“If freedom were to speak, she would ask, ‘Am I not free?” – This is the sentiment that a new filmmaker, Leena Patoli, has explored in a short and powerful film, titled ‘Anthems’, which is showing at the VHC Contemporary art gallery in Pune’s Koregaon Park. Tightly packed with symbols and socio-political motifs, ‘Anthems’ zeroes in on an incident in the lives of its characters to draw a larger image of the history of nation-building. It will be on view till January 15.
“Freedom comes in many shapes and forms, in our field, in particular, through expression. I am not so concerned about the details of it, as a whole is often on my mind. Having been exposed to both eastern and western lifestyles and philosophies I have examined and questioned freedom to a great deal. Currently, due to the circumstances in Iran and how it’s been dealt with, especially by the media outside of Iran, the subject is bolder than ever for me,” says Vida Heydari, owner of VHC Contemporary and curator of the show.
The form that peaks in ‘Anthems’ has marked Leena’s films from the beginning. Her worldview has stretched the personal into the political from her first film, in 2016, titled ‘Death and Cookery’, which is about “a day in the empty life of a bourgeois Sindhi family, their pet fish, plants and pigeons”. Two years later, she made ‘I Want to be Loved’, a documentary that draws parallels between the lives of a trans woman and Leena’s cousin who was about to get married. “They were both looking for love and it made me think of the things that Indian society teaches us,” says the filmmaker.
‘Death and Cookery’ was for eight minutes, ‘I Want to be Loved’ for 33 minutes and ‘Anthems’ lasts four minutes and thirty-eight seconds. “I have been into a non-structured way of communication. It was always a little experimental about how the story was constructed,” says Patoli. Based out of Pune, Leena was an avid reader and painter but was headed towards engineering before certain events in her family “made engineering seem like a bleak medium to spend your life with”. Photography and imaging seemed like a natural progression.
“The pursuit of cinema wasn’t a big part of growing up, but it caught on as sweet love. I watched Bollywood films occasionally, but each one of them had me dazed and mesmerised in its world for months, till the next one. However, it was not in my family’s imaginable scope to pursue filmmaking. Since my grandparents came to India from Sindh during the Partition, securing life is a priority. So, navigating from the pursuit of engineering to the realisation of cinema was a detour,” she adds. At present, Patoli is studying filmmaking in Prague and, coming up next, is ‘Marching in the Dark’, a feature documentary by director Kinshuk Surjan for which Patoli is the cinematographer.
