‘A product of love’: Nepali director Deepak Rauniyar on his police procedural ‘Pooja, Sir’

In Nepali filmmaker Deepak Rauniyar’s Pooja, Sir, a police detective and her team investigate the kidnappings of two children in the shadow of conflicts involving the Madheshi ethnic group. Adding an extra layer to Pooja, Sir is its heroine, who wears her hair cropped, tapes her chest and insists that her colleagues don’t refer to her as “ma’am”.

Written by Rauniyar and his wife and lead actress Asha Magrati, Pooja, Sir has been inspired by true events and political unrest in 2015 in southern Nepal as well as Rauniyar’s own Madheshi identity. The tense and complex thriller examines sexism, bigotry and issues of gender and caste identities.

Rauniyar’s third feature after Highway (2012) and White Sun (2016) is part of the South Asia competition category at the ongoing MAMI Mumbai Film Festival. In an interview from Boston, where he teaches a film course, Rauniyar spoke to Scroll about the challenges of making Pooja, Sir and the recent resurgence in Nepali cinema.

How much of your own experiences were built into Pooja, Sir? Your wife and you come from different communities.

We have always been interested in showing something we have experienced. There is a lot of Asha and me in the film. Also, Pooja’s father is very much inspired by Asha’s father, whom we lost during the year before we filmed.

The whole movie is structured around how Asha and I came together and how Asha experienced my world, from her point of view. At the same time, this isn’t an autobiography. We set the film in the police department because we were looking for a setting that would give us the strength to create the experience that we have gone through for years. That’s why we decided to set the film in 2015, during the protests.

While the riots were a true event, the kidnapping was not, although there were a lot of kidnappings at that time. A character like Saraswati was inspired by several real persons.

We did almost seven or eight years of research and talked to characters like Pooja, who was not queer to begin with. But as we started to meet a lot of officers, we found it really interesting that officers were queer but were not openly talking about it because Nepal is even further away than India from legalising gay marriage. We thought celebrating someone like Pooja would be important.

The production faced many challenges. Funding was difficult because of COVID. Then Asha was diagnosed with cancer.

When the treatment ended in April, we wanted to go to Nepal and shoot. But we didn’t have any money. The investors had disappeared. Grants were taken back.

The only reason we could film was with the support of our friends. We went to Nepal with some money, but nothing close to the original budget. We were worried that we wouldn’t be able to hire people, we wouldn’t be able to get the crowds for the riot and protest scenes, and we wouldn't be able to shoot the way we wanted.

But as we started to work and put the crew together, there was overwhelming support in a different way. I was surprised that we ended up with around 700-800 extras, and the police department helped too. So we had a lot of real gear, real policemen, real trucks. The community was really happy that we were recreating their lives, their trauma. Pooja, Sir is a product of love.

Pooja, Sir isn’t just a police procedural but contains several themes linked to identity and bias.

In our part of the world, it’s very hard to separate gender from race and class or identity, especially after the civil war [between 1996 and 2006]. The conversation has been all around identity. I live in the United States now, and identity is very much in focus here as well.

I grew up in a country where I always felt out of place, I always felt my [Madheshi] identity was questioned. We’ve been refused service at restaurants just because of skin colour.

The centre of the film is the race movement and the Madheshi protests. Once we decided to bring in Pooja as a central character, she became a queer character and that too added a layer. So it was very organic.

You are among the directors from Nepal who have done well on the international film festival circuit. Nepalese cinema has seen a bit of a resurgence over the last few years. How did that happen?

I hadn’t been to film school, and I had no idea about the international film circuit when I was shooting Highway. Once I shot Highway, I knew I wouldn't be able to finish the film alone and get it to festivals. So I started to look for co-production, and I got lucky in finding a company in New York.

We did a Kickstarter campaign to finish the film and bring it to Berlin. Once we were in Berlin, that showed us a path as this was the first film from Nepal to do an A-list festival. I feel that gave a lot of impetus to other filmmakers.

After Berlin, we released Highway widely, so that opened up the conversation. The next year Bibhusan Basnet and Pooja Gurung’s short Dadyaa was screened at Venice and Toronto. Then Min Bahadur Bham’s The Black Hen won an award at Venice Critics’ Week in 2015.

In 2012, Subarna Thapa’s Soongava: Dance of the Orchids came. White Sun came in 2016. In 2023, Fidel Devkota’s The Red Suitcase was at Venice and Nabin Subba’s A Road to a Village was at Toronto.

Nepal’s industry was not pushing for change. Because festivals selected these films, it encouraged us. The Locarno Open Door programme focused on Nepal and South Asia. The Film Independent organisation has been working with us for the last four years.

All these things added up, along with getting grants. For me, I knew I wouldn’t be able to survive financially in Nepal. So I started teaching in America, which has helped me support myself while making films.

Have you got plans for other films?

I’m developing a film based on a real story, which will be shot in India, Nepal and London. It's a kind of follow-up to this current film.

It’s the story of a young Madheshi boy who works as a kitchen porter and somehow finds his way to the UK and wins a Master Chef competition. He is a very well-regarded chef now. I’m trying to look at how he made the journey from Nepal to India to the UK, how food reintroduced his career and connected with a lot of people around the world. It’s a more hopeful film than anything I have made so far.