When I Decided ‘I Will Become a Filmmaker’

Whether that was luck or a curse, but at 13 I decided to become a filmmaker.

Part I

At 12 I made it into a school for gifted students where girls would study the school curriculum separately from boys, from nine in the morning until five in the late afternoon, with evenings dedicated to homework preparations. It was almost compulsory for students to stay in the dormitories from Sunday evening to Saturday afternoon.

It was supposed to be a beginning point of my academic path; it was estimated that in there I would find a hidden, scarcely distributed key to educational nourishment.

Though that also I absorbed and acquired, in there I discovered something that went beyond the mere what was unanimously thought to be the right thing.

Not every evening from 7 p.m. to 9 p.m. were students required to sit in the classrooms to work on their homework assignments. Sometimes, when calendar dates fit it, we were requested to join an auditorium to watch concerts, which were prepared for the celebration of certain holidays: if they belonged to organisations within the school system, we would watch them in the evening, but if they were official holidays, we would be their spectators at around 4 or 5 p.m.

One of these holidays was Independence Day, which in our country we celebrate every year on the 16th of December. That year was 2013, and we were about to commemorate the 22nd year of our recently gained independence.

There was one friend at school with whom I shared this love for cinema, with whom on that day we sat in the auditorium at the back row as the organisation team and performers on stage were getting ready for the performance, instead of starting on time.

When I scatteredly mentioned my amour for cinema, perhaps the first thing that came to your mind was Hollywood, or even movies that originated from our own local production. Whether I disappoint you here or gratify you, the confessional honesty here is that I was brought up on Indian cinema. But given the fact that I am from a nation which once in history belonged as part of the Soviet Union, where and when movies imported from India were in demand and supply to the extent that, even once the Union dissolved, the citizens of the now-independent countries still had lingering vestiges of harboured love for Bollywood.

Though I was born in an independent country, though neither my parents nor their relatives were the ones to adore those kinds of movies, at the age of 8 or 9, while watching Nickelodeon or Disney Channel, accidentally ending up pressing several buttons of the remote control, I ended up on a channel called ‘Индийское кино,’ which from Russian translates as ‘Indian Films.’ I think I just stayed on the channel without changing it back. The moment I arrived on it, it was showing a scheduled movie, one of whose scenes was a fight scene, for which Indian films are ironically known to be unfamiliar with the rules of physics.

True, the scene looked anything but close to reality. And maybe that was what kept me hooked. The fight scenes were not making sense to a practical eye, but who said I had one?

That channel would show an Indian movie every three hours according to its timetable, thus accumulating to around 7 to 8 movies per day. During summers, in case I would be at home, I would watch 3 to 4 in one day.

By the time I turned 12 and got enrolled into a new school, I had a deep fascination with those movies, backed up by hundreds of movies I had watched. I had never restricted myself to Bollywood movies solely once my knowledge of their country’s entertainment industry broadened by getting acquainted with many other industries, namely Tollywood, Kollywood, Mollywood.

In the 7th grade, I introduced that one friend of mine to the cinema knowledge I had, so that by 8th grade we would become the ones in class who would search for movies and download them to our flash cards as a preparation for movie time. Whether fortunate or not, it was the case that no other classmate would complain to us that from one movie session to another we would feed them all Bollywood movies. Partially, I deduced it, it was due to others’ unwillingness to go through all the processes of downloading the 2.5-hour ‘video.’ Whilst for some, it was just that they didn’t care as much as we did: it didn’t bother them that they kept watching one country’s movies as much as it bothered my friend and me in case we wouldn’t do so. In most cases, as long as it was SRK (Shah Rukh Khan) who starred as the protagonist in the movies, there was not much trouble for them in watching them.

In retrospect, my classmates were pretty accommodating to my extreme whims and unwavering passion for something stupid that the place to which we all belonged as students would never have called us to be like.

They were accommodating except for that one case in 9th or 10th grade, when one of the classmates, with whom I ironically would happen to share the same university campus later on, would come all prepared with a digital version of a recently released ‘Interstellar’ movie. That day, my friend and I were outvoted, and the majority chose the Hollywood movie that was bound to connect us during the movie time. It is needless to say, I was anything but connected to the storyline shown by our projector in the class. The fact that the movie had a non-linear plot didn’t help either, only contributing to making my already out-of-control and confused brain even fizzier.

I admit. I might have gotten too sensitive at that incident. Back then, I wasn’t that self-reflective or self-aware enough to see how inconsiderate I was of others’ tastes and wishes in relation to movies and art. I was not that thoughtful to begin with. Interestingly, though, no one in the class complained. From that incident onwards, I would even bring song-and-dance sequences from various Bollywood movies and put them on display on a classroom projector during the one-hour lunch time we were all provided from half past twelve to half past one p.m.

All would watch, and the ones who didn’t wouldn’t even utter a word of annoyance, instead choosing to get occupied with the tasks and dealings of their own necessity.

They should have discouraged me from the love I possessed for the cinema that was too colourful, too jubilant, too grand, too passionate. Who knows?! If only I hadn’t permitted those pink glasses to dictate my life’s further trajectory, maybe… just maybe I would not have ended up being that obsessed with this dream…