By Nabamita Mitra
Dominic Megam Sangma’s first feature film MA•AMA has been selected for the competitive section of Jio MAMI that begins on October 25. The brilliant young director from Meghalaya will be in race with some of the most talented directors from across the world.
“I do not expect to win though I wish to… it will be a great thing not only for me but for the state of Meghalaya as well. For me being selected in the international competition itself is a big win,” Sangma told Sunday Shillong weeks before the competition in Mumbai.
The director, who comes from a village where story-telling was part of the tradition, described the film as a “living organism” that transformed and evolved during its shooting. “It was a continuous revelation, like the way one writes a book or paints,” he said.
Sangma has already proved his prowess as a director and sensitivity as an artiste through his poetic narration in Rong’kuchak (Echoes), the story of a Garo poet who searches for the ultimate poetry in his own language, and other short films.
But in all the previous works, Sangma told someone else’s story. This time, he narrates a personal story and his experiences since the death of his mother when he was only three years.
Drawing a comparison between the 123-minute feature film and Rong’kuchak, Sangma said, “There are a few similarities in the style and casting of non-actors but the film itself is very much different from Rong’kuchak. In the short film, what I was trying to achieve was to be able to execute what I have written or imagined in the script and there was intentionally design shots. But in MA•AMA, though I had a concrete script in hand I was allowing myself to be dictated by the situation and environment during the shoot. The film itself was like a living organism, transforming and evolving as we go on shooting it.”
“I was also concentrating so much on capturing the small details of life, which we tend to miss out most of the time because we look for larger emotions and grander things. As a director, I feel these small details and gestures of life are what build a relationship between father and son, between siblings, etc,” he added.
But memories can be upsetting at times and Sangma had to work hard to collate the scattered memories of his and his father’s.
Six years ago, when he first tried to strike a conversation about his mother, his father Philip Sangma would not even speak up. “He just said one thing, ‘why are you stirring the dust that has already settled?’,” the director recollected. He was still in a film institute in Kolkata.
Every time he came home on vacation, a determined Sangma would coax his father to speak about the woman he loved and lost.
“And one day I told him, ‘the face of my mother that I have in my mind is so different from this black and white photograph of my mother’. I think my father understood then, so it happened gradually,” the son succeeded.
The writer and director needed to make sure that his emotional upheavals do not hang heavy on the audience. So he had to work on many drafts of the script to get the essence and nuances right.
“Though it’s a personal story but when the audience watches the film they should be able to relate, the feeling should be universal. When I am writing the script I cannot be the son of the father I am trying to tell the story of but I have to be the director who is trying to tell the story of an old man and his relationships with his family,” Sangma explained.
The evolution
Before making this film, Sangma was working on a different script that dealt with the death of his mother and his memories. But several factors impeded his work.
“I was working on that script for quite a long time, doing research and talking to my siblings and my father. But shooting that film was almost impossible in the beginning because the production cost was really high. Not being able to shoot it made me depressed for a very long time and I spent sleepless nights thinking how to shoot that film. One night, I thought what if I make a film on the present story of my father rather than concentrating on the past. And it just came flowing into my mind and I had to get up from bed and scribble the whole story from the middle of the night till morning. And yes it took me another six months to put it into screenplay,” he remembered the initial days.
For the son, the process of making the film was “sort of healing, a sort of catharsis and it’s like when you confess something your heart becomes lighter”.
For the father, it was redemption. The things that he couldn’t do in life, he did in the film. “When he finally watched the film, he told me that he felt as if he was looking at the mirror of his own life.”
The director confessed that shooting the first feature film “is always hard” but for him, it was an overwhelming experience.
There will be five screenings of the film at Jio MAMI — four for the general public and one for the jury members of the international competition.
MA•AMA, which has also been selected for Dharamshala International Film Festival, is lined up with films like Chinese director Hu Bo’s (the 29-year-old director who hanged himself after making the first film) Elephant Sitting Still and Phuttiphong Aroonpheng’s Manta Ray from Thailand. The 12 films in the category are from different countries like France, the US, Belgium and Brazil.
For screening in Meghalaya, Sangma and his team are developing a distribution strategy with director Pradip Kurbah of Onaatah fame. “If I don’t screen the film in Meghalaya, the journey of MA•AMA will be incomplete. People of my state have to see the film and I have made the film keeping this in mind,” said the director, who is already working on his second feature film and the project “is being selected in Asia Cine-Link in Busan film festival”.