Rishi Chamman

For Rishi Chamman, the seed of his love of filmmaking might have been planted when his mother named him after Rishi Kapoor, a famous Bollywood actor. Although he claims that the true realisation about his future profession came when a career test at high school indicated he should either be a film director or an agrarian.

Lelystad, where Chamman grew up, seemed to him an isolated place lacking, creativity and vibrancy. He spent a lot of time writing stories and watching Bollywood films; the advantage of the latter evidently being his affection for the genre. For him, the essence of these movies is that they are colourful, magical and form a positive escape from reality.

Upon finishing studies in journalism, he attended the Maurits Binger institute in Amsterdam, where he was taught writing and directing. Afterwards he continued his education in India at a film school. It was here that he had roles in several television series, alongside famous Bollywood actors: "When you are younger and you see for instance Tom Cruise on screen, you can never begin to imagine that you’ll ever meet him and work with him. That’s how I felt about working with these movie stars, who had once seemed to far out of reach for me." Later, he wrote the script for the Villa Achterwerk production Sapney- The Dream, a film about a young boy who dreams about Bollywood.

In his latest work Bollywood Blues, he again follows a young person who shares his main passion. 24 year-old Monique has the ambition to be a dancer and work in the Bollywood industry, but her parents don’t see this as a realistic or fruitful future. Instead, her father wants her to leave the house as a married woman. Monique struggles with the discrepancies between the Hindu culture of her parents and the Dutch values that she sees all around her. The director likes to play with images, and here he mixes footage of the family with footage of Bollywood films, which seems to serve as a metaphor for the relationship between Monique and her father.

Originally he wanted to shoot a film about three women in a difficult situation, because of the clash between their cultural heritage and their environment. Then when he was shooting at Monique’s house something interesting happened: she and her mother where having a debate on the subject of living together with a partner, and her father came in to the kitchen saying: "Living together? I don’t ever want to talk about this again! Animals live together, people get married!" It was then that Chamman decided his film was to be about the father-daughter relationship in this family.

During the year the film took to prepare, he became good friends with Monique. Such good friends, that Monique even let him read her diaries, in which she wrote about her ambivalent situation. She wants to live her life to what she thinks is her full potential, but at the same time doesn’t want her parents to think she disrespects them. Chamman was well-informed about Monique’s thoughts and feelings and in making the documentary, and could anticipate the next developments in her home. Also, when Monique decided to confront her parents with a new decision, she would call him up and warn him to come over with a camera.

For Chamman it is important to ’get out of the comfort zone". Although he spends time with like-minded people, he also wants to be confronted with completely different visions from his own in order to keep some perspective. "I don’t agree with the idea that a lot of Hindis have that men and women should be treated differently. Girls shouldn’t be raised sheltered from the outside world, because it makes them naive. I prefer that they get the freedom, just like boys, to explore and make mistakes, since you learn from those and it makes you stronger”, he says.

The fact that he portrays subjects who share his passion, albeit with a different kind of situation all together, reflects back to when his parents named him. For this director born under a Bollywood star, it seems that destiny has taken its due course. No wonder he was never tempted by learning to drive a tractor.

Jessica Hartman