English Documentary, 2013, You Tube, IMDB 9/10, Directed by Shabnam Sukhdev
An emotional tale of a daughter’s quest to fill the missing pieces in her relationship with her ‘Padmasri’ awardee father, only to realize he wasn’t the terrible father that her memory recalled and he was trying to influence her life all along without her knowledge.
The film’s strength is its unusual tone of a daughter’s disregard for her father, a eminent director at the Films division, who died young at 45 while working.
We hear from interviews of Sukhdev’s friends which showcase the different person that he was, to the one his daughter remembered. The interview with her mother to talk about her father was truly emotional as the question becomes more intense about the yelling and fights when she was very young.
The revolutionary film maker of the 60’s India, is recalled by his daughter when he slapped her without notice, just to take a realistic shot for his film on ‘violence’, was such a heart wrenching irony.
Voices of her father are incorporated on images, photographs and incidents, as answers for the questions that arouse in her mind all these years. The director cleverly makes them as dialogues of hers with her father and that seems to resolve her anger. It makes her see the other undisclosed side of her father through the eyes of his friends, colleagues, artist, peers and associates.
When she questions naively to one of her father’s friend, ‘Why marry if they can’t avoid work life taking a toll on personal life?’, it does haunt the viewers- if that’s the price the creators like S. Sukdhev pay for presenting us with such powerful revolutionary work.
Good watch.