His teenage daughter who rides her horse through the mountain paths is drawn to a group of silent nomads and their monkish life. Living amid nature, lying below a night skies glittering with tiny stars, chancing upon a swarm of fireflies and letting them weave a gentle, calming magic, their lives are idyllic on the surface.

But the harmony with nature snaps when fire breaks out in Dev’s sprawling orchard. Dev is furious, who is setting the trees on fire? He suspects his workers, the mountain people who he feels resent him for being a “rich man” and for spraying his orchards with ugly pesticides which they feel are killing them.

This is a partial description of the plot of Jugnuma: The Fablean indie film currently running in theatres. This film, with noted actor Manoj Bajpayee as Dev, which premiered at the Berlin festival and at the MAMI in Mumbai, is more than a whodunit. It is a mesmeric film with spiritual undertones which sucks you into a mysterious, slow-paced world where nothing is what it seems to be.

Is it a film on class divide, about climate change or is it to do with man’s restlessness for a deeper connection beyond owning land and material goods? Or is it just a fable about fairies who accidentally fall on earth and live among humans?

The Federal caught up with the 35-year-old director Raam Reddy to throw more light on his magic realism film and his seemingly inextricable connection with nature. It is a stunning film but leaves you perplexed in many ways as well.

‘Attracted to world-building’

Raam Reddy, a St Stephen’s alumnus, is a screenwriter and director who studied at the Prague film school. His first feature Absorbi (2015)an Indian-American production, won awards at the Locarno Film Festival, and Jugnuma is his second feature film. This indie movie, which is backed by Anurag Kashyap and Guneet Monga, is picking up good reviews after its theatrical release last week.

Actors working with Raam Reddy, including Bajpayee, are in awe of the young filmmaker’s rich ‘imagination’ and mastery over his craft. Drawn to fantasy films like Lord of the Rings and having inhabited these extraordinary worlds as a teenager, they “sowed a seed” in his young mind, says Raam explaining his fascination for magic realism. “I am attracted to world-building. After nipplewhich was a realistic film, I wanted to blend magical elements in my work and build a world where people can journey into for a while,” he adds.

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To ensure everyone on his film crew was in sync with his fictional “universe”, a determined Raam sat with an artist and developed a graphic novel as the storyboard. But it took him eight long years to make his film hampered by the pandemic and “pauses to raise funds”. It was a “painstaking” ride, admits this indie filmmaker, who is happy people are connecting to the “philosophical layer” underlying the mystery in the film.

A surreal experience in the hills

Interestingly, before they started shooting in the hills of Uttarakhand, Bajpayee and Raam visited the Neem Karoli Baba Ashram or Kainchi Dham in the Kumaon region and bonded over a “surreal” experience.

Raam recounts, “Manoj does Kriya Yoga and I meditate and we connected at that level initially. On the way up to our shooting spot, Manoj said he would like to stop at the ashram and I agreed since I loved the place, having been there many times while scouting for locations.” However, from the ashram, they trekked up the mountain to Dwarahat (known as Mahavatar Babaji’s cave) to sit inside the cave and meditate for 20 minutes.

He continues, “There was a rainstorm and rough winds blowing outside the cave. While we meditated inside the cave, the rain outside suddenly turned to snow. Strangely, it only snowed for those 20 minutes we meditated. We came out of the cave to see a white canopy of snow all over. When we went down the hill to our car and looked back, there was snow only in those two peaks near the cave. It was extremely surreal and we were really awestruck. That experience connected us to each other deeply. And that connection between us endured throughout the making of the film and even till today.”

A heartfelt collaboration

On casting Manoj Bajpayee as Dev, Raam, who acted with non-actors in his first film, says that he loves the way the actor can transform himself entirely into the role. “I was nervous at first as I saw how incredible he was and as a young filmmaker I had all this power in my hands and I knew I had to use it wisely. But, luckily, I connected with him and it became a heartfelt collaboration. My nervousness fled and we were just busy deciphering the different layers in each scene,” shares Raam in a candid manner.

