A debut worth the wait
Saibal Chatterjee

Ashvin Kumar’s sure-handed maiden feature, The Forest, lay in the cans far longer than a film this good should have. Mercifully, it is now finally out of the woods

Ashvin Kumar can now breathe a little easier than he has anytime in the past couple of years. While negotiating the pitfalls of trying to get a small, independent film out into the market, Kumar was locked in a battle with the censor board over Inshallah, Football, a documentary about a young Kashmiri footballer and his struggle to get a visa to travel abroad for coaching.

Ironically, despite being banned for public viewing, the film has gone on to win a National Award for the Best Film on Social Issues.

The long-delayed The Forest, too, has gone through much struggle before hitting the screen. It does not deal with an issue as contentious as Kashmir, yet it is anything but a safe film.

Nandana Sen in a still from The Forest

It is a taut thriller that fuses together a m`E9nage a trois, a ferocious man-eater on the rampage and a life-and-death confrontation between man and animal. But The Forest makes no concessions to the expectations of a risk-averse movie industry.

What the struggle to secure a release for the film has taught Ashvin is that life can never be smooth for an independent director like him. "These five years have been really painful," he says.

"When you show a movie like The Forest to the people, who hold the reins of distribution, they simply don’t get it," says Ashvin, whose 2005 documentary film Little Terrorist was nominated for an Academy Award in the short fiction category.

After abortive negotiations with a couple of big movie industry players for the distribution of The Forest, Ashvin Kumar has managed a limited release through PVR’s Director’s Rare initiative.

The film opened on May 11 on six screens in Mumbai, four in Delhi and one each in Chennai, Kolkata, Ahmedabad and Surat.

"A film like this should have got a big nationwide release, but I could not have compromised with my vision simply to cater to what the market wants," says the director.

He is equally critical of the media. "There is no support from the media for independent films. You have to pay for reviews these days. You need big money to play the promotion game."

The Forest, featuring Javed Jaffrey, Nandana Sen and Ankur Vikal, is about a dysfunctional married couple, who drive down from Delhi to a secluded jungle retreat to sort out their knotted relationship.

But matters only get worse. As soon as they reach the wildlife sanctuary, the childless couple bumps into a cop, who turns out to be the woman’s ex-lover. He lives in the forest with his motherless son. Long-suppressed emotions burst to the surface and throw the trio into the sort of turmoil they can barely handle.

The demons within are aggravated by a man-eating leopard lurking in the shadows, and the two men so distrustful of each other must now join forces to ward off the blood-thirsty mammal and survive the night.

Ashvin presents the love triangle and the complications it sparks as an analogy for the havoc wreaked by humans on the natural habitat of tigers and leopards, forcing many to turn into man-eaters.

"Human beings are as predatory as the creatures of the wild," says Ashvin. "As man becomes more petty and greedy, we unleash forces we cannot control."

Animals, the film suggests, hunt solely in order to survive. Human beings are far more self-seeking by nature.

"The lives of the four key characters in The Forest, including the cop’s son, are out of balance. So their relationships are warped," explains the director.

The Forest opens with a title card that reveals the hard reality: 150 people lose their lives every year in India in attacks by tigers and leopards. And the film’s end credits are accompanied by chilling photographic evidence of the brutality heaped on the kings of the forest by poachers.

But The Forest is anything but a drab vehicle for a pro-environment message. Neither is it a predictable thriller in which the protagonist and antagonist are clearly identified. Every character has shades of grey and it is never easy to anticipate how far each will go to self-destruct.

"I’ve always been focused on fiction filmmaking," says Ashvin Kumar. "I came quite late to documentaries. In The Forest, I wanted to take the theme out of the wildlife documentary space and make it as mainstream as I could."

Ashvin, who now lives in Goa, is set to turn the spotlight on the urban space in his next film, Hype. "It is the coming of age story of a 22-year-old single girl set in the cocaine-drenched, high society party circuit of Delhi," he says. "The film will focus on the male gaze that overwhelmingly dominates the city’s social landscape."

Ashvin plans to cast a big Bollywood star in one of the two male roles in Hype, while he himself will essay the other. He is ready to move on — from the grave dangers that lurk in a jungle to the no-less-perilous intricacies of existence in a big, bad city.

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