Linking fragments of one of Goa’s and India’s most celebrated and avant-garde artists was no mean task, but for Bangalore-based filmmakers Shai Heredia and Shumona Goel, who have been pushing the envelope, experimenting with cinematic language, the experience has been an invigorating one, earning them the BFI London Film Festival Short Film Award in the process. “The Xandev Foundation initially commissioned us to make a film on Francis Newton Souza in 2012. However, on encountering his writings, our process changed dramatically and the film began to take on several layers and become more complex. Perhaps the film is more than just a film about Souza,” explain the filmmakers of the film which was also screened at the Toronto International Film Festival in September 2015.
“We used our own aesthetic to say something about F N Souza, but everything about him could not be said in a film. We were interested in his inner world and discovered that through his writings, letters, and drawings. We were drawn to his gentlemen series charcoal drawings, because we were interested in his critique of the British gentleman and how that relates to Souza as a man. We tried to craft the film in an associative and painterly way,” they elaborate further.
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The award caps their efforts to take cinematic language to a higher level. “We are happy to receive this award and appreciate the recognition of our effort to push cinematic language. We would just like to continue to make the work we do,” maintain the duo whose life works have hinged on such experimental work. Shai Heredia, who incidentally traces her roots to Divar, founded ‘Experimenta’, the international festival for experimental cinema in India in 2003. Shumona Goel on the other hand is a Mumbai-based experimental filmmaker and installation artist who works with 16mm film to produce personal films. Both have garnered critical acclaim and awards for their respective work.
Collating material from archives that house Souza’s letters, writings and essays and shooting the film predominantly on the island of Divar, as well as the Salim Ali Bird Sanctuary and Rachol Seminary, the duo, with the aid of just a five-member team, did amazing justice to F N Souza in this short black and white film. “‘An Old Dog’s Diary’ is a short film portrait of F N Souza as a radical art student, who co-founded the Bombay Progressive Artists Group in 1947 to nurture an Indian avant-garde art movement. He moved to London in 1949 and went on to become an internationally acclaimed artist,” they explain.
In the same breath, they also appreciate the pathway the progressive movement forged for all creative artists. “The Progressive’s pushed the frontiers of art through creativity, despite opposition. They created a space and new possibilities for artists like ourselves, many generations later, to express our ideas and experiment with new artistic forms. It is sad to see this powerful legacy being challenged in today’s India. If we begin to constrain art and culture, either by default or deliberately, it is a great loss to a society. We must remember that without art, the soul of a people dies.”
