The audience has to be provoked, says Sajas Rahman of his film Chavittu

The Malayalam-language feature Chavittu (Stomp) is the third film from the Rahman Brothers, Shinos and Sajas, after Kalippaattakkaaran (Toy Maker, 2015) and Vasanthi (2021). The latter won three Kerala Film Critics Awards. Their latest feature, Chavittu had its world premiere at the International Film Festival Rotterdam 2022.

A powerful, politically engaged film, Chavittu, revels in satirizing present-day society, its prejudices, hypocrisies, and politics while being a poignant tribute to folk art forms and artists.

The film presents a group of theatre performers who are getting ready to present their play at a function organized by a residents’ association in a small town in Kerala. They rehearse their play, while the people in the auditorium are also busy with their preparations.

The film engages with theatre and cinema both in form and content, bringing together the worlds of Sajas, a theatre director and alumnus of the School of Drama and Fine Arts, Thrissur, with that of Shinos, an award-winning video editor.

In an exclusive interview, Sajas spoke about his latest film and what art means to him. Beginning by speaking about the ways in which Chavittu engages with the theatrical and the cinematic, he said, “I am a theatre academician and practitioner and for many years I thought about theatricality and the cinematic; that has been the quest. It is only with our first film, Vasanthi (Toymaker), which was in 2014, that my brother [Shinos] and I started collaborating.

"I think theatricality is highly cinematic. In many films, there is always an element of theatricality. For us, it happened organically… every scene, I would conceive it theatrically and my brother would conceive it cinematically, and the conflict would bring about something else, that’s how our films start.”

Chavittu foregrounds the practitioners of a theatre troupe and deploys Brechtian alienation techniques which the filmmakers have employed in their earlier two films as well.

The idea, according to Sahas, is not to lull the audience into a narrative stupor during the film but to keep them engaged with what is going on and make them think. “While you are watching [the film] you should also think and while you are watching one scene and going on to the next scene, the audience should be able to conjoin it and make meaning out of it while watching the film, not after watching the film. I think that is a very powerful ideology. My thesis and dissertation are also on Brechtian alienation and I love Brechtian aesthetics.”

Chavittu review: A provocative and captivating satire that pulsates with life

Elaborating on the technique and the ways in which it is deployed in the film, he said, “There is no protagonist, no antagonist; there is only a group of ten people that we see. You are not going into their background, no names, no emotions, only theatre emotions, what’s needed inside the theatre. We only see them in the play; we want to see the characters and actors in the play, not beyond that narrative. That’s the way it [the film] was conceived.”

In many ways, Chavittu is a political film, gesturing towards issues and happenings going on around us in everyday life. However, the critique is not explicit as the film leaves it to us as audiences to interpret the words, movements, actions and even the editing.

“We are not talking about one particular thing. In the drama, through the rehearsal process, we see people who are fighting against corporatisation and privatisation and for the struggle of farmers and common people; and in the outer space, there is conflict between artists and cultural spaces. The intercutting between one shot and the next is communicating a thought, they are in dialogue with each other. I think, everywhere in Stomp, there is a political statement. I think it’s there is every dialogue and cuts.”

“Good art is not something which follows existing ideologies. Good art is what follows existing forms. The form and the ideology, whatever is done beyond that provokes the audience in many different ways. It could be anger, happiness or any emotion. The audience is not meant to just consume the film, but the provocation has to be there. Whatever is provoking them is meaningful. The audience has to be provoked,” he stated.

While Malayalam features have been gaining recognition across the world at various film festivals, Sajas pointed out the deplorable condition in Kerala, a state where the space for culture has been shrinking. This apathy towards traditional art forms and work outside the mainstream is one of the strains in Chavittu as well.

He explained, “The cultural space that we are critiquing in this film is very familiar to artists. We have also gone through the same situation with our previous two films. We had to do parallel screenings. Although films like Battleship Potemkin (1925) and Pather Panchali (1955) are being screened, spaces are shrinking for the current parallel films [in Kerala]…

"In Kerala, there is a discussion about what is a good film and a bad film. I don’t agree with this. I think there are commercial films and there are independent, parallel films. Films that experiment with form and aesthetics are not being screened in theatres. That space is not there for parallel films. It’s only there for middle-brow cinema. Films that are currently celebrated in Kerala are generally middle-brow films, the kind we had in the 1980s. There are a lot of good parallel cinema filmmakers currently but they are not getting enough attention,” he said.

The situation remains bleak despite the coming of several OTT [over-the-top] platforms as they too, either demand star-driven content or do not pay for the films being hosted on their platforms. Despite the difficulties, Sajas does not lose heart and like the artistes in his film, decides to move onward. “It’s a never-ending process. We struggle, we overcome and then again, we struggle and we overcome it. It is continuing… the struggle continues. As an artist, I believe that every formula should be broken and renewed. That’s the struggle of an artist. That’s the pressure as well.”

Chavittu was screened at the recently concluded Habitat International Film Festival.

The interview was conducted with the help of Nisam Asaf who translated the conversation.