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| Sajda Pathan and Ananya Shanbhag in Anuja |
In the first part of my interview with Adam J Graves about his Oscar-shortlisted short film Anuja, we spoke about the Salaam Balaak Trust, which helps Delhi street kids and discovered young star Sajda Pathan, as well as about the huge numbers of kids who arrive in the city every day and become vulnerable to exploitation. The film follows two girls who work in the garment trade, with Sajda playing the title character and Ananya Shanbhag her older sister, Palak. When Sajda, who has a gift for numbers, is offered a rare educational opportunity, she hesitates in part because she knows that it will cost the money that Palak has saved for her dowry. Saving for a dowry – the only route to subsequent family life – is very difficult for orphans living in poverty, and Adam says that unscrupulous employers sometimes make that situation worse.
“This is a really terrible fact that's not fun to think about, but there are cases – many cases – where girls are exploited for their labour on the promise of having their dowries paid,” he explains. “There are contracts in some factories – of course, it's completely illegal – where the factory owners tell the girls that they aren’t paying them because they are basically paying into their dowries, and of course it doesn’t happen. I mean, even if it does, it's insanely exploitative and frustrating to read that this would be happening. But I think from my research, it's not. It's oftentimes just a hoax, feeding and preying on the dreams and the hopes of these young girls and women.
“I thought, well, in my film, I wanted to make sure that the characters were as smart and gifted and mischievous as the girls I met in those homes. I wanted to pay tribute to their intelligence and to their agency. And so instead of making the older girl a victim of such a scheme, I thought ‘What if she herself has a scheme where she's figuring out a way to, under the nose of the factory, save something on the side for her own dowry?’ So it's interesting. I’d forgotten about the background research I'd done that inspired that moment in the film.”
The film unfolds in a very natural, organic way, and that’s thanks in part to the locations.
“I know Delhi pretty well,” he says, “but of course, when you're scouting locations, you have to know it at a very granular level. And I was not living in India at the time. During post, I was based here in LA. So like I've heard so many filmmakers now doing, I was using Google Maps, and of course not every city street in Delhi is available for Street View. When I went to India for our first scouting mission, I have to tell you that my friends who were crew members, I took them on some really wild goose chases, searching for things that I knew existed because I saw them on Google Street View or whatever, and then we couldn't find them in real life. So some of it was just really scrappy, researching things, going there, finding stuff that we thought might work. And then in other cases, the Salaam Balaak Trust helped.
“The shelter where the girls live, the home in the informal settlement or slum, is in a community that the Salaam Balaak Trust works with. So we told them what we were looking for and that we were visiting different slums, looking for the right kind of place for the girls and not really finding anything quite right. There were always logistical issues too, like how do we get the camera in there? Because you've got to go through these winding, very narrow alleys, walking for 10 or 15 minutes to find it, and then of course it's like a maze getting out. And so we had some concerns about how the crew would get in and how we’d light it and get electricity.
“The Salaam Balaak Trust wound up helping us find the right location. Everything was a real location. We didn't dress anything to make it look like something it wasn't. The only exception was that the factory was a jeans factory. They were manufacturing like blue jeans and we wanted it to feel like a different kind of factory that would make clothes like dresses or shalwar kameezes, things like that. And so when we got there on the day of the shoot, we took literally thousands of half made jeans and tried to push them aside. And we took other things, we piled them on top and we interspersed other fabrics, so we kind of had to fake that. But everything was a real location.
“The factories weren't really privy to what we were doing. I think they probably would have been a little bit more reluctant to give us access if they knew what the nature of the film was. And then every location was an issue. We wound up overstaying our welcome pretty much everywhere. The mall, for example, we thought we had the mall locked, and then the day that we showed up, a different manager was on duty and had no idea about our agreement. He said ‘Well, fine, you can shoot in this one corner of the store.’
