Deepti Gupta is a filmmaker and director of photography living in Mumbai, India. An alumna of the Film & TV Institute of India, she has shot many documentaries, narrative feature films, and music videos, and loves working across genres. Gupta is one of the founding members of the Indian Women Cinematographers Collective. “Shut Up Sona” is her debut feature documentary.
“Shut Up Sona” was scheduled to screen at the 2020 Hot Docs Canadian International Film Festival. A digital version of the fest has been organized due to the COVID-19 pandemic. “Shut Up Sona” will screen in Hot Docs Festival Online, which will launch May 28 and is geo-blocked to Ontario, Canada. More information about the program and how to tune in can be found here.
W&H: Describe the film for us in your own words.
DG: “Shut Up Sona” is a film about a feisty woman, a music star in India, and a self-styled inveterate troublemaker — a woman who cannot keep her mouth shut! The film is tongue-in-cheek at today’s India, which is at odds with the modern Indian woman. It is about the importance using one’s art and one’s voice to ask for equality, and the price one pays for protesting — especially in a society seeped in millennia of patriarchy.
Through Sona, my endeavor was to let people feel what it means to be a woman in India. I don’t find that it is so different anywhere else in the world, but it is through specificity that I tried to explore a universal truth.
It was also cathartic for me, because in Sona’s story there is also my own, having been one of the first women cinematographers in my country in a male-dominated industry. It is actually a story of all women who fight for an equal place.
W&H: What drew you to this story?
DG: I met Sona 14 years ago when I directed a music video for a song of hers. We remained friends through this time, as she was becoming a well-known singer and a youth icon. At the same time, I realized that while this firebrand of a woman was always unabashedly saying what she believed in, calling out powerful people and institutions, she was often at the center of a storm brewing around her.
She was being trolled, threatened, and sent legal notices. It was like she was always being told by the “powers that be” to “shut up and sing, but don’t speak your mind.”
I saw in her a sparkling protagonist, and someone who symbolizes what women relentlessly go through when they protest, the price they pay at work, in their homes, and the toll it takes on them. And here is this woman — she hits rock bottom, fuels herself with all of it, and rises up again to keep fighting back!
W&H: What do you want people to think about after they watch the film?
DG: When the film was screened at International Film Festival Rotterdam and at the Mumbai Film Festival, the reaction was the same — people laughed a lot through the film, and by the end some were very moved. A few were in tears! It has been deeply gratifying that after each screening, some people have come up to us to say, “This is my story too!” One doesn’t expect that, coming from India to the first world, but I feel the narratives for women are the same everywhere.
The film sees Sona receiving a legal notice from a conservative religious organization for wearing “obscene clothes to sing a devotional song,” and it leads to she and her partner being locked into an all-night debate about what to do. She wants to blast it out on social media, which will decidedly make it national news, and invite a lot of controversy — while he feels she should not “make a circus out of it.”
There are so many shades and power dynamics in the negotiations that happen when women speak out. What happens in the home is often a reflection of what they are fighting in the world outside. All of us have been in those shoes, even if we are lucky to have “supportive feminist partners,” who also struggle with the shadows of patriarchy they carry on their backs, as do women. It’s in the silences and the pauses that people discover their shared realities playing out.
W&H: What was the biggest challenge in making the film?
DG: My biggest strength was also the biggest challenge — Sona herself! There are times when your protagonist will forget that her “friend” is filming, and can’t share a bite with her because the camera is rolling! During the filming, it was hard to draw the line — sometimes what was work for me was just life for her! Yet the gaze of the camera being so intimate is also the strength of the film.
Sona was also a very brave protagonist, uninhibited, willing to bare her soul. The fact that she’s the primary producer the film did not get in the way of her totally respecting the filmmaking decisions, though some of the choices could seem harsh, especially to a musician.
For example, a lot of the politics of the film are driven by the choice of music, and also the treatment of music in the film. To depict the story of a woman being denied her right to be an equal part of the music industry, there are some very “intrusive” cuts to create a sense of discomfort — an interruption — in music and sound edits. She stood by me in all aesthetic choices, even when it may not have been so comfortable sometimes.
W&H: How did you get your film funded? Share some insights into how you got the film made.
DG: We funded it ourselves. In a country that has no internal documentary funding to speak of, it was impossible to raise finance in India. Those machineries are in place mainly for Bollywood, and even there, women-driven subjects are harder.
It’s no coincidence the film is called what it is. Films like this are nearly impossible to make in India; without international backing, there is no recourse. I hope that changes now that the film has received lot of love in India; we received Special Jury Mention in the Film Critics Guild Award category at the Mumbai Film Festival.
I doubt either of us would do it this way again, but the film grew from an urgent need to take our narratives in our own hands, to write our own stories. That theme runs through the film like a silent river under the ground. In that way, it is a testament to sisterhood.
W&H: What inspired you to become a filmmaker?
DG: When I went to India’s premiere film school in the late ’90s to study cinematography, I discovered my love for cinema — but I didn’t know I was walking into a profession that would define me by my gender. It simply hadn’t struck me that I wasn’t aware of any female predecessors in cinematography in the country! I discovered that opportunities were nowhere near equal. It took me and some of my colleagues almost 20 years to set up the Indian Women Cinematographers Collective.
My personality as a cinematographer was also to be super picky about my subjects. Storytelling for me is this amorphous artistic quest where many disciplines feed off each other and enrich each other. Frankly, I never knew where the cinematographer in me blended into the director or storyteller.
When you are 23, and after having shot your first film people still wonder if this woman can actually pull off a film. It can take years before you aren’t obliged to prove anyone wrong by being a devoted director of photography! My gaze, and my arm holding the lens, are all one intention for me. Maybe it just took me time to own up to it!
W&H: What’s the best and worst advice you’ve received?
DG: The worst advice was that you can’t pick up the camera if it’s half your weight. This was when we would only shoot with 35 mil cameras. That went out of the window when I took my first shot on “The Warrior” — where I was the second unit DP — with an ARRI BL and an angenieux zoom.
The best advice was what I once read that Van Gogh wrote to his friend Anton van Rappard: “Let us try to plumb the mysteries of technique so deeply, that people will crowd around and swear to heaven that we have no technique.” This is something that guides me. It is why music speaks straight to the soul, as do good stories and cinema. It seems like it just flows when there is so much technique that went into it. That is what one strives for when making film, from behind the lens, in montage, and at every stage of the process.
W&H: What advice do you have for other female directors?
DG: I feel we live in an unprecedented time of artistic freedom, a freedom to express. Our grandmothers fought for stepping out of homes, mothers fought for education, and women today are asking to be equal and no less. Our freedom is somewhat new-found, and we owe it to ourselves to use it to speak our truth with everything in our power, our art, poetry, music, and film.
W&H: Name your favorite woman-directed film and why.
DG: I love Mira Nair’s “Salaam Bombay!,” Lone Scherfig’s “An Education,” and Agnès Varda’s “The Gleaners and I.” The list is endless!
W&H: How are you adjusting to life during the COVID-19 pandemic? Are you keeping creative, and if so, how?
DG: I am developing a nonfiction series idea and a fiction script while my country is in an extended lockdown. It’s a busy time with the film being at HotDocs, and planning the journey of it.
It is very important in an uncertain time like this to stay sane, and even better, to stay inspired. I keep myself in the inspiring — remote! — company of friends old and new, great work by many great people, and masters who have gone before us and left us their work and journeys.
