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Bollywood Trade News Network
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White Feather Arthouse films in association with Eros International presents PANKH - The Flight, which is produced by Sanjay Gupta. Written and Directed by Sudipto Chattopadhyay, it stars Bipasha Basu, Maradona Rebello, Amit Purohit, Lilette Dubey, Mahesh Manjrekar, Ronit Roy, Daya Shankar Pandey, Kiran Karmarkar, Asha Sachdev, Raj Magnani, Bharat Kaul, Johny Bakshi, Sanjeeda Sheikh. The music of the film is given by Raju Singh.
Cinema within cinema has always fascinated filmmakers all across the globe. The film industry of each country has characteristics peculiar to their culture. That is what distinguishes them, makes them intriguing and anecdotes associated with each industry in a specific cultural context naturally lend themselves to interesting tales.
The story of Baby Kusum is such an intriguing and horrifying tale. It is a story about life imitating art in a grotesque and bizarre way. This film seeks to probe into the mechanism that operates behind the creation of dreams. It highlights a phenomenon that was peculiar and exclusive to the Indian film industry--- the practice of casting children in roles opposite to their natural genders. We have had many instances of young girls being cast as boys in films and vice versa. Their screen names used to be changed to suit the gender they were playing on screen. Interestingly, in Raja Harishchandra, the first narrative film made in India, a man portrayed the heroine's role. It was a common practice in Indian theatre till the middle half of the last century, to cast men in women's roles. In cinema however, verisimilitude was sought to a greater degree and hence the entire persona of the performer had to be changed to suit the screen image. It is difficult to ascertain gender of children by their appearance. Their clothes and hairdos often demarcate them. So the practice of casting perky kids, who could deliver effortless performances, in roles that were not representing their own gender, was widely practiced in Indian films.
This film purports to delve into the psyche of one such person who was forced to assume a gender role other than his natural gender and analyses the disastrous consequences that follow and destroy him in his adulthood. Baby Kusum is the story of a boy burdened with a sexual identity not his own. It is about the brutality of a society that imposes superficial gender codes.
It is a story of human suffering and about the tragedy of human predicament. The film tries to explore the complex maze of relationships: the Oedipal, the homosexual, the exploitative. It tears that veil of shame that covers the face of this glamorous profession. Truth stares naked at the face of an audience bred on and allured by the sham of this life.
Baby Kusum was a child star...
Baby Kusum achieved tremendous success...
Baby Kusum was a Boy.
Baby Kusum is now 20 and still searching for his identity . . .
Baby Kusum explores various spaces--- the real space, the mind space, the sexual space and the spiritual space. All stand juxtaposed together and often are intermingled to create panoply of gore and blood, of intensity and brutality, of love and shame. Cinematically it confronts the time space continuum. It conjures and jumbles up the time past, the time present and the time operative, all together within the same mental space. It creates a delusion. It provokes and raises several pertinent questions. But it never ignores basic human emotions. That is where it becomes a moral fable, a pious tale. That is where it connects to the common man.
PANKH is the story of a young man caught in a psychological matrix of gender confusion that has been imposed on him by his social circumstance. In linear time, the narrative encompasses twenty four hours of the protagonist Jerry’s life during which his entire world order goes topsy-turvy. A mentally deranged Jerry lives trough a passage of several spatio-temporal zones – time present, time past and fantasy time all blend and merge into one another and the differentials are blurred. He bears the burden of a false identity imposed on him by a ruthless system. The surreal dream woman Nandini acts as his counterfoil, constantly provoking him to fly beyond the drudgery of a mere mortal existence. In many ways she becomes his alter ego, and extension of his mind, accentuating his psychological trauma. It is a bizarre and disturbing film that questions and confronts traditional notions of psycho-sexual politics and pushes the envelope to a point that shocks and benumbs the audience.
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