Selvi starts on a light note: three women laugh quietly as they fly kites on a beach.
Sailesh Rathnakumar’s debut feature premiered at the Busan film festival in October, and won big, taking home the Hylife Vision Award and the Taipei Film Commission Award. It is the only light-hearted scene in the film. It is also the only one shot with a wide-angle lens. She is a homecare nurse now picking up shifts for a friend who has attempted to end her life. She is part of the reason, so she feels she must be part of the solution too. And one starts to longs for reprieve. His friend and co-writer Bargav Sridhar’s mother was ailing. “Imagine the emotional toll of looking after an ailing person while not being able to care for one’s own family, in such a time. I was already nervous and that just made it worse. Relief came during the Q&A session that followed, when he realised how closely the audience had been paying attention. “Some shared stories about their experiences with homecare nurses. It was incredible that a South Korean living in Busan connected so deeply with a story rooted in Chennai.” *** It helps that National Award-winning Marathi-film actor Anjali Patil is outstanding as the titular homecare nurse, in the Tamil film. “They work through agencies and have almost no control over where they are sent or how long their shift will be. His co-writer Sridhar, a cinematographer, polished the screenplay with a clear idea from the start of how they wanted to shoot it. This helped them create the uniform tone that gives it such intensity. Rathnakumar then shared an early draft with Patil (while this is a project he was pursuing on his own, he works full-time as a writer at her production house, Anahat). She also backed the project as producer, greatly helping it make its way to Busan, from where it is now headed to other festivals. “One of the best days of Selvi’s post-production cycle was the day I spent with Anand in the studio. He has created a very layered soundscape that seamlessly weaves in the cacophony of the low-income neighbourhood where Selvi lives and the hush of her rich patient’s home, and the middle-class household with its noises from the TV and sounds of children laughing. Though she isn’t fluent yet, Patil dubbed for Selvi herself. Patil also spent time with nurses, in both hospital and home-care environments. “She learnt how to perform basic procedures such as tracheostomy care and suctioning. This allowed the camera to capture moments as if they were unfolding rather than being manufactured.” *** Rathnakumar’s journey into film was fairly seamless too. Born to a banker and a marketing executive in Chennai, he grew up studying Carnatic music, Western classical music, the piano and violin. “Then, as a teenager, I became obsessed with making fan-edit music videos. “This led to my interest in sound design.
For the rest of the 90-plus minutes, the story zooms into the world of its protagonist: a woman caught between what look like choices but are really more like traps. As the camera closes in on her life of intimate care for near-strangers, the clock ticks on through the hours: 12, then 24, 48, 72. The idea for it came to him during the pandemic, says the 33-year-old. “As the screen turned black, the theatre of 150 people sat quiet. Since her role in Pa Ranjith and Rajinikanth’s Kaala (2018), Patil had been learning Tamil.
The homecare nurses who cared for her became the centre of their world, he says. “In those months, many such nurses had to live with the families of those they were caring for, because they couldn’t go back to their own homes,” Rathnakumar says. As the film met its first audience in Busan, Rathnakumar says he scanned the viewers’ faces to see if this story of isolation, loneliness and outsourced care resonated as he hoped it might. “They were unreadable!” he says, laughing. “There were intricate questions about how the film was shot,” he says. Some said their marriages were being affected by this,” he adds. “Many were from small rural towns, new to the city, and struggling with this adjustment too.” *** As he set out to tell this story, the stars aligned in ways that are rather unusual for a first-time filmmaker. “I’ve heard so many horror stories, but making Selvi was a breeze,” he admits, smiling. “She connected so deeply with the story that she asked if she could play Selvi,” he says. Patil asked two National Award-winners, film editor A Sreekar Prasad and sound designer Anand Krishnamoorthi, if they would be interested in working on the project “and both simply said yes,” Rathnakumar says. “Anjali’s involvement in the project from the writing stage meant that she really understood the character,” Rathnakumar says. Her sense of each scene meant that “we would let her guide us, during the shoot,” he adds. I would take a Michael Jackson song, for example, and sync it with clips from local movies,” he says. “One of the things an audience member at Busan said to me was, ‘I kept waiting for a wide-angle shot to feel some relief.’”
“From the masala films I grew up watching, I was introduced to the everyday realism of European films, which find beauty in the mundanity of daily life. Lenin also suggested he apply to film school. That’s how he ended up studying film-writing and direction in Prague.
At 23, a friend introduced him to five-time National Award-winning writer, director and film editor B Lenin, who took an interest in the young man who loved storytelling and sound. By 29, he had been hired as a writer at Anahat (Marathi for Limitless), helping to develop films and series ideas submitted by others. ***
“Through him, I was exposed to cinema in ways I had never experienced before,” Rathnakumar says.
She seems to fade under the weight of guilt and fatigue. There is a building sense that, while her friends prepare for exams that may take them overseas, or hope for kind husbands who will help free them from their drudgery, there will be no escape for her. So, how does the story end for Selvi? She has suffered and made mistakes, but maybe someday she will be forgiven, and will forgive herself. But all that may come later. In the film, claustrophobia is what he was going for, and he is glad to have succeeded.
Many of the homecare nurses he spoke to, as part of his research, felt similarly trapped, Rathnakumar says. She holds on to hope, Rathnakumar says. “She longs for a life where she is free to enjoy simple things like going to the beach or buying something pretty for herself,” he says.
