Entertainment News | Wanted to Capture Death of a Culture, Its Stories in 'Rains Don't Make Us Happy Anymore': Director
Get latest articles and stories on Entertainment at LatestLY. Director Yashasvi Juyal's short documentary "Rains Don't Make Us Happy Anymore" begins as an imaginary conversation between a tribal boy and his faraway lover as they share myths and stories about Lohari, their Uttarakhand village now submerged in the waters of a hydroelectric dam.
New Delhi, Apr 9 (PTI) Director Yashasvi Juyal's short documentary "Rains Don't Make Us Happy Anymore" begins as an imaginary conversation between a tribal boy and his faraway lover as they share myths and stories about Lohari, their Uttarakhand village now submerged in the waters of a hydroelectric dam.
"Rains Don't Make Us Happy Anymore", which will premiere at the prestigious Visions du Réel International Film Festival in Nyon, Switzerland on Thursday, comes from a personal space for Juyal, who hails from the region and strongly feels about the displacement and migration there.
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Though there is a touch of magic realism in his 27-minute-long documentary, Juyal said the village and the stories are real.
"It's the death of a culture, its stories and so many community experiences because of this village going away... We have heard stories about the ecological imbalances in the upper Himalayas, especially in the Garhwal region. I am always looking at what's happening in the upper Himalayas," the filmmaker told PTI in an interview.
Lohari was one of the worst affected villages because of the construction of the Vyasi dam, which is a part of the Vyasi Hydroelectric Project, originally proposed in 1972. Villagers of Lohari staged several protests which were widely reported in the media in 2022.
Juyal, a self-taught filmmaker, said the idea to explore this particular story came to him through his producer Sharad Mehra. Mehra connected him to one of his friends, Professor Atri Nautiyal, who has extensively studied displacement and migration.
When the director went for a recce around Lohari, Juyal said he was overcome by a sense of dystopia.
"...because just behind that mountain is Mussoorie, which is a romanticised tourist destination about the mountains and then theirs (Lohari village) is a land which is destroyed by this (dam). There is already another bigger project underway there."
Juyal said his family originally came from Pauri Garhwal, which has its own history of displacement due to the Tehri dam project. He has also grown up listening to the stories about the ghost villages in the upper Himalayas due to migration.
"So I have always connected to that space," he said.
The idea to explore the documentary through the lens of magic realism was partly inspired by his fascination with the genre and partly by Uttarakhand's culture.
"I'm fascinated by the experimental style of filmmaking and magic realism because Uttarakhand, especially the Jaunsar region, has an intriguing culture in terms of mythology. The people there believe they are the descendants of the Pandavas but their history is quite different. I like meeting people and I get fascinated by how these stories keep getting distorted as the region changes.
"During my recce, I met this guy, who is the only remaining person in Lohari and he kept talking about Hidamba, Kirmira (characters from Mahabharata) and the fight between the local gods and asuras. I decided to tap this into my story."
Juyal, who is looking forward to showcasing the film to the international audience in the festival in Nyon, said like many aspiring young filmmakers, he also travelled to Mumbai but after sometime he decided to come back to Dehradun.
"I was homesick. Dehradun has its small-town charm to it, which is interesting. It is the gateway to the Himalayas. When I came back, I decided to explore the region from my own lens," said the filmmaker, also known for his award-winning short film "The Last Rhododendron" (2021).
He is currently working on his debut feature "Ink-Stained Hand & The Missing Thumb", a migrant worker drama, which was selected among 15 projects in Hong Kong International Film Festival's Asia Film Financing Forum (HAF).
"It is about a toll booth worker who dies in a tragic accident and reappears to deliver a poignant letter to his lover," he said.
Juyal, who was one of two participants sent by Netflix to the Busan International Film Festival as part of its Fund for Creative Equity cohort from India for "Ink-Stained....", also hopes to make a film on Hindi poet Manglesh Dabral, who hailed from Tehri Garhwal in Uttarakhand.
"It will not be a biopic on him (Dabral) but I want to make a film around his poems. He also came from the mountains and though he settled in Delhi, many of his poems talk about the sadness of leaving home."
(The above story is verified and authored by Press Trust of India (PTI) staff. PTI, India’s premier news agency, employs more than 400 journalists and 500 stringers to cover almost every district and small town in India.. The views appearing in the above post do not reflect the opinions of LatestLY)