Kastoori: It's Time To Give The Small Film Its Due
Unlike Animal which opened at the box office with 4,000 screens or Archies, powered by the might of Bollywood’s shiniest and which allowed Netflix to collaborate with a dozen big-ticket brands, this film had to fight long and hard to be released. It had a quiet opening—on the same day that Archies hit Netflix—and was available to watch in 20 theatres across six Indian cities.
Kastoori was made on a one crore budget cobbled together by a collective led by eight women producers, many of whom are social workers, some of whom broke fixed deposits and mortgaged their gold because they believed in the storytelling power of its 33-year-old director Vinod Kamble. They met when Kamble took a film appreciation course at FTII, Pune, and one of the women was a teacher’s spouse.
The film is a stunning portrayal of lost childhoods, how this country repeatedly fails its most marginalised children and how they, miraculously, hold on to innocence and hope despite the brutalities of their daily lives.
Though the film won a National Award in 2019 (which Kamble finally received in 2021), showing it to audiences was a struggle. After months of tracking Anurag Kashyap and trying to find a way to make him watch the film, Kamble approached his friend Prateek Vats, the director of 2020’s Eeb Allay Ooo, who introduced him to his producer Ranjan Singh. Singh in turn connected Kamble to Kashyap and soon, he and director Nagraj Manjule were on board to help the film get a theatrical release.
The film’s lead actor, class topper Gopi, is on a quest for a rare perfume that will make him smell good. Gopi cleans toilets and water tanks and helps conduct post mortems, hammering skulls and stitching bodies. He buries unclaimed bodies, and sometimes reburies those that have been dug up by street dogs. He tags along with older boys who clean sewers because his mother wants him to learn the ropes. It’s the smells of these jobs—a lethal cocktail of blood, maggots, garbage and faeces—that seeps into his pores and one that he is desperate to rid himself of. His obsession with smell reminds me of Lady Macbeth, repeatedly rubbing her hands trying to get rid of imaginary blood. Gopi’s troubles, though, are anything but imaginary.
His father is a drunk and his mother, the epitome of the unceasing labour of Indian women, thinks studying is pointless when there’s only work written in her son’s future. His ever enthusiastic companion for any adventure is his Muslim classmate Adim, the son of a butcher. They are each other’s main support structure in the growing up years. My favourite scene in the film is Adim applying perfume on Gopi to cheer him up.
Though the idea of the young boy assisting with postmortems was inspired by a newspaper article that Kamble read and first made into a short film titled Post Mortem, a lot of the film—from Gopi’s eternal hopefulness to his Muslim best buddy—is autobiographical. The director effectively harnesses the power of his own story.
Kamble’s grandmother was a sanitation worker in Barshi, Maharashtra, where he grew up and where the film is shot, and he often helped her do the heavy lifting. “She used to show me cinema in return,” he says. Rajendra Kumar’s Suraj, best known for its song Baharon Phool Barsao was his first film. He also saw Dilwale, Raja Hindustani, Kaho Na Pyaar Hai, Koyla and other Hindi blockbusters at those 3 p.m. shows after his grandmother completed work.
His real life friend Afzal’s dramatic narrations of films he had seen on TV (like this cult fight sequence from Amar Akbar Anthony) were another entry to the world of cinema. “Later, I realised that even without any formal training, I can visualise a story when someone narrates it.”
The bullying depicted in the film came from Kamble’s experiences in engineering college. I ask how he battled the casteism and what advice he would give other marginalised students who face harassment and discrimination in higher educational institutions. “Have faith in yourself,” he replies. “I read lots of Babasaheb and Phule and Anna Bhau Sathe and realised that what I am facing is something people have faced forever. I at least have basic rights and the samvidhaan (Constitution). Get inspired by your history, understand that our struggle is only a fraction of what our forefathers faced.”
Kamble’s education path was propelled by his parents’ desire that he become an engineer and he even worked as a site engineer, however briefly. “After 8-10 days I realised that I was in the wrong place,” he says, adding that he soon understood he needed to be true to himself. “I couldn’t lie to myself and my family and I told them in 2014 that I wanted to do filmmaking full time.”
He got a job at a local drama company as a backstage artist, sweeping and supplying crews with water. “In 2015 I became an assistant director and my journey as a creative person started,” Kamble says.
His first feature film, Kastoori, which depicts the lived reality of Dalits from a child’s POV, is one of the best movies I’ve seen this year. It’s made me take a pledge to turn away from the mainstream and pay renewed attention to the less-publicised films that often slip past us.
Starting Point
I asked voice actor Shiv Kanungo, my go-to film guide, to share a list of gems from 2023. Here’s what he sent:
Lakadbaggha, Bommai Nayagi, Aatmapamphlet and Viduthalai: Part 1 on Zee 5.
Kathal, Nanpakal Nerathu Mayakkam, Adrishya Jalakangal and Three of Us (coming soon) on Netflix.
Chithha & Pookkaalam on Hotstar.
Purusha Pretham, Koozhangal and Thuramukham on Sony Liv.
Thankam, Mast Mein Reine Ka and Saptha Sagaradaache Ello - Side A on Amazon Prime.
Kaathal-The Core and Joram in theatres.
“Viduthalai Part 1, Jigarthanda Double X and 12th Fail are made by big name directors Vetrimaaran, Karthik Subbaraj and Vidhu Vinod Chopra respectively. But I would still consider them to be in the category of not enough people have watched/heard of these,” says Kanungo.
