AN EPIC OEUVRE

Mujib, Shyam Benegal's last film, was monumental in scale-but the 89-year-young director is already embarking on new projects

- Peter Griffin

What was Shyam Benegal’s first film? And which biopic did he star in? The second question first. Benegal’s father was a photographer, and also had a movie camera at home. The birth of a child in the family signalled the start of loving documentation of the infant’s moments and landmarks. Baby Shyam was the subject of a documentary of his infancy. But his first film? It wasn’t Ankur. Or the first of the documentaries he made before that. It wasn’t any of the hundreds of advertising films and sponsored documentaries he made when he was in that industry. It was a 100 per cent indie effort. When young Shyam was 12, his father permitted him the use of his movie camera, and the boy used it to record the happenings of the school holidays in the family home, edited it, and called it Chhuttiyon Mein Mauj Maza.

All this he recounts with a small grin and a twinkle in his eye. Benegal has a history of making exactly the films he wants to make, and getting the funds to do so, sometimes from the private sector, sometimes from government bodies (notably, his 1976 film Manthan was financed by 500,000 dairy farmers contributing Rs 2 each, arguably the first ever crowd-funded movie). “[Funding] has always been the most difficult,” he says. “Film is not inexpensive; somebody’s got to cover the cost, either an audience or a sponsor.”