There is a scene in the film when Bajpayee comes across a cloud of fireflies and is in a trance savouring the magic of being enveloped by them. Raam says this is something he had experienced as a seven-year-old child in Ooty.

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“It was in the middle of the night. We went right inside the dense forest in our vehicle and turned off the lights. Suddenly, we were in the middle of a cloud of fireflies. I never ever forgot that. I felt like literally the sky had fallen all around me. And, so this transference of the universe down to earth somehow was lodged in my subconscious. I penned a poem about it and I was trying to decipher it for years. It’s not like we went searching for fireflies in the woods. But I’m lucky to have grown up with nature,” he shares.

On the vintage aesthetic

It’s not surprising to learn that Raam, whose film is a visual splendour, reads a lot of poetry. He describes his love of poetry as the need to gravitate towards “going inward”. Like his character Dev, Raam too is obsessed with travelling “inward”. “Whenever I went inward, I felt like creating something. It started with poetry, then photography and music. From writing prose I moved into filmmaking, which I love for all its complexity,” he says.

Asked why the film is set in 1989, Raam replies that it is around that time that the post-colonial structures were starting to break down. He explains, “Earlier, there was this post-independence hangover and I was trying to set my film in a period when these structures were gradually breaking down in various forms. The other thing is this is the year I was born and keen to explore this period from a cinematic point of view. I’ve always had a little bit of a vintage aesthetic as an artist, drawn to classics and nostalgia.”

He still rewatches The Godfather frequently. “I like the way it feels. The aesthetics of cinema were different back then, shall I say more daring and sometimes slower or literary. A lot of the filmmakers then had so much rigour to their work whether it was Alfred Hitchcock or Akira Kurosawa. For Jugnuma, we scribbled to create a storyboard, while Kurosawa actually painted each frame before he made his film,” he says. Further, to make it seem like the film was shot in the late 1980s, he designed it to give that period feel. That’s one of the reasons he shunned digital and shot Jugnuma in 16 mm film, he says.

We are back to the subject of magic realism, which is pervasive in the film. Raam, who loves the genre in literature, wanted to translate it into cinema. “It is so easy using words to slide between the real and the unreal. You can easily play with words and create something imaginative. But how can I do that using image and sound? I took up this challenge and I wrote a screenplay that relies on image and sound and achieve the same effect,” he points out.

On nomads and the power structure

If some viewers are puzzled what to draw from the film in the end, Raam says he is not trying to get the audience to ask questions about climate change or class divide. What he wants is pure and simple: “I want the audience to stop, pause internally. Because that’s something that’s so hard nowadays for people to do, to just stop. I feel there are beautiful meditation techniques which involves stopping to be able to see oneself a bit more clearly. My effort is to try and create a mirror rather than plant any questions or thoughts,” he says.

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A nature buff, Raam says he always tries to listen to nature and spends time in the forest to see what they tell him. That’s how he explains the presence of a bunch of nomads who appear in the film. They don’t speak and live a spartan life and disappear as they appear suddenly. (Dev’s daughter attracted to one of them stalks him).

Raam explains their presence thus: “I think it has to do more with exploring land ownership vis-à-vis nature. We think we own land, like Dev does in the film, but that’s just an idea in our minds. All other species suffer because of man’s ownership of land and power structures. Nature is indifferent to it. I brought in the nomads to show the power structures in the film. The family owns the orchard, the manager controls it and workers get a living through it but in a limited way.”

“But when nature starts to speak that harmony breaks down. I was really keen to have a group of people who didn’t belong to this world and are just passing through. They sleep under the sky and hardly have anything. They merge with nature and represent that purity in the relationship with nature,” he adds.

However, though the film was shot in an orchard scattered all over Uttarakhand, most shots, including the flowers in bloom, were achieved post-production in CGI. “The world in Jugnuma has been built partially from what exists and partially from VFX. Over 500 shots in the film are VFX but it is all invisible. It is a laborious process,” he admits, promising to be back with a “high-energy film” dealing with music next.