Filmmaker Sarah Singh brings her film, the Om Puri-starrer 'A Million Rivers' to Chandigarh and fondly remembers the gifted actor
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It wasn’t meant to be a tribute film but it has gone on to become one. Early last year, filmmaker and artist Sarah Singh released ‘A Million Rivers’, her ‘surrealist fiction film’ that stars the late actor Om Puri and Lillete Dubey. An award-winning filmmaker and artist based in New York, Singh screened the film in Chandigarh at the Government Museum and Art Gallery on Tuesday evening on the invitation of the Chandigarh Lalit Kala Akademi. The film has been invited to screen in several cities in India as a tribute to Om Puri. It has been showcased at the Kochi-Muziris Biennale, National Gallery of Modern Art, Bengaluru and Jawahar Kala Kendra in Jaipur recently.
And like most of her works, this film in also in black and white. “I like black and white as to me it depicts reality. The play of light and shade has always intrigued me,” said Singh whose first documentary film, ‘The Sky Below’, explored Partition and was widely acclaimed. ‘A Million Rivers’, as Singh puts it, also emerges from the partitioning of a place resulting in the crisis of identity, fragmentation of relationships with others and self, fantasy, feeling of impermanence, violence and aggression.
As to what it was like to work with Om Puri, the filmmaker tells us, “At a memorial meeting, I heard director Sudhir Misra and actor Naseeruddin Shah talk about Om Puri not just as an actor but as a person, the way he was two-three decades ago. And all what they said was exactly what I would say about Om Puri today. Not only was he a gifted actor, he was a person who had not let fame or time change him. I was incredibly lucky to have worked with him.”
Interestingly, the filmmaker met the late actor at a function and even though they had never met before, Singh realised that the actor was very approachable and said yes to a project based a lot on his intuition and gut. “I really liked that he not hold himself back from trying something new. On the sets he was effortless,” reminisces Singh who worked with Puri in 2014.
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Born into the royal family of Patiala (former Punjab Chief Minister Capt Amarinder Singh is her cousin), Singh is looking to document the history of Patiala in her future work. Speaking of which, she’s already on to her new fiction film, ‘Western Summer’ that stars actors from different countries including India. Incidentally, she’s not closed to the idea of working in Bollywood. “I spent some years in Mumbai and worked as an assistant director. It was a great to get an idea of how the industry works and I think it gave me perspective and I moved from being a painter to working with moving images,” explains Singh who admits her latest work will have “one direct Bollywood moment.” We look forward to seeing that.
