19 June,2011 09:48 AM IST | | Lhendup G Bhutia
After 26 years of making films on Tibet-related issues, filmmaker couple Ritu Sarin and Tenzing Sonam are almost ready with their latest offering -- a sweet story of a taxi driver in Dharamsala who fell in love with his to-be-bride over the mobile phone
In 1985, two young California-based students made their first documentary, The New Puritans: The Sikhs of Yuba City. It spoke of the Punjabi Sikh community in the Yuba City area of Northern California (also the largest rural concentration of Sikhs outside Punjab). The filmmakers, Ritu Sarin and Tenzing Sonam, both, away from home, found the story of old value systems meeting new American mores appealing and worthy of a documentary.
Filmmaker couple Tenzing Sonam and Ritu Sarin.
PIC/White Crane Films
In the 26 years that followed, the duo got married, had two children and created a large body of work, all of it dealing with issues surrounding the Tibetan community, except for the stray Fish Tales (1997), a documentary about fishermen in Kerala and their depleted fish stocks.
Now, just after making an intense political film, The Sun Behind The Clouds (2009) (it dealt with the 2008 protests against Beijing hosting the Olympics), they are almost ready with their new film. When Hari Got Married tells the story of Hari, a taxi driver from Dharamsala who fell in love with his to-be-partner Suman Devi through a mobile phone.
Hari works as a taxi driver. PIC/Ritu Sarin/ White Crane Films
Tenzing Sonam, 52, says, "We wanted to take some time off after making The Sun Behind The Clouds. And that's when we learnt that Hari, whom we knew for many years, was getting married." What Sarin and Sonam found interesting was the way the traditional and modern met in Hari's wedding.
Hari belongs to a remote community and has met people from around the world visiting Dharamsala. The one person he was keen to interact with but couldn't was his to-be-wife Suman. Their only encounter had her wearing a veil. He wasn't too impressed with her short height, claims Sonam. Later, he purchased a mobile phone and spoke with her everyday, falling in love with Devi gradually over phone conversations.
"Hari is an interesting person with strong opinions, and full of wisecracks and home-grown insights," says Sonam, adding that through the film, the filmmaker couple was able to depict the meeting of modernity and tradition in a remote part of India.
However, and not surprisingly, most of their works deal with Tibet. Sonam was born to Tibetan refugees in Darjeeling in West Bengal and Sarin has always shared a close relationship with the community, having lived in Dharamsala and being a relative of Freda Bedi, mother of actor Kabir Bedi, who was a Tibetan Buddhist nun.
Their films stand out in the sea of movies about Tibet because they carry the perspective of an insider. Sonam says, "We find it increasingly difficult to source funding for our films, because funders say they have already made a film on Tibet."
He rues, "The western media has done a lot to talk about the Tibet problem, but usually, what's depicted is an oversimplification of Tibet and its issues. Most works centre around the Dalai Lama's personal life or Buddhism, and often these are exoticised, which disrespects the political side of Tibet's issues."
Naturally then, When Hari Got Married acted as a breather from the heavily political films the couple was making. "It, however, came with its own set of complications," he adds. Normally, during shoots, they have a cameraman and sound recordists, but this time, Sonam did the camera work and Sarin handled the sound. "It was a story about an intimate moment in their life and we did not want to disturb it with a crowd," he says.
"We were more participants at the wedding than filmmakers."
