Actor, producer and director Anjali Patil is in South Korea for the world premiere of her Tamil film Selvi at the 31st Busan International Film Festival on October 9. On the opening night of the festival, October 7, as she walked across the expansive Busan Cinema Centre, the festival venue, Patil recalls having a fangirl moment as she saw actor Michelle Yeoh being felicitated with the honorary Asian Filmmaker of the Year award and when she met legendary filmmaker Park Chan-wook (of films like Oldboy and No Other Choice fame).
“I met Park Chan-wook; he was so gentle and generous. We told him about the film (Selvi). He promised to see it. It was incredible.” She adds that it was rewarding to see the love and generosity that was being expressed by everyone towards the filmmakers and artistes at the festival.
“I have been studying Korean films for the past few years and realised that being a part of a big festival or having a world premiere at a big festival doesn’t take away from their box office success. The films still go back and become box office hits of all time or break all the records. That is something that we (in India) should actually be taking our cue from… that films can be celebrated on an international platform and still be so welcomed and consumed by locals.”
It is hard to miss the bitter irony: India has had films with a successful run at prestigious festivals which, despite the ovations and the honours, have had to fight for theatre space. “I think it’s a popular belief that has been catered to us, that is, whether it is a ‘mass’ film or not. I don’t want to buy into it. It’s a popular belief, which has been given to us. The audiences are and will be the kings, and very, very, very intelligent. We better give them something which is holistic, healthy, eye-opening and entertaining at the same time.”
Playing the ‘ordinary’
Known for her emotive representation of characters that are often neglected and marginalised in popular culture and mainstream cinema, Patil, who has produced and stars as the eponymous Selvi in the film, narrates how it shifts the lens to the lives of healthcare workers as they navigate personal challenges within a professional space where they are often overlooked or under-recognised. The film follows one such caregiver who takes over the shifts of her best friend, a fellow caregiver, moving from house to house tending to the elderly, while carrying the weight of her own problems.
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“We often take healthcare professionals as people in the service industry, who are just service providers. But they take care of you or yours, while pushing their own problems to the background. So, the first time Sailesh Ratnakumar, the director, sent me the long synopsis of the film, it immediately intrigued me. I thought this character is so ‘ordinary’, someone who could definitely be missed in the crowd. You know, there are all these Selvis roaming around us, and nobody really cares about them.”
Patil adds: “What makes Selvi the film so special is the detailed eye with which the character’s inner landscape is seen. You are constantly with Selvi, with her exhaustion, as she runs around the city, providing care… That makes her unmissable. That makes her unique and human at the same time. The treatment with which Sailesh and Bhargav (the cinematographer) wrote and crafted the film, I was so game to produce it. There are these layers to her character, like a Russian doll, and the invisibility of her that attracted me to take on the part.”
A woman with power
Patil, 39, won the National Award for the Telugu film Naa Bangaaru Talli in 2013 and is known for her critically acclaimed turns in the Marathi drama The Silence, the Hindi dark comedy Newton and the Tamil action film Kaala. Though she finds acting the easiest of the many roles she inhabits — that of director and producer — her approach to her craft has undergone its own shift over the past 15 years.
“I was pretty bored with the kind of roles which were offered to me and would get really annoyed at how they came to me with the same old characters: the victim, the angsty girl. There was an immense love-hate relationship with acting during that time, but honestly, subconsciously, I kept choosing these narratives. Someone kept asking me, like, ‘Do you not regret not doing those commercially leaning films back in 2012, 13?’ I said, ‘I wasn’t interested.’ It was true. I wasn’t interested in money, in fame. I was driven by something else. Looking back now, I wonder, ‘did I make a mistake? ’ You know, by not choosing that sort of path. But if I would have chosen that, I wouldn’t have been producing or directing, so I’m glad that didn’t happen in a way. And now, even as an actor, there is a lot of humbling gratefulness which has come when people look at me and say, ‘We see you, we see us in you’.”
Actor-director-producer Anjali Patil’s approach to her craft has undergone a change in the past 15 years.
Patil launched her production house Anahat Films in 2021 and has since bankrolled several notable projects, including the documentary Neither a Girl Nor a Woman and The Moogai. She says the sensibilities and philosophy behind the production house are well defined. “The ethical and moral texture with which we started Anahat Films is that we wanted to have an ecosystem where we are making films which defy gender, caste and class and all these hierarchies and definitions with which we have to function, even as artistes. We always have to fight with all these things. So we were set on creating an environment where we don’t have to look at this; we just have to look at the essence, the talent, the brilliance of that artist or that story. And Selvi was 101 per cent right for it.”
After Busan, Selvi heads to the São Paulo film festival (October 15-29) and will travel to a few more before it heads home, where the team plans to hold impact and community screenings and give it the release it deserves. Even though Patil is “neck-deep in projects” and travelling across the globe, the enterprising actor-producer is already at work on her next projects, which include a documentary, Oh Believers ( on female priesthood in the Hindu and Islamic communities), as well as a sci-fi film.
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“Oh Believers is a documentary in its last stages of production now. It is directed by Nazia Khan. We have been writing this film for the past seven years. A documentary takes another kind of muscle… You have to keep at it, and now finally we are almost at the tail end of it. It sheds light on women across Kolkata, Kerala, Maharashtra, working as priests in both Islam and Hinduism. I am also directing and writing a sci-fi. It again revolves around a very ordinary girl, the ‘yes girl’ of the family who goes on to say ‘no’. So my work would somehow always circle around these major themes of gender.”
If there was one thing she could change in Indian cinema’s landscape, what would it be? “I think this entire thing of being a little scared of women-centric films,” is Patil’s candid response. “I might come across in a very wrong way, but I’m kind of bored with the fear around women having power and riding the wave. We are environmentally and economically at a point where female intelligence is going to nurture, nourish and help the planet survive.”