When director Suhel Banerjee went onstage to collect his award for Best First Feature at IDFA 2024, he did so in bare feet as his shoes had become soaked by the incessant rain. Afterwards, he was congratulated by an Ecuadorian filmmaker (also a fisherman) who confessed that he never wore shoes either, so the barefoot statement that Banerjee had made was important. Later, when the dancing began, Banerjee realised that many other filmmakers had also taken off their shoes, inspired by his decision to eschew convention, albeit at a festival he loves.
“It is a privilege to be at IDFA,” he underlines to Business Doc Europe.
Like his appearance on stage, Banerjee’s winning film CycleMahesh is anything but conventional, telling of the 1700-km cycle ride undertaken by plumber Mahesh, from Maharashtra on the west coast of India across the country to his home in Odisha, on the east coast. He undertook the journey, which is presented as a form of odyssey, on April 1 2020, a week after lockdown was announced. He had no money as the company he was working for couldn’t pay his salary, hence the cycle ride home, which he completed in seven days. When a journalist writing for the Hindustani Times heard his story, Mahesh became famous.
Mahesh’s fame may have been short-lived, but it was long enough for director Banerjee to want to tell his story, which he imbues with heightened senses of magic, mythology and philosophy, and employing three actors (as well as Mahesh himself) to play the eponymous hero.
In a sequence reminiscent of the classic 70s TV series The Water Margin, Mahesh cycles across a mountain and comes across the mask-wearing, poetry-reciting Khanderao, a mythical sprite, who describes their existence as part of a continuous gyre.
“In the beginning there was only water, then came the forests. Then you came, and me! Then came fire, then again, water. Then you, then me, the king of this wilderness,” intones Khanderao.
As to how the cyclical nature of Mahesh’s odyssey is to be interpreted is entirely up to the viewer, but when the real Mahesh returns home, he feels compelled to set off back to his plumbing job in Maharashtra, while the fictional Mahesh (as depicted by an actor) feels a desire to stay. Even Mahesh’s mother gets in on the act, advising her son on his two potential courses of action, to choose either plumbing or cinema. Meanwhile, Mahesh is all the time trying to escape from a metaphorical open-sided cage, which reappears throughout the film. Ultimately, by the film’s end, after our hero has traversed the sub-continent by bike, he is given a further choice whether to continue his journey into the sea – and perhaps beyond.
“There is in that sense, the story of Odysseus coming back home,” the director tells BDE. “And there is a little bit of The Motorcycle Diaries as well. I am interested in the physical journey or a geographical journey reflecting a journey within. So Mahesh’s story fits into a philosophical exploration that I wanted to do in this direction, which is why I am using his story to tell more stories, to explore this more. And the idea of him also being stuck in a loop was exciting to me.”
At points in the narrative Mahesh is joined by two friends with whom he walks and talks, sometimes going crabbing in rivers in the night-time. One is a young woman, played by Mamta and to whom the film is dedicated, while the other is a young lad who, earlier in the film, also plays a version of Mahesh.
“Mamta is the person who is representing a lot of things that we want to say through the film – she’s the one who talks about there not being enough crops and people migrating in search of work. And she’s the one who says that the villages are places where you feel suffocated and you want to go out, because if two people are in love, then people talk,” says Banerjee of Mamta’s character.
“She was also the person who was helping us identify locations and was a kind-of line producer. She’s a tribal girl herself from the Varli tribe. And it is through her that I understood a lot of what is happening in Palghar,” Banerjee adds of the impoverished tribal district close to Mumbai where he shot his film. “She was an intellectual from the community, and she looked at that community as an insider, and I benefited immensely from her gaze.”
“The third guy (Kailesh) is an urban actor from Bombay who represents the director or filmmaker, who is leading the questions, and who is the representative of the film itself.”
Banerjee underlines how he is determined to disrupt the sense of comfort with, and understanding of, the moving image that people have developed in the age of social media and fake news, as well as undermine the sense of immediacy that a platform such as TikTok can deliver.
“The question that, as a filmmaker, I’m asking is ‘what do I show an audience that helps them ask a question within the format of the film?’” he ponders to BDE. “If I give them something that makes them comfortable, or shows them something familiar, then I might not have as much space to make such a layered film and say so many different things. And a good film is like a good novel. It’ll be seen again and again.”
“I have to do justice to what I’m thinking while making the film to not make compromises with my vision,” Banerjee adds. “I think that is what gives rise to a form like this. I’ve been trying to frankly ask that question to myself: ‘why this?’ And over the last three years, I’ve really taken apart the film multiple times. I’ve really re-edited the film many times and it has always come back to this.”
So how does Banerjee assess the film’s future prospects, which presumably must seem very good following the IDFA prize?
“Like all filmmakers, I would like the film to be seen by a maximum number of people across the world,” he responds. “Films, like music, can speak to millions of people over many years. It’s the best way to communicate across boundaries and languages. And even if you don’t know me, if you’ve seen my film then you’ve seen something in my soul. This is why the film is meant to be shared and seen by as many people as possible. If you find the right way to do it [via traditional methods], then fine. Otherwise I will just make it available myself for everybody to see.”
