Gaalibeeja is a debut film made by an artist and is an homage to the genre of the Road Movie and seminal filmmakers like Wim Wenders, Jim Jarmusch and Abbas Kiarostami. It opens with Prakash, a road engineer, leaving for a site visit to an unnamed village. On the way he gives a lift to Jaffer, someone who previously sold pirated dvds, and receives a set of road movies from him. The sequences in the films and the people that Prakash meets in life begin to resonate with each other. Jaffer’s pronouncement that Prakash’s life could be a film comes back to him as he witnesses each person starring in their own road movie. The road carries us, connects us, it equally disrupts lives. The film explores this ambivalence and the different temporalities people inhabit.
Dear Chalam can be read as an eulogy for a dear friend, a journey through the landscape of cinema, and of making and sharing films. A poetic assemblage, the film dips into Chalam’s powerful documentary practice, his involvement with the Odessa Collective and commitment to cinema as a people’s movement—all of which come alive as potent strands in a letter that forms the central thread of the film. The film moves beyond a personal remembering of a singular life to think more widely about cinema.
The film is a meditation on the act of walking through the lives of three principal characters: Kumar, a photojournalist disenchanted with his regular job, visits different places seeking new sources of inspiration; Neelu, a salesgirl in a shoe shop with a set routine, is only interested in watching people walk; and Amaresha, an elderly prisoner, alleviates his feelings of confinement by walking to imagined places within his cell. The camera follows the gaze of the characters, trained to different directions, in some cases the ground and in others the sky, experiencing how they relate to the world around them, the minute details they observe, and their sense of time and place. Moving between dream and reality, the film is an exploration of the inner and outer landscapes they encounter.
