30/08/2024 - VENICE 2024: The director and the lead actress, who are personal and professional partners, speak about their impetus to collaborate on a film inspired by their relationship

(© Isabeau de Gennaro/Cineuropa)

As a Madhesi individual himself, director Deepak Rauniyar has crafted Pooja, Sir [+see also:
film review
trailer
interview: Deepak Rauniyar, Asha Magrati
film profile], a deeply personal story set in the context of the 2015 Madhesi ethnic-minority protests in southern Nepal. Rauniyar co-wrote Pooja, Sir with his wife, Asha Magrati, who also plays the eponymous leading role. The film had its world premiere in the Orizzonti section of this year’s Venice Film Festival.

Cineuropa: Your film started out with the working title The Sky Is Mine. The new title emphasises a different aspect of the movie. What was the reasoning behind this change?
Deepak Rauniyar: It came about during the editing process and from the feedback we started getting. People kept saying that the title The Sky Is Mine made it feel like a happy film, which it’s not. Originally, I was intrigued by a poem by Abbas Kiarostami. The way I thought about The Sky Is Mine is that all of our characters are minorities, and in a way, they were claiming the sky. That was meaningful for us, but it felt like people were wondering about it a lot while they were watching it. We didn’t want people to wonder, so we gave it a more straightforward title that would also embrace identity in a film about Pooja’s journey.

The film centres on Pooja and Mamata, two very different women police officers dedicated to their own positions and identities in different ways. How did this particular character relationship come about?
DR: The film is actually inspired by us. She [Asha], naturally, is Pooja.

Asha Magrati: And he is Mamata.

DR: We were inspired by Asha’s experience in my world since we started dating – how different her actual experience was from what she’d been expecting. The film is structured around an outsider coming into a Madhesi person’s life or a Madhesi town, and experiencing that world and being impacted by it in some way. Our goal was for the audience to go on the same kind of journey and, by the end, develop empathy or a connection. We wanted this film to be a bridge between communities.

Both of us grew up during the Panchayat [absolute monarchical] system in the country and during the Nepali Civil War. When the peace process came, there were massive protests by darker-skin Madhesis in 2007, 2008 and 2015. They were brutally repressed, and several were killed. Knowing the story so closely and the way society became colder after the protest, we felt that it was our responsibility to make a film that everyday media could not cover. It could have been a totally different movie if it had dramatised a protestor who’s going through that. But then it would have been a different film for us. It felt more natural if we came from outside this point of view, into this village. We get that understanding of everyday Nepalis, and then we come into the town, and it gets transformed into something else.

AM: Before I met him, my perspective was totally different. After our wedding, it changed: I felt so guilty about why we were still doing these kinds of things. They [Madhesi people] are also Nepali. They are also our family, our communities. I wanted to tell my people. We were thinking, “Let’s tell them from Pooja’s point of view.” I wanted to tell everyone that they are also people from this country, and not different.

DR: Asha used to drive a motorbike. I remember one night when we were driving back – I used to work for the BBC at the time – the police stopped us. I was carrying two laptops, and they wanted proof that they were mine. I showed my BBC ID – in a third-world country, the BBC ID means a lot, it's very powerful. But it didn’t help. They kept asking for proof until she got really angry and they backed off. Those were the kinds of experiences that we had.

There’s a bit of gender bending involved in transposing your stories onto these characters, and Pooja particularly stands out in this context because she is queer and more masculine-presenting.
DR: As we started to get into interviewing people and meeting police officers, we thought that 2015 would be the best setting because that was the time when everything was happening. We were really amazed meeting these women who were police officers and were joining the department where there were so few women. Still, the Nepali police have less than 5% or 7% women, I don’t know the exact number. A lot of officers that we interviewed at that time, whom we followed for six or seven years of back-to-back interviewing, were queer. We felt that this was natural and authentic for this story.

For Asha herself, it was more interesting that she had a brother who died early, when he was only 24. Since then, her mother would cry or think, “I don’t have a son to cremate me,” or “Who I can rely on when I die? Who will do my rituals?” So [Asha] had made up her mind that she would do the rituals and she would be that son at home, and she acted like a son growing up until her late twenties or early thirties.

AM: From my experience and my childhood growing up at home, only the son was important for my parents. Even though a girl is doing everything for them, they think she is not important. For Pooja’s queerness, I have a niece, and we drew a bit of that character from within my family. But mostly, we brought our relationship into the movie.