotions through the lens. Sangma went to Kolkata in 2008. He was new to the big city, a stranger wrapped in solitude. However, his inquisitive eyes observed the city and her people closely and found a similar loneliness in their exis-tence, magnified by modern technology. “I read in the newspaper that a 14-year-old killed his grandmother over a smartphone and the teenager was unrepentant. I realised how tech-nology was taking a toll on us,” reminisces Sangma. This realisation culminated into Karyukai.inc, his first short film made in 2010. He wrote the story in 10 minutes. The protagonist in the film searches for a soul mate and finds him-self on the doorstep of Karyukai.inc, a com-pany that delivers personalised soul mates, or PSMs. But in the process, he realises that he is still longing for human company. The less than 15-minute film delves into the intricacies of human emotions which suffer the onslaught of technology in the fast chang-ing world. “Though the protagonist wants to be with a real human being, he is forced to accept a PSM. The story shows how modern-day technology is imposed on us, making us lonelier by the day,” explains Sangma, who has made eight short films so far and all in Garo language.
Rong’Kuchak (Echoes) is another master-piece of Sangma that was made four years after Karyukai.inc. By then, Sangma had matured, both as a director and storyteller. Sangma says the film is the result of the profound influence of poets like Rainer Maria Rilke, Mahmoud Darwish and Charles Pierre Boudelier, among others, whose works he read during his days at SRFTI. He was also influenced by the works of filmmakers like Andrei Tarkovsky. The word Rong’Kuchak is a combination of two words Ro’ong (stone or rock) and Kuchak (to respond). “I remember as a kid we would shout out to the forest and it would echo back. Once I asked my father the reason behind this and he told me that it was the voice of our forefathers that respond to us,” remembers Sangma. The National Student Film Award winning short film is a tribute to all the storytellers in his village who had shaped his life and thoughts, says Sangma, who is also a poet. The story’s protagonist, Ianche Sangma, is a Garo poet who searches for the ultimate poetry in his own language, Garo. The poignant story takes viewers back and forth to the poet’s re-cluse and leaves them, once again, on the cusp of longing for the roots. An interpretation is that the film deplores that Garo language is draped in a foreign tongue (Roman script) and the protagonist laments the loss of the original script. Ianche can see his people completely abandoning their rich cul-ture and he believes that the only way to save himself, and the tribe, is to author a script.“The film is indeed the echo of my heart and I am quite proud of it. It is the portrayal of my pain for the lost, for my inabilities to write them in A’chik, which is a beautiful language. So I expressed it through cinema,” says the ‘golpo agangipa’ and adds, “I imagine if we could re-ally capture them in written language, then the A’chik script would have been something like musical notation.”The film, which has a poetic rendition to it, was shot in Kolkata. The scenes where the north east’s natural abundance features were shot with perfect miniature sets. “Those at SR-FTI told me that I was the first person to recre-ate North East so vividly,” he says. The actors in his films, who have faced the camera for the first time, are as perfect as the films are. The reason, Sangma explains, is that instead of searching for actors, he searches for a person who would resemble the character in real life. “Sometimes because of this, I need a lot of time finding them, so when I am shooting them they are living their life before the cam-era,’ he says.Besides short films, Sangma has made a few documentaries and corporate films. Most of his documentaries too explore the emotional upheaval that finally finds stability. Like in Rahale’s Liitle Theatre, a documentary shot in Kolkata, Sangma traces the life of a puppeteer named Rachel. After losing her husband and with no children, Rachel has to struggle with depression for a long time. She, however, finds her solace in dolls that she started making for her sister’s children. Soon she forms a puppet theatre and finally strings her life together to tell the stories of the dolls. “She had around 100 dolls and each of them had a name. That was fascinating,” says Sangma. In another short documentary, All My Only Dreams, which was made during an exchange programme with Italian students at SRFTI, Sangma tells the story of a blind Anglo-Indian blues guitarist, Guy Guzman, in Kolkata with as much aplomb as the musician who finds a meaning to his life in music. Both Rahale’s Little Theatre and All My Only Dreams are in English. Sangma’s sincerity in telling one’s story is evident in all his creations. Also, he prefers to write stories for his films himself. “I do not like making films based on other’s stories,” says Sangma, who wants to tell the stories of his lost friends in his film someday. For now, he is focusing on a story that is in-spired by his father’s life after the death of his mother. Sangma’s first feature film is also in Garo language and tells the story of an old man who is transported to a dream world where he sees several women of all ages. “The man is lost and looks for someone and cannot find the woman he is looking for. At the end, he wakes up from his dream and realises that he was looking for his long lost wife. The story is based on my father’s life that has re-mained lonely after my mother passed away,” says Sangma, who quit his job in NFDC-Kol-kata last March for his maiden feature. The film will be shot in different parts of Me-ghalaya, including Shillong, and 45 percent of the shooting is already over in Sangma’s vil-lage, Nongthymmai Garo. He has also man-aged to get a Chinese producer, Jianshang Xu, who first saw Sangma’s film, Rong’Kuchak, at a festival in Beijing and immediately agreed to part-finance his next venture. “The first time I saw Dominic’s film Echoes in Beijing, I knew he was different. He has his own strong attitude on cinema which is similar to what I believe in how films should be made or what films should be like. After talking deeper and deeper in 3 or 4 days in Beijing, we became really close friends and without prom-ising each other, we knew that we would sup-port each other to make films that we believe in. And now it is happening. It should be a life-time collaboration,” says Jianshang. Asked how he plans to promote a film in the regional language outside the boundaries of Garo Hills, Sangma says language cannot be a barrier in the changing world of films. “Film has its own language that traverses all bound-aries. You can tell a story in any language but it will still touch hearts outside the geographic and demographic boundaries,” the talented young filmmaker aptly puts it. The feature is still being made but Sangma is keeping his fingers crossed and hoping to enter international festivals wherefrom he can showcase his storytelling capabilities and bring the North East on a global platform. But that’s another story.