Deepak Rauniyar
Highway, Deepak Rauniyar (2012)
Deepak Rauniyar is a Nepalese screenwriter, producer, editor and film director. After participating in Locarno's Open Doors initiative, Rauniyar's debut feature Highway premiered at the Berlinale— the first Nepalese film ever selected for a major international film festival. Rauniyar's second feature White Sun premiered at Venice, Palm Springs, Rotterdam and Singapore, where it won Best Asian Film. It was the ninth Nepalese submission in history for the Best Foreign Language Film, but was not nominated.
In an exclusive interview with Filmatique, Deepak Rauniyar discusses Nepal's civil war, borders and racial discrimination, obsolete bodies of government and his next project.
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FILMATIQUE: Highway seeks to capture both the political and personal climates of a world rarely depicted onscreen— contemporary Nepalese society. What was your inspiration for this story, and why did you choose to frame the narrative in the details of interpersonal relationships, rather than making a film that was overtly political?
DEEPAK RAUNIYAR: Highway is inspired by my own travel experiences, especially in 2009. At that time I worked for the BBC World Service Trust, the BBC's international development charity, writing and producing radio dramas. We used to record on location, mostly using non-actors. It required a lot of travel. I have spent a lot of time during those bandhs, stuck up to 57 hours once, with no food or drinking water.
A new trend has emerged in post-war Nepal— people who are "unhappy" and have a "demand" for the government shut down major highways. This is known as a bandh.
We were returning to Kathmandu after the recording in Ilam, a distance of 350 miles between the two. At least 3 separate political parties had organized bandhs in different parts of the country. No vehicles were moving besides journalists, weddings, and ambulances. We were in a BBC car so we could move. But every time we approached a protesting group, we had to stop, talk to them, show our ID's and then pass.
In Sunasari, near the Koshi river, a few people approached us asking for help. A small van with a bride and her the family had been stopped by bandh organizers. They needed to reach the nearest temple about an hour away, but they didn't have a wedding banner or a music band so the bandh organizers didn't believe them. We escorted the wedding party to the temple and from here began to talk about the idea of a film, which later became Highway.
When I thought of a bus in Nepal, I thought of the country. The country is comprised of people from diverse strata of society, and a bus is one of the few places where you get a cross-section of society. So I thought, it would be a great "vehicle" for the film, which provides an opportunity to explore the contemporary society we were living in.
Highway, Deepak Rauniyar (2012)
FLMTQ: Much of the film's tension arises from its geographical dimension— a bus snaking through the Himalayas, from Ilam to Kathmandu. The bus' route if often impeded by bandhs, or political protests; thus the audience also falls hostage to the jolting journey. How did you seek to communicate the anxiety of this experience cinematically? Do you believe that structure itself can evoke emotion among the audience more effectively than dialogue?
DR: I think so. Once I know the story, I try to find right structure which allows me to bring those elements into the film in the most natural way. The less said, the better. I'm not successful doing that in Highway though— the film has a lot of dialogue!
For Highway, we were following a bus journey. And because of the bus we were dealing with lot of characters, and their individual stories. It was all current so we felt, why don't we try to tell it in an inverted pyramid style, all non-linear? The major incident in the story comes first and then we go back in time and to places, characters and other elements of the story that led up to it.
We believed that jolting journey created the feeling of the bandh— being stranded, taken hostage by something we don't expect or imagine would to happen in our journey. We also implemented abrupt cutting. I'm not sure how successful we were, but that was our intention.
FLMTQ: Love seems to inform the majority of the characters' narratives, whether it be an army lieutenant en route to visit his wife, or a girl traveling to be reunited with the man she will marry. Why did you choose to privilege love in particular? What is it about love that motivates us above all else?
DR: Highway reflects a moment in time in a complex Nepali society, which is divided by caste, class, race and color— how people look, feel or believe— and in the wake of a decade-long civil war. When we face a common problem, we come together for a brief time to resolve it. But just as soon we are back into our lives. We all put ourselves or our loved ones first!
Even though the music band helps Highway's characters reach their destination, the characters abandon them. Before that, because of their uniforms and how they look, the bus staff didn't want to let them board the bus. We didn't compose that scene. The bus staff aren't actors and they didn't know we were filming. We asked our band members— who are also non-actors, a real wedding music band— to get onto the bus however they can. We stayed further away to film it. It was very dark and becoming difficult to film. Soon, it started to rain. What you see happening on screen is real.
The characters and events also metaphorically represent our political realities, behavior and alliances, which are today still very much true.
