Director making waves in Goa

In this darkly brooding setting, rarely associated with Goa, Laxmikant Shetgaonkar unspools a touching, authentic film that has earned him international acclaim.

After taking the International Federation of Film Critic’s award at the Toronto Film Festival in October last year, Paltadacho Munis (’The Man Beyond the Bridge’) was given the grand jury prize at the Indian Film Festival of Los Angeles recently. The film has also had a highly successful run at over a dozen film festivals abroad.

Based on a story by Konkani writer Mahableshwar Sail, the film looks at the concept of loneliness and how a man living deep in the forest handles himself in a rather unique situation. Vinayak (Chittaranjan Giri) is a forest guard tormented by the memory of his dead wife. He grieves her deeply and rejects his aunt’s pleadings to remarry. When his supervisor bluntly turns down his persistent applications for a transfer, Vinayak seems resigned to a solitary existence in a decrepit little house in a fast dwindling forest. He is required to carry out his duties though his uniform carries little power, even as the village is caught up in the shifting political dynamics.

One day a deranged woman, an outcast in the village, suddenly turns up at his door. Put off at first, the forest guard gives the woman food and shelter, and a bond slowly grows between the two, leading to a relationship. The arrangement becomes the gossip in the village and the couple is soon targeted. The village, meanwhile, is driven by the ambitions of the powerful local sarpanch who is set on building a temple on the forest land.

Shetgaonkar’s handling of the difficult subject in a multilayered narrative is admirable. He was “gripped”, he says, by the story. “I knew when I read it, I just had to tell it,” he says. .

With no filmmaking culture to speak of in Goa, Shetgaonkar worked with a small band of Goan theatre actors. The only professional actors in the film are Giri and Veena Jomkar who plays the mad woman. The Hindi-Telugu actor Giri, picked up for the lead part because of the “soulful look in his eyes”, had to take a crash course in Konkani.
Shetgaonkar has shown the way for independent filmmakers.