‘This film is my love letter to the end of hatred’

Parents in Sri Lanka, in India, the world over... when they see their child being queer, still say, ‘oh he’s just being creative’, instead of addressing an issue. But the childhood and the young adult and the young adult and the childhood are intrinsically linked by the sexuality, but also the emotions.

That is what I wanted to capture. One without the other is meaningless,” is how Deepa Mehta unveiled the India Premiere of her movie, Funny Boy that simultaneously opened I View Human Rights Film Festival, at DLF Cyberhub, Gurugram, on World Human Rights Day (December 10), following COVID protocols of face masks, sanitisers, socially distanced seating of bolster-and-mattress islands in an open air amphitheatre. 

The Indo-Canadian filmmaker had especially flown down for the festival by Delhi-based transnational arts and human rights organisation, attended by actors Swara Bhaskar, Bani J, Sayani Gupta, Vivek Gomber, directors Onir, Faraz Arif Ansari, Tushar Tyagi, and Jonathan Kennedy — Director Arts, British Council, and Deirdre Kent — Canadian Deputy High Commissioner to India. 

Funny Boy, an adaptation of Shyam Selvadurai’s eponymous novel, is a coming-of-age story of Arjie (Selvadurai’s autobiographical character) set against the Black July anti-Tamil pogram in Sri Lanka 1996. The film portrays the same —‘them vs us’ concept as her earlier films, because as Mehta put it during the Q&A after the screening,

“I am very intrigued by why we as human beings cannot share an earth and can’t get along. There’s a quote by James Baldwin that I love: ‘I imagine one of the reasons people cling to their hate so stubbornly is because they sense, once hate is gone, they will be forced to deal with pain.’

These communities have to let go of the hatred for the healing to start. This [film] is my love letter to the end of hatred.” It was also pointed out in the session that perhaps we have changed as an audience as 24 years ago, Fire (1996) — from Mehta’s element trilogy series saw the Shiv Sena destroy cinema halls screening this lesbian love story played by Shabana Azmi and Nandita Das, while Funny Boy has gone ahead without a glitch. 

The film that will represent Canada in the best International Feature Film category at the 2021 Oscars has also been slammed by Tamil diaspora in Canada for the diction and casting of non-Tamil actors. When asked about the backlash, she replied: “We looked at Tamil actors in Sri Lanka, Canada, as a huge number of Tamils from Sri Lanka came as refugees [after the Tamil-Sinhalese bloodied skirmishes].

A lot of them were fabulous, but hesitant to be in what they called ‘a gay film’, not because they were queer themselves or didn’t believe in it; it’s dangerous, you don’t want to call attention to yourself.” Cinematographically, Mehta described Sri Lanka — also the venue for her previous films - as the colour of paradise, with the dominant screen palette of greens and orchres infiltrated with a bit of red (blood) that shows “how paradise can be lost because of what we do to each other,” and ended the evening, saying, “Who we choose to be with is called self-determination. All of us have that right.”

For schedule and free viewing: plexigo.com/IViewWorld2020/