Highway, Deepak Rauniyar (2012)
FLMTQ: Another major theme of the film is how our personal lives often intersect in unintended ways, and how small gestures can themselves become political acts. What responsibility do you believe we have as individuals to strive for collective good, and what responsibility do you believe filmmakers have specifically to encourage political discourse?
DR: I think as filmmakers we have the responsibility to create an experience on-screen that people wouldn't have otherwise. Those experiences have the power to transform people. This is essential. I believe in the power of film as an art form to help people understand one another's predicaments, and our shared experiences of life and death.
FLMTQ: Like Highway, your new film White Sun focuses on one microcosm— a village high in the mountains— as a nexus of the clash between tradition and modernity in contemporary Nepal. How do you believe Chandra internalizes and embodies this conflict, and how does he come to represent Nepal as a body of people grappling with their post-war identity?
DR: Like in Highway, the situations and arguments you see in White Sun represent the mindset of the country's majority. Groups belonging to higher castes, like the elder generation of the dead man— the priest, the old uncle— still insist on traditional law, even in the capital of Kathmandu. Then there's Agni (formerly Chandra) and Suraj, the adults, and the future generation of children, Pooja and Badri.
The first two adults are divided by their beliefs and their castes. People like the former guerilla Chandra believe in change, that traditional law is unfair to everyone else. But people like his brother Suraj still defend the older generation, even if they agree that some rules were discriminatory. Because they had no mercy for opposing parties in the past, their past now haunts them. The bitter experiences of war still permeate people's lives today. The children suffer from the other groups' beliefs, even if they can't yet understand what caste, community or class means.
I was interested to force this three generations to intersect in one place and explore what good could result from it. We've gone through a lot in Nepal in the past decades, but rarely discuss about our feelings and experiences with our parents or children. Even the shoot for us— the cast and crew— living together for two months was a transforming experience. We talked about things we never would have otherwise.
White Sun, Deepak Rauniyar (2016)
FLMTQ: Paralleling the bus journey in Highway, White Sun revolves around a procession of a deceased elder: Chandra's father. While Chandra fought alongside the Maoists in favor of the revolution, his father was deeply traditional as remain many in his home village. What spiritual or psychological importance do you attribute to the act of movement? Can you comment on the importance of the ritual of movement across generations in Nepal today?
DR: Movement came as a requirement for the story to function in both films. In Highway, to experience the bandh we needed to be on the road, traveling. The feeling of being stranded wasn't only of the feeling of the traveler, but of everyone. I wanted to bring that experience to screen.
When making the film I lived in a city, but from time to time I needed to travel to the village for work or to meet my parents. On every trip I saw villages getting emptier and emptier. Only elders, women or children were left. Even younger women were leaving the village for work in Israel or the Gulf countries. It used to bug me. White Sun came out of this frustration.
In White Sun, Chandra is forced to come home after many years following the death of his father. Chandra being new to the village gave me the space that I needed to see things differently. I could bring my experience through him onscreen. Chandra's fight with his brother forces him to walk to other villages to find help at a police station. This movement allowed me to observe and explore the village, to experience life in the wake of a decade-long civil war.
The dead body is also a metaphor for the old constitution and the king's regime which was overthrown by the war. Just as Nepal struggled to establish a new government and constitution, the film's characters struggle to get the old man's corpse out of the house. They could take an easier way but they don't because of old beliefs. They choose to make life harder on themselves. Whether it's small issues, like changing official names or establishing legal citizenship, or bigger political issues like our constitution, we don't seem to look for the logical path. We overthrew the old regime but have yet to establish the new. The death procession represents that experience.
FLMTQ: Both films also utilize non-professional actors alongside more seasoned film veterans. Was this choice for the sake of naturalism, convenience, or both?
DR: The casting process was long in both films. We went all around the country. We were open to all kinds of actors, professional or first-time actors. Especially in White Sun there were several characters— such as children, and elders— that we knew would be hard to find in the industry.
I like improvising dialogue and movement with actors. My process starts with a precise screenplay then tries to bring as much local truth as possible into the film through rigorous work on location. Dialogue is re-worked through rehearsals to ensure that both non-actors and actors speak as authentically as possible.
So I need actors who are flexible. In my experience, some actors, and especially popular actors, like being dictated to. We were careful about that. We also looked for actors with a similar ethnicity and political beliefs as the characters. It would have been hard to cast someone who didn't understand what Chandra/Agni was going through or who didn't believe on him. Because of all this, it took a long time.
But I've worked with Asha Magrati, my wife, for casting on both my features. She is a theater veteran with much more experience than me. We start talking about actors during the writing process. She understands what I need and helps me find what I'm looking for. She has been great.
White Sun, Deepak Rauniyar (2016)