Preetam Koilpillai is back under the sun

Black Coffee Productions was a company synonymous to a good dose of theatre in Bangalore. But even when founder member, director, musician and playwright Preetam Koilpillai sort of disappeared from the scene, it continued to be a production company that a lot of Bangalore’s theatre audience waited for. Well, Preetam is back alright, but this time around — it’s a short film about young urban Tibetans in India, that seems to have him all excited.

After a couple of quick communications through short messaging service and two brief meetings,  Preetam came across to be relaxed, laid-back, calm and at peace with himself. “I will return to theatre,” he says, adding, “When I find something worthwhile for it. It is not difficult to work on a play. One can do one after another. But at some point, I figured I did not like what I was doing. I started questioning my own capabilities. I did not know what I wanted to do and it took me a while to find myself.”

While music performances, both for the church and otherwise, has been keeping Preetam fairly busy, his short film Passport Photos, produced by Venkatesh Narayanaswamy, is making quite an impression at film festivals across the world. “They are basically a collection of interviews with young Tibetans living in Bangalore. The entire 14-minute film features mug shots of the people interviewed — like they were all passport size photographs off a passport. In fact, I’ve used a print of an actual passport as the background as well. While we finished shooting the film in just a couple of days, it was the editing that took a lot more time. To ensure that 14 minutes of footage of people being interviewed does not turn boring can be a challenging task. So, I’ve incorporated a lot of cuts — which, even though each of the interviewees have a different story to tell, are all unified and connected,” he explains.

The idea behind Passport Photos was to portray not just the struggles faced by Tibetans, but also, Preetam says, “To show that they are as regular as any of us are, but with loads of life’s harsh experiences that bear them down at some point.”

Interestingly, it was the name Tenzing that actually seeded the first thought of a story. “I have a lot of Tibetan friends and a surprising number of them use Tenzing as their first name. Practise is Tibetan parents ask the Lama to name their children. While people living in Tibet would ask their local Lama to do so, here in India, the access to His Holiness, The Dalai Lama, is such that everybody prefers to have their children named by him. The Lamas tend to pass on their own first name in such cases and that’s the reason why we have so many people here whose names begin with Tenzing,” Preetam reveals.

Passport Photos has been screened in as many as seven international film festivals since January this year, including one at Laos — a country that is politically connected to China. “Acceptance at that film festival came as a surprise  since the content of the film is not exactly pro-China,” points out Preetam.

The next big screening will be held as part of the Milan International Festival to be held in October. “I am looking forward to that one as the jury members include big names like Ridley Scott and Robert Rodriguez. The festival received as many as 3,800 entries this year and Passport Photos is one of the few that has been chosen for screening,” he says.

Will Bangaloreans get to see it too? “I hope so, soon. But it seems highly unlikely that we can invite people over and screen just one 14-minute film. The screening has to be a part of something else, and once we figure that out, we will showcase it,” says Preetam. If the innumerable number of multiplexes in the city decide to dedicate 14 minutes of screen time before showing commercial films to this cause, it would probably reach out to a lot of people. However, the way forward seems to be more films, as far as Preetam is concerned. “It need not be a documentary like this one. I am looking at making a feature film next, so let’s see how things pan out,” he says, optimistically.