Exploring idea of home with Maisam Ali’s debut film ‘In Retreat’
Born in Iran, brought up in Ladakh, an engineering degree from New Delhi and finally mastering the art of filmmaking at the Film Training Institute of India, who can understand the feeling of displacement and rootlessness better than Maisam Ali. Any wonder then that his debut film, ‘In Retreat’, whose genesis lies in a personal experience, has touched a chord globally. The personal has become universal.
Maisam wanted his debut feature to be ‘original and authentic, experiential and experimental’. After its world premiere at the Cannes Film Festival, the first Indian film to be featured in its ACID (Association for the Distribution of Independent Cinema) sidebar programme, it now has a date with the prestigious Busan International Film Festival. And later this month, it would be showcased at MAMI Mumbai Film Festival.
The film tells the story of a 50-year-old man who comes back to Ladakh and is faced with the gnawing realisation of not belonging. He says homelessness is a universal predicament. “It’s a story of every small town. Parents leave the city for work and children step out for higher studies. We come back after having a worldview but don’t really fit in.” In his lead protagonist, you find an echo of similar thoughts, “a distant version of myself”, as Maisam puts it. “It deals with subtle and fragile emotions. He comes in the shadow of the night. For society at large, he may not have come and for him, it could be the last memory of what was home for him.”
Maisam’s idea of home is hard to define, but filmmaking certainly is a place he finds himself at home. Finding this home, however, involved a few unnecessary detours, like an engineering degree. What is it with engineers turning filmmakers, we ask, and he says, “When you start off, you really don’t know what you want to do in life.”
Interestingly, it was at the engineering college that he discovered his love for cinema. When FTII happened, he knew he wanted to make films, but only after learning and honing the craft fully. The FTII, which is having its moment in time what with Payal Kapadia’s Cannes win, he shares, is indeed a “serious place, perhaps too serious, for, it makes us too idealistic”. This is not to say the FTII graduates are not thriving in mainstream cinema.
With his second film, he is also likely to discover new landscapes, maybe make more accessible cinema, have more humour in it, but without altering the lens with which he looks at cinema.
Right now, everyone is gushing over how he has rediscovered this new landscape of Ladakh, far removed from its touristy image. He credits cinematographer Ashok Meena, his senior at FTII, for fully grasping the interiority of mind and spaces he wanted to delve into. In fact, many of his FTII friends chipped in the making of the film, and mostly gratis.
The choice of language, Hindi and Ladakhi, however, is not born out of any expediency. “Though I know Ladakhi, I can’t get the syntax and grammar of its poetry. I wanted to drive home the insider-outsider dichotomy with my hero talking in Hindi,” Maisam says. If the film is rooted in its cultural space, world influences are apparent too. Inspired by Iranian cinema, which brings to fore the complexity of life in simple ways, ‘In Retreat’ also has a fragment of a poem, ‘If I Were Another’, by Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish, not as a political statement but as thematic connect. In fact, Maisam is not looking at making an ideological or political statement, but only exploring life around him. As the opening lines in the trailer of his film and the poem go — ‘Agar Mein Ek Musafir Hota…’ — what does this traveller on the cinematic road say to his fellow passengers? He smiles, “Well, it’s a journey, make it rich and interesting. Explore.”
