Sounds, so visually appealing

How did project u-ra-mi-li take off?
The project happened completely by chance. It started with a spur of the moment decision to just travel around the country in March 2011.

Two days after we spoke about it, we sent out an email to all friends and family saying that we are doing something we have always wanted to do and reached out for support via our www.somethingwehavealwayswantedtodo.com, asking for contributions, equipment, ideas, etc.

And the beauty of it is, people got excited and donations started coming in. But this journey has always sort of been on our minds, individually. Of course now we have identified one thread to our story, but we still want to keep to the original spirit of the journey as we go along.

u-ra-mi-li is all about…
u-ra-mi-li means ‘the song of our people’ in Chokri, a Naga language. The name was suggested to us by Mercy Tetseo, one of the four Tetseo Sisters a young and fantastic band of sisters from Kohima who we filmed with.

u-ra-mi-li, the film, is about the kind of performance, music and rhythm from the everyday. As we went along we found other things that fit in to this idea of performance including movements in nature, a spider weaving its web, the rhythm of a weavers loom etc. In the larger project, we also tell stories of individual performers and musicians, but even here we’ve tried to look at the everyday stories that have to do with their music.

So the crux of the film and the project is performance, rhythm and music, but looking at it completely outside the context of regular performance spaces. The huge part of this project is recording and filming songs that people sing when they work. For instance, most recently as we were travelling in Tamil Nadu, we filmed two men near Pulicat Lake as they built a small wooden fishing boat by hand.

One was sitting under the boat and the other on top, they couldn’t see each other and yet they hammered in the planks in perfect coordination, because they’re listening to each other’s rhythms.

We see this all the time when groups of people work together — on construction sites for example, when they toss the bricks to each other, sometimes the rhythm is incredible to watch.

How long did you guys take to finish this project?
The project is in its third year (they started shooting mid-March 2011) and will probably continue for another couple of years. So it is certainly not finished. What we are showing now is a work-in-progress film, the idea being to get a sense of how people view this kind of material, what works and what doesn’t, and get some feedback to enrich our own work.

Can you describe your journey?
Our idea is to travel and film as much of India as possible.

Obviously that could be an endless journey. So what we try and do is narrow it down to one or two places in each state. Of course we do our research and try to get a sense of the kinds of things that happen there but once we get to our destination we keep our eyes open for anything new and unexpected.

Early in this journey, we visited the Spiti Valley, a high altitude desert in the Himalayas, where barely anything grows. There we stumbled across a group of farmers who were tilling the land and preparing to sow barley. We first spotted them from a high vantage point. But as we approached closer, we could hear the music, mixed with laughter. It really was magical.

Weeks later, in the lush hills of Nagaland, we saw the same thing.

This time, the farmers were harvesting paddy, and the music and rhythm pervaded every agriculture task — reaping, thrashing, winnowing, and finally, most amazingly for us, while carrying 60kg rice sacks up steep slopes. Witnessing daily tasks that were performed in such a theatrical manner was awe-inspiring. 

How did you manage the funds?
We’ve had funding through various ways now — initially it was more informal crowd funding by just sending out mails to family and friends, then we began to crowd fund through orangestreet.in.

We have now also received one fellowship from pad.ma to archive some of our material on their online site and a research and documentation grant from the India Foundation for the Arts to do a more in depth film on the work songs in Phek, Nagaland.

Are you working on any other projects also?
There are no film projects, but we’re both part of a theatre collective in Chennai called Perch and we’ve just finished a few months of full-time rehearsing and staging a new play — How To Skin A Giraffe and we’re now in Bangalore for screenings of our film and also for shows of another play we’re both part of — Ms Meena.

IFA is hosting the screening of u-ra-mi-li  at the IFA office, Apurva, 259, 4th Cross, RMV 2nd Stage, 7pm onwards, this evening, call 23414681