Long Life of a Short Film
by Riyad Vinci Wadia
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Filmmaker Riyad Vinci Wadia
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This is part two of a four-part series. Please
read part one,
part three,
and part four.
Watch BOMgAY in the
PlanetOut Online Cinema.
By the summer of 1995 I had written and discarded some 50 ideas for
gay stories. As I discovered for myself the gay world that lived and
thrived in the shadows of the gullies of India's urban underbelly, I kept
changing my mind on the exact angle from which I wanted to tell the
story. A collaborative attempt to work on a television project with
filmmaker Kaizad Gustad introduced me to the work of R. Raj Rao, a writer
and poet who had just released his book of short stories One Day I
Locked My Flat in Soul City. A slim volume, I read it in a matter of
hours. This book was the first work I had read from an Indian author that
was able to capture the essence of being a homosexual in India. It told
its stories primarily from a middle-class point of view, a point of view
that I found interesting to read and document. I didn't waste time. I
traced Raj to a university in Poona (a couple of hours' drive from
Bombay) and a few weeks later had acquired the rights to adapt his book
for the silver screen. We decided to write the screenplay
collaboratively, meeting on weekends.
As we went about this venture, we found it wasn't as easy as we had
hoped. Struggling to write and make a living proved to be difficult for
both of us. One weekend Raj would have commitments, the next weekend I
would have to be elsewhere. All this meant that our writing process
became way too extended and we lost the thread. I became disenchanted
when, after the initial rush of creativity had worn off, I found that
raising the money for making a gay film from India was not going to be as
easy as I had envisaged. My friends in the international gay festival mafia,
who had seemed so close and easily accessible when I was on the
festival circuit, suddenly seemed very far away now that I was once again
stuck in Bombay.
By the summer of 1996 the gay feature project had almost stalled. With a need to
keep busy, and at the prompting of some friends, I started to occupy myself with
other projects. One such project centered on transgender issues in a patriarchal
society. Titled A Mermaid Called
Aida, this was a documentary on Aida Banaji, a notorious transsexual from
Bombay. Intended for television release, the making of this feature length-film
was a bumpy and long-drawn journey. It gave me an opportunity to focus on gender
politics and sexual identity, and very soon the buzz in the film industry in
Bombay was that I was a director working on bold new films.
Then one afternoon Raj called me and asked if he could come around to
show me some poems he had recently written. He had been invited to attend
the
writing program and workshop at Iowa State University and was keen that I
film him with a video camera reading some of his poems. He wanted to have
some visual material to take with him, as the other writers who were
invited to the program would.
That evening as I read the three typed pages of poems, a shiver went down
my spine. Raj's poems were so explosive, so in-your-face gay, and so
incisive about the urban gay milieu that he and I had been trying to capture
in our screenplay. What wasn't working in our prose came alive with
vitriol in his poetry. I was determined to make something of this work.
My decision was further bolstered by the fact that I had just completed
some banal ad film assignments that had brought in some money -- money
that I could use to fund a short film project. I called Raj the next day
and said I was keen to make something of this material but not just have
him read his poems against a backdrop. I was keen to explore the poems
with my own vision and bring to screen the power and passion of the poems
as I had encountered them. Raj was agreeable. His only request was that I
have the film ready in time for his departure to the United States 18 days
later!
There are some moments in one's artistic career where the mind, the soul,
and the medium all mesh together to create a work that comes from the
heart. For me, the making of BOMgAY was that moment. The
confluence of 27 years of being in the closet, two years of
being hedonistically out, and the confidence of regaining pride and
self-worth all came together to shape a film that, while only lasting 12
minutes, is very long in its evolution.
Watch BOMgAY in the
PlanetOut Online Cinema.
You can purchase a VHS copy ofBOMgAYfrom Wadia Movietone, NYC. E-mail the distributor at
cinema@mindspring.com or visit the Web site
www.wadiamovietone.com.
This is part two of a four-part series. Please
read part one,
part three,
and part four.
This essay is part of the landmark book, Queer Asian Cinema: Shadows in the Shade
edited by Andrew Grossman for the Haworth Press.
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