India, Switzerland, 2010, HDcam, 75’
directed by Amit Dutta
screenplay Amit Dutta, Eberhard Fischer, Ayswarya Sankaranarayanan
cinematography Mrinal Desai
sound Ajit Singh Rathor
editing Amit Dutta, Eberhard Fischer
cast Manish Soni, Nitin Goel, K. Rajesh, Srinivas Joshi, Sat Salarwi, Mohan Singh, Alpana Vajpeyi, Srishthi Gupta producer Eberhard Fischer
production Eberhard Fischer, T +41 44 202 11 64, E e.b.fischer@bluewin.ch
world sales Eberhard Fischer, T +41 44 202 11 64, E e.b.fischer@bluewin.ch
Nainsukh (1710–1768), son of Pandit Seu and brother of Manaku, was the first Indian painter with an individual vision: from a certain point on, he infused his family's workshop style with elements of Mughal naturalism. One might go so far as to say that Nainsukh’s mature miniatures, in particular those made during his stay at the court of Jasrota, mark the beginning of Indian Modernism.
It is remarkable that the forefathers of India’s Modernist cinema, Mani Kaul and Kumar Shahani, never showed an interest in Nainsukh, although both were and still are very interested in paintings – in fact, Mani Kaul has written a long essay on miniature paintings entitled Seen from Nowhere. Still, it seems that music and the epic tradition in the performing arts are more important to them as points of reference. With his passion for painting – before Nainsukh, he made Jangarh, Film One (Jangarh Film – Ek, 2009) – Dutta diverges from their example in the same way Nainsukh did when he began to re-consider his family’s tradition by re-viewing it through an alien aesthetic; mark also Dutta’s love for animation, which permeates vast areas of his filmmaking – one might say that he enriches his formalist-modernist heritage with the legacy of the great Pramod Pati.
Nainsukh is a most extraordinary AV creature: a hybrid between narrative feature, art documentary and essay film. Nainsukh tells the story of the painter’s time in Jasrota, with Raja Zorawar Singh and his son Raja Balwant Singh – dandies both who loved the arts more than politics, and whose lives Nainsukh documented in his miniatures. Which, again, are “animated-through-enactments” here by Dutta. In this way, Nainsukh becomes a profound meditation on the elusive nature of reality – who’s to say that miniatures are less true-to-life than film images just because they favor different aspects of the way we experience the world? In that, Dutta returns to the earliest examples of his genius.
"Inspired by the paintings and biography of Nainsukh, this film is shot in the same region where the artist had lived and worked. The actors are local people and include the direct descendants of Nainsukh. The story is from my homeland and I speak the same dialect. The artist himself is played by Manish Soni, one of the finest contemporary miniature painters in India." (Amit Dutta)
Amit Dutta
Amit Dutta was born in 1977 in Jammu. He studied filmmaking at the FTII in Pune. Dutta’s award-winning shorts are masterpieces of a kind of storytelling that is as sensual as it is elliptical. His first feature-length fiction film, The Man's Woman and Other Stories (Aadmi ki aurat aur anya kahaniya, 2009), had its world premiere at the 66th Venice Film Festival.
