Literally Short Films Festival Selects Gulati’s “The Manliest Man”
The organizers of the Literally Short Film Festival, from right, Rose Mary Salum, Founder & Director, Literal, Latin American Voices and Lorís Simón Salum, Festival Director with the winner of the Best Picture “The Aeronauts” represented by Rita Basulto and the Grand Jury Prize winning film “The Manliest Man” producer and director Anuj Gulati.
By Jawahar Malhotra
HOUSTON: He must have been jet-lagged from his long plane ride the day before from Mumbai to the Bayou City, but dressed in blue jeans, a black vee-neck t-shirt and white sneakers, Anuj Gulati looked like a college student out for a stroll in the hot humid weather of the city. The short-cropped hair and tinted eyeglasses on a slight, tall frame only emphasized the carefree, casual look that made one admirer wonder whether the bemused 31 year-old movie maker was much younger than his age.
His short movie – his first foray into feature films – though, dealt with an age-old problem in India, female infanticide, and added a twist to it, set in a deeply conservative village in Madhya Pradesh. “The Manliest Man” dealt with the dilemma of a poor village laborer whose wife had given birth to yet another baby girl. Deeply ashamed by his lack of male producing power, the village chief orders other virile men of the area to help bring out a male offspring.
“This wasn’t the movie that I set out to make,” explained Gulati eagerly while waiting for the festival’s there top films to be screened. “I actually was working on a documentary on female infanticide in 2015 and visited a village in the Madurai District of Tamilnadu. I met with the pastor of the church and interviewed villagers.”
At the Literally Short Film Festival, prior to the screening of the top three films, Grand Jury Prize winner Anuj Gulati (center) met with from left, Raj Sehgal, Jawahar Malhotra, Poonam Sehgal and Kavish Sehgal of Sehgal Diamonds.
The documentary was to be part of his thesis at New York University’sTisch School of the Arts in Singapore, where Gulati had lived for 10 years. The seven-year-old school closed in 2014, the year that Gulati completed his degree, and then he moved back to Mumbai, where he lives in Andheri. After small stints with other studios, Gulati struck out to make the documentary and got the inspiration for his screenplay from the real-life story of a couple who had twelve girls, all of whom they killed. Hoping their thirteenth would be a boy; they had another girl, but decided to keep her.
Gulati spent some time writing the screenplay, then used his savings and money from relatives and friends to start shooting in a typical village with theater actors, whom he paid, from Bhopal, Madhya Pradesh. After the filming was over and he had started editing, Phantom Films, for whom Gulati had worked, saw his first rushes and decided to invest in the still unfished product. Gulati submitted his film to the Literally Short Film Festival in March when he read about it on the internet.
The Literally Short Film Festival is now in its fourth year and is an outcrop of the Literal magazine which was founded in 2004 by Rose Mary Salum. The quarterly magazine provides “a medium for the critique and diffusion of the Latin American literature and art”, according to its website and publishes in both English and Spanish. But the catalyst for the film festival appears to be Salum’s daughter, Loris who exudes a passion for film as a medium to merge “a multitude of arts into one vision”. This year’s festival had four selection categories: International with 15 films; German with 9 films; Mexican with 7 films and Local with 6 films.
This year, the Festival was held over four days, June 14 through 18, with opening night party on June 15 and screenings the next three days, at 5425 Renwick just off Westpark and Fountainview in a large white metal building painted with a large yellow triangle on one corner. Inside, the large space was divided into a screening area behind tall velvet drapes, where about 200 guests sat to view the top three films: Verde (from Mexico) by Alonso Ruizpalacios, which received for the $500 Award of Excellence; The Aeronauts (from Mexico) by Leon Fernandez receiving the $1,000 Best Picture award and Anuj Gulati’s “The Manliest Man” (from India) winning the $5,000 Grand Jury prize.
Both Rose and Loris Slum made brief introductory remarks about the festival and the artistic expression inherent in the films. Just prior to the screenings, Dr. Issac Bustos, a classical guitarist and a faculty member at Texas A&M University’s Department of Performance Studies gave an impressive recital of a song by the late Spanish guitarist Andres Segovia.