“The problem was we needed Anuja to run through the store. So when we filmed the scene where she was running through the store, she was really running through the store, being chased by the security guard of the store. It's this whole silly film within a film moment. But that happened a lot. It happened almost everywhere we shot. We wound up getting pushed out, overstaying our welcome.
There’s a key scene in which the girls enjoy some rare recreational time together in a cinema.
“It's a theatre that I visited decades before,”he tells me. “There are a lot of beautiful modern cinemas in Delhi, in the malls and around the affluent suburbs, but the Ritz just felt like the perfect place. It was just part of my imagination of the film. For some reason it just spoke to me. And we had more exterior shots that we wound up not using because of trying to tell the story in such a compact, compressed amount of time, but it's a really cool old cinema that's been around forever and I don't know, we'll see if it survives. It's one of the few remaining single screen theatres in the downtown area of Delhi. For people who know Delhi, it's basically at the Kashmir gate. So that was fun.”
I ask about the story about a mongoose that Palak tells to Anuja right at the start of the film.
“This was partly inspired by conversations with my wife who's the creative partner on the project,” he says. “She's the producer. She's a visual artist. Her artistic practice involves archival work, working through her own family story. There's not a lot of historical record there, but her family was brought as indentured labourers to Guyana from northern India. Anyways, I digress a little bit, but in her visual practice, she takes these kinds of historical narratives that she's trying to recover and oftentimes integrates them with material drawn from folklore and mythology. I felt like it would be really fun to have folkloric bookends to the film, so that it’s framed by something that's kind of otherworldly and mythological, almost, in nature.
“Then it occurred to me that it would be really interesting if what the children inherited from their mother was her stories, her voice. They're obviously poor. They don't have anything. But what the older sister does have is the memory of her mother's voice and the stories she would tell. I'm a scholar of Sanskrit literature and the South Asian intellectual tradition. You can't even call it a tradition. There's hundreds and hundreds of traditions. But there's a really strong role for oral history. I mean, even the Rig Vedas were passed down orally for 4,000 years before they were written. So I thought it'd be really nice to pay tribute to that aspect ofIndian culture.
“The question was, what folk tale works best? I was reading through the Panchatantras, the Puranas and the epics and things, to find the right kind of story. And it occurred to me that I didn't want something that would too obviously serve as an analogy or an allegory for the film. I wanted the folklore to serve as a bookend that would relate emotionally and almost unconsciously, but not logically. A lot of times people who watch the film struggle with this question of who's the mongoose and who's the snake. And that's great, because it triggers the interpretive faculty of the human imagination and that's what I hoped that the story would do. But I also think that there's no simple resolution to the question.”
He’s still at an early stage in his filmmaking career, so receiving Oscar attention is a bit overwhelming.
“I'm just completely flabbergasted. I think I knew we had lightning in a bottle when I saw Sajda and Ananya together and how incredible their performances were. I knew it was magic. And I've loved this film for a very long time, but I think every independent filmmaker makes something that they're proud of and they wish more people would see it. And unfortunately, with short films it's really hard to get attention, to build an audience – so I'm just incredibly humbled and honoured that it has gotten the attention that I think these two girls’ performances deserve, and I'm really excited that they have that. That they're going to have really bright futures as actresses if they decide to pursue that professionally as a career.
“It's just incredible. It also allows us to take the film and use it as a platform for positive change. I don't believe that every form of art should have some kind of social message, and I'm not even entirely sure that Anuja has a singular social message. It's not didactic, like ‘You should do this,’ or ‘You should do that,’ or ‘You should feel this, you should feel that.’ But I am incredibly grateful that the film that I happened to make, that happened to get this much attention, has the potential to use that attention to do more.
“I’m just really humbled by the whole thing and excited that people are responding the way that they do. When I get like a text or somebody emails me or messages me after a screening, telling me how it left them feeling and how powerful it was, that's like the dream for a filmmaker, because that's what we try to do, right? We are creating experiences through human emotion, so it's really lovely.”
If you would like to help street kids like Sajda, you can donate to the Salaam Balaak Trust.
