The Woman & Her Buffalo

 By Our Film Critic

Who is who of the  entertainment world many from  the highest strata of society  belonging to all walks of life  vie to attend international film festivals even if it costs a lot.  But Hira Devi, an 80-year old nondescript poor farmer  of Munsiyari village of  Pithoragarh and a nominee as  best actor as best actor could  finally attend the gala event.  She was initially reluctant  because there was no one  to take care of her domestic  buffalo at home! She was  nominated for best actor at the  New York Indian Film Festival  to be held next month. As if a  coincidence her co-actor, a  retired army officer, has also  not confirmed his presence  since down with cancer and  undergoing cameo therapy.  Though not an artist at all Devi won international film  award   “Pyre”  and did travel  to Estonia for her film but then  her daughter came forward to  keep the buffalo.

 The film she  acted as a couple has co-star  Padam Singh, also 80, a retired  army man not an actor. The  short film has many twists.  The lyrics of the film written  by Gulzar free of cost has no  script and sparse dialogue.  Most of the performance  rests in gesture, silence, and  routine. It is all based on today’s  conversation of ordinary life of  Hira Devi with her buffalo  a Bhutia (ghost) village. The  Hindi-language film focuses  on themes of love, resilience,  and human spirit against the  backdrop of the Himalayas. 

Devi and her co-star have  both been shortlisted for their  performances in Pyre, the  feature film set in a ‘ghost  village’ in Uttarakhand. Directed  by Vinod Kapri, ‘Pyre’ chronicles  the life of an elderly couple  living in an abandoned hamlet  in Pithoragarh district. The film  is a melancholic ballad about  an undying love in a dying land,  inspired by a true story of an  elderly couple in the hill state.  They share a home with their  goats and a buffalo and earn a  living through livestock. When  Devi was told about the New  York nomination, she was in the  forest collecting fodder. Singh  was undergoing cameo therapy.  The story behind the film  began in 2017, when Kapri  encountered a similar couple  in Munsyari while researching  another project. Moved by their  isolation, he started work on a  fictional narrative that would  Himalaya’s glaciers are melting fast  reflect the reality of rural ageing  in India’s higher altitudes. Kapri  wrote no formal script. Instead,  he filmed around Singh and  Devi’s routines. The result is a  film where fiction gives way to  presence: a document of two  old people continuing their lives,  rather than performing them.  Last year, ‘Pyre’ was selected  as one of only 18 films from  around the world to compete  at the Tallinn Black Nights  Film Festival in Estonia, where  it won the Audience Award.  

The film was produced by  Bhagirathi Films, a venture led by Kapri and journalist Sakshi  Joshi. Rejected by multiple  studios, the film eventually  attracted collaborators  including Oscar-winning  composer Mychael Danna  (‘Life of Pi’), lyricist Gulzar,  and German editor Patricia  Rommel (‘The Lives of Others’,  ‘The Tourist’). It had its Indian  premiere at the 16th Bengaluru  International Film Festival,  where it received a Jury  Special Mention in the Asian  Cinema Competition. But for  the filmmaker, the highest​​​​​​​​​​​​​​honour came from cinema legend Gulzar, who loved the movie and even wrote a song without charging any fee after seeing the unedited clips of the film. Rommel was literally in love with this couple, and flew from Berlin to meet them in the premier at Tallinn in Estonia. She even spent three days with them and gave all her gifts and love to the elderly.

For the background score, Kapri had Danna in mind but then he found that the music composer was on a six-month sabbatical. But after watching the first cut he volunteered.