(Lipika Darai, whose short film on her music mentor fetched her a National Award recently, is working on projects to capture the cultural kaleidoscope of Odisha to give back its due. )
There is a storyteller in all of us, but it takes more than just a story to spin a yarn on the silver screen. Odia girl Lipika Singh Darai is one among the few who has this spark. An upcoming filmmaker, she is exploiting the short film genre with passion, zeal and enthusiasm. And for her commitment to her craft, she has already bagged two National Film Awards, just at the age of 29.
Eka Gachha, Eka Manisa, Eka Samudra (A Tree, A Man, A Sea), a short Odia film directed by Lipika, recently fetched her the National Film Award in the best debut film of a director, non-feature film category. The film produced by Veenu Bhusan Vaid deals with the director’s memory about her music teacher.
“I feel happy because this is a tribute to my Guruji, my music teacher Prafulla Kumar Das from Balasore, who taught me Hindustani classical music,” says Baripada-born Lipika who majored in sound recording from the Film and Television Institute of India (FTII), Pune, in 2010. Besides directing it, she has done sound editing and mixing for the movie.
Though Lipika’s Guruji died before she could capture his voice, what helped her make the film were her vision and the only material imprint of his voice, a 30-year-old almost detuned audio cassette.
“My Guruji used to stay in Balasore and travelled 60 km to Baripada for 20 years to teach music to his students during weekends. I was one of them. Eka Gachha… explores his feelings during this journey; what he might have thought on seeing the setting sun or the thoughts that could have crossed his mind while travelling in the bus are what I’ve tried to document,” says the girl from Mayurbhanj’s
Ho tribal community.
And guiding her was none other than the late visionary filmmaker, Mani Kaul, who was a faculty at the FTII. After graduating, she moved to Mumbai in search of work, but did not want to do the regular technical stuff that Bollywood offered.
“This is when Kaul offered me an opportunity to do the sound designing for his film,” she says. It was around this time when Lipika was planning Eka Gachha… as well and received the news about her music teacher’s death. “He was no more and I was desperate to record his voice. I approached Kaul who told me that a Guru lives even after his death through his students. He suggested that I capture my own feelings which can narrate my Guruji’s presence around me. Thus began the journey of Eka Gachha… I travelled the same route many times, met his family and wife for several days before beginning to shoot the film,” Lipika recalls.
Prior to this, she had received the National Award for the year 2009 for Best Sound Recording and Mixing for a film titled Gaarud which was her college project. Gaarud gives a glimpse into the lives of people who walk in and out of a single hotel room close to the railway station. Lipika was in charge of creating the mood of a railway station and the accompanying hustle-bustle. “We had to capture sync sound. Since the film had no cuts, only track shots, and the story took place in that single room over several days, capturing the variation in the sounds, moods and ambience was an interesting learning experience for me. Most importantly, the sound of Gaarud was manually mixed on 35 mm magnetic track; these days sound is mixed digitally which is very easy,” she says.
The filmmaker now aims to work on projects related to the cultural kaleidoscope of Odisha with the thought of giving back to the state its due. And for that Lipika and her husband, cinematographer
Indranil Lahiri, moved to Odisha a year ago. Currently, while Lipika is doing a documentary on all forms of puppetry in the state and has plans to make a film on the subject, Indranil is researching on it.
Belonging to the Ho tribal community of Mayurbhanj, Lipika is also working on a Ho songs archival project. “Ho tribal community is very rich in its culture. We have songs for every season and situation, and dance for each festival. There are even rhythms for love and arranged marriage. I have already archived traditional songs of six Ho-dominated villages in Mayurbhanj and neighbouring Jharkhand,” says Lipika.
Besides, she is working on two films—one an adaptation of an Odia contemporary writer’s novel and the second based on transition and the cultural transformation of Bhubaneswar as a capital city.
Hillele 