‘Chhello Show’ director Pan Nalin's quest to 'become' a film

Filmmaker Pan Nalin has been a drifter all his life, someone who constantly seeks stories within himself and one could visibly experience this in his Gujarati film Chhello Show, a part-autobiographical drama that captures the charm of the western region of Gujarat while paying homage to the cinema of the past.

Chhello Show (The Last Film Show in English) has been selected as India’s official entry to the 95th Academy Awards under the Best International Feature Film category and Nalin is completely in love with all the love he is receiving for his work.  The self-taught director, who decided to become a filmmaker at a very young age, says that The Last Film Show is very personal and autobiographical.

“Samay and his gang’s adventure in the movie are what I did as a kid with my gang of friends,” he says, recalling how his father sold tea at a remote railway station, a station that was nobody’s destination.

“There was nothing except vast fields and open skies. Besides trains, there were airplanes far in the sky, and that was our only connection with the rest of the world. My mother too was an excellent cook. My father became poorer and poorer as he saw his land, then his cows, and lastly his home being snatched away by his own brothers, leaving him with nothing but a tiny tea stall on a remote railway station. So I had never been to the movies till I was about eight,” he says, adding that the day he saw one, he was enlightened. This was before he turned nine.

“I wanted to ‘become’ films! The Last Film Show is also filmed in many real locations close to my native place in Gir and in Kathiawar where I grew up. We even resurrected the abandoned cinema hall where I had seen my very first movie, and that too became one of the main locations in the movie,” says the filmmaker.

Set in the Kathiawar (Saurashtra) region of Gujarat, Chhello Show is the story of Samay (Bhavin Rabari) who aspires to study ‘light’, and is fascinated by the way movies are projected and the process involved in making the reels. The Gujarati film is produced by many, including Roy Kapur Films.

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Best known for directing award-winning and visually striking films such as Samsara, Valley Of Flowers, Angry Indian Goddesses and Ayurveda: Art Of Being in the past, Nalin, as a filmmaker, believes in evolving with time and with emotional ups and downs. “My journey as a filmmaker has never been about the destination, it has always been about the journey, walking rather than arriving,” he says.

And his family has been his biggest inspiration in all this.

“My parents contributed the most. They could hardly read or write but over the years I realized they were gifted with the amazing power of perception. That perception and their organic and spiritual lifestyle often produced fresh ways of wisdom. A life science that was unquestionably unique to them,” he says, adding that his brothers and sisters taught him to be humble and appreciate every breath he takes. “Every time I make a movie I go back to my family roots to seek inspiration.”

So does that mean his personal ideologies shaped his film journey?

The ideology is a funny thing, and with him, it changes every day, every single moment, says Nalin. However, to name the few shaping moments, he says first it is life that shapes his ideology, then it is death.

“Then sometimes it is my parents or at other times me being a parent. Sometimes it is all the hatred and anger in the world. Then other times it is all the hatred and anger in me. Sometimes it is the love I have felt, sometimes it is the love I have given.

“Sometimes it is a great man and his life. Then other times it is not so great a man with his worthless life. Sometimes it is people who have something to say. Sometimes it is animals who have nothing to say. I can go on and on…”

A self-taught filmmaker

The self-taught filmmaker also conceived a unique comedy TV series of Doordarshan in collaboration with famous cartoonist R. K. Laxman. The series was later sold and became a major hit under the title of Wagle Ki Duniya.

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Nalin travelled and lived in the USA and UK for about a year and then in Europe for six months. After his return to India, he started writing screenplays and making documentaries for Discovery, Canal Plus, BBC and other leading international TV networks.

Nalin also made short documentaries on Indian superstars Shah Rukh Khan and Sridevi. However, talking about the films that he grew up watching, he says that at first he only knew about popular Indian masala films, then he discovered Hollywood, and later as a teenager, he fell upon the world cinema.

“So there were days when I will be watching Maya Deren and Robert Bresson in the morning, Star Wars in the afternoon and Amar Akbar Anthony in the night. When it comes to watching movies I do not think I ever ‘grew up’ . I am still like a kid when I go to see movies. I could laugh and cry easily. So I have never been conscious of what impacted me or my thought process. Strangely, as far as the impact on my movies is concerned, it often comes from the non-film world like architecture, engineering, agriculture, or cooking,” elucidates the director.

Apart from representing India at the Academy, Chhello Show had its world premiere as the opening film at the Tribeca Film Festival and has won multiple awards across various international film festivals including the Golden Spike at the 66th Valladolid Film Festival in Spain, where it also enjoyed commercial success during its theatrical run.

Also starring Vikas Bata, Richa Meena, Bhavesh Shrimali, Dipen Raval and Rahul Koli, the story is set against the backdrop of cinemas in India witnessing a massive transition from celluloid to digital, where hundreds of single-screen cinemas stand dilapidated or have disappeared altogether.

Talking about the evolution of cinema from a single screen to multiplexes and now OTT in the real world, Nalin says that storytelling at heart is the same, it is the ways we narrate stories that will keep evolving.

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For him, years ago, it was an era of cinema, when phones were not smart, the net was not flix, the box was not an office and movies were not ‘content’.

“We are living in strange times for someone who grew up loving cinema, which is now being reduced to content and commodity. It is deeply saddening.”

“The more writers and directors we ‘produce’ in film schools, the more we are flooding the world with manufactured emotions and tricksters who master dishonestly manipulating human emotions. Content is the king and cinema is now reduced to its sidekick. However, I want to send out an optimistic message that the mediums of storytelling will keep evolving and the storytellers have to keep up with that evolution. They have to keep adorning new avatars if they want their voices to be heard. As a filmmaker, I embrace these evolutions and adapt.”

Finally, ‘Chhello Show’ is out for the world to see. So, is he happy with the buzz?

“I have always tried in my own way to entertain and inspire the audience,” he says.

“The world is passing through terrible times, an era like we have never seen before. As a storyteller, I want to share feelings of hope and refreshing air,” adds Nalin emphasizing that he wants to celebrate the beauty of our planet and show how much simpler our life used to be, through this film.

“Just in a short span of one hundred years, what have we done to this earth? What have we done to our souls? For me, The Last Film Show is a meditation on all these concerns. A wake-up call to mindfulness. It’s a jubilatory story about the birth, life, death, and rebirth of films,” he says and feels elated to see people moved, uplifted, and by the end drenched in a colorful world of storytellers. “They all seem to fall in love with portrayals of 5 Fs in the movie: Family, Friends, Food, Films and Future.”