Indian monsoon is a cool hit at Toronto film fest

"Have you got your raincoats up there?" shouts an elderly film buff at his friend, who is firmly perched in her back row seat at the Scotiabank theatre in downtown Toronto. The teasing question would have made Sturla Gunnarsson, the director of the new documentary film on monsoon, laugh, too.

A few moments later, the director himself walks in, a Canadian, born in Iceland. "The monsoon is like a Swiss watch," he adds for good measure." It arrives on the first day of the school every year."

Part of the prestigious documentary section of the 39th Toronto International Film Festival, 'Monsoon' is a celluloid testimony of the record monsoon India had last year, excluding some parts of the north-east. It is also a cinematic exhibition of the link between the weather, economy and psychology of a whole nation. Seen through the eyes of weather experts as well as ordinary people, the film uncovers a range of beliefs and mysteries surrounding one of the most talked-about subjects in the country.

Beginning from Kerala, where the nation's weather bureaucracy agonises over the onset of the monsoon, the film chases the rains in Kerala's racially and topographically fragile coastal villages to the beaches of Goa to the labyrinth of Mumbai's slums to the nostalgia-filled minds of erstwhile Bollywood actors.

It ends in Meghalaya's Cherrapunjee, once dreaded by British weather officers as a "suicide posting" before visiting the drylands of Maharashtra where debt-ridden farmers kill themselves today when the rains don't arrive for years.

"There are so many stories of the monsoon and you can go very deep to find them," says Gunnarsson, who first did a pre-monsoon recce in 2012 before returning to India in May last year with four super high-definition cameras and a crew.

"For example, everybody makes fun of the Met department, but it is understandable why they are cautious about declaring the monsoon arrival every year, having endless phone calls with the top brass in Delhi and Pune," he says. "People's lives are in their hands. One reckless word can rattle the stock market and affect the whole nation's economy."

To compare Mumbai's monsoon in the last century with today's, Gunnarsson braved heavy rains to walk with Mousumi Chatterjee on Marine Drive as the actor recalled the memories of romance and rain from her 1979 film 'Manzil' with Amitabh Bachchan.

"Both the actors were chasing the same chaos the people of the city chase today," says the director, who adapted fellow Toronto resident Rohinton Mistry's 1991 novel 'Such a Long Journey' set in Mumbai, for the screen more than a decade ago.

In the backwaters of Kerala, the director spent days with a family talking about the onset of monsoon before their home was submerged later in the rains. The unpredictability of monsoon is told through a bookie in Kolkata who talks about "dummy clouds' as he makes money from people betting on the rain.

However, it was in Vizhinjam, a fishing harbour near Thiruvananthapuram, where the director discovered the devotion of the people to the rains disturbed the certainty of his own disbelief. "Here, Muslims and Christians live at opposite ends of the harbour, but they are brothers at the sea," says Gunnarsson, who arrived for the shooting as an agnostic. "India has an effect on people," he says while admitting how the country changed him. "In India, the monsoon is close to god," he says before going on to describe the phenomenon one last time. "It is the greatest show on earth."