The Art of Faking It

EISHA MARJARA – FILMMAKER

My father left me with his Minolta SLR accompanied by elaborate hand written instructions while I was vacationing with my mother and sister in India. I was 13 and had no idea this apparatus was going to change my life. What the camera did was act as a second pair of eyes, a framed window through which my senses were awakened as if from a dream of dreary blindness of ordinary seeing, to the magic that permeated the light and dark in the world of matter. I discovered through this mechanical device an ability to recognize what was otherwise hidden. This was my role as an artist, a creator of images: to bridge the gap between the ordinary and the exalted, whether it be light or dark, delightful or dreadful.

I pursued filmmaking and during my final year at university, I entered a nation wide competition held by the National Film Board of Canada (NFB) and was one of four filmmakers selected to write and direct their first professional documentary. A dream come true? Yes, but I had no idea what reality I was in for. My first feature-length movie “Desperately Seeking Helen” took five gruelling years to complete partly because the story was personal and tragic, and the subject was thematically complex. The film tells the story of my search for my childhood movie star idol “Helen” in the fantastic world of Bollywood.

Through the (fictionalized) search for Helen on the streets of Mumbai and extraordinary movie sets, I flash back and tell the story of my mother and her struggles adapting to her adoptive homeland (Canada) and her tragic death on her flight back to India. My mother and sister were killed in the bombing of Air India flight 182 which left Montreal destined for India. It was part coming-of-age story, part story of loss, part mother-daughter story; a search for identity and an exploration of fantasy versus reality. I struggled for years with the writing process, abandoning scripts and narrative hooks that would only lead to dead ends. It came to be called the “Desperately Seeking a Story”story! Then one morning in the third year, I came up with the idea of literally searching for Helen in Mumbai and this search would somehow segue to my own story which lay at the heart of the movie. Helen was always meant to be a metaphor. It had never crossed my mind to interpret her and the title literally! Once I pitched the idea to the producers – without a clue of how I would eventually pull it off – I was off to Mumbai, putting together a crew and seeking out movie stars who knew Helen and showing up on Bollywood movie sets pretending to be searching for this starlet. After weeks of shooting, I returned to Montreal with only half the movie. I still had to tell my story. I went home and began writing the second part of it and that’s when it really got real. I wrote the story in four weeks and went into production all over again.

To simplify the process and keep the budget down, we chose to shoot stills using a Nikon SLR with a motor drive after which I would piece together the images using dissolves and build them into scenes in the editing room. Chris Marker’s film “La Jetée” shot entirely with b&w still photos was held up as an example and inspiration to this approach. What was assumed to be a simple process turned out to be an editor’s nightmare. And the editor with the nightmare was me. I had amassed 8000 stills that had to be edited down into scenes. My entire apartment floor was strategically carpeted with thousands of photos for months. But my biggest fear was not knowing how well this second part of the story would cut with the live action footage of India. It was a creative risk that just had to work. And it did. It worked remarkably well, partly because the story worked. Not only did I learn to become a writer in the making of this film, but I understood that the script is the spine of a movie and without it, a movie simply cannot hold up.

Desperately Seeking Helen (clip) from Eisha Marjara on Vimeo.

Daydreaming of Helen from Eisha Marjara on Vimeo.

“The Tourist” is the story of a vacationing loner in Munich recovering from a break up who gets entangled in a couple’s rocky romance. I wrote the script specifically with the budget and production in mind yet also managed to explore the themes I am most passionate about. You guessed it: fantasy versus reality, among others, such as loss, experiences of alienation and the desire to belong. I wrote it with as many outdoor daytime scenes as possible to avoid the high production costs of set design and lighting, and with a maximum of three characters. I selected public sites and streets and followed our lead character as a pov documentary crew would.  A fictional story on a documentary stage. Experiences of my previous film echoing … but at one-tenth of the budget.

The Tourist from Eisha Marjara on Vimeo.

Right now I am completing my current short film entitled “House for Sale” which received an arts council grant for production. Nevertheless I am taking my first step at crowdfunding on Indiegogo to finance its promotion in order to launch it in 2012.  I am excited about this film and expect that it will do well with audiences because the story’s unique subject matter resonates on multiple levels. I have had comments from viewers that my short films often feel like features. I suppose the stories and themes they address are large in scale. The dreamer in me says, “Ah yes, larger than life! Larger than reality!”

House for Sale (Trailer) from Eisha Marjara on Vimeo.