In indie film ‘Hunter’s Moon’, a delicate dance between human want and the untamed wild

Ridham Janve’s The Gold-Laden Sheep & the Sacred Mountain (2018) explores the movement of men and their livestock in the craggy valleys of Himachal Pradesh. Janve’s feature debut explores the culture of the pastoral Gaddi community through the story of two shepherds who set out in search of a plane that has crashed in the mountains.

Janve’s second film Hunter’s Moon (Kaati Ri Raati) takes him back to the Gaddis and the Chamba Valley. The Gaddi-Nepali film is an absorbing, stunning-looking tale of Jarm Singh, a traditional hunter who prowls the Upper Dhauladhar mountain range for meat to keep his family fires burning.

Jarm Singh (Chamel Singh) fiercely guards his turf from perceived intruders. He is one with the forbidding landscape. But the delicate balance is undone when a shambolic thief (Ajay Kumar) enters the picture.

Hunter’s Moon won an award for Janve’s script in the Asian New Talent section at the recently concluded Shanghai International Film Festival. Like The Gold-Laden Sheep & the Sacred Mountain, the new movie has been made in difficult conditions with non-professional actors and a skeletal crew that relied on solar power.

While the films also share ethnographic detailing and metaphysical concerns, Hunter’s Moon is more narrative-led, exploring the consequences of a clash between shifting human values and the unwavering codes of nature.

A National Institute of Design alum, Janve recruited Amit Dutta, the reputed director and his teacher at the National Institute of Design, to edit Hunter’s Moon. In an interview, Janve discussed the film’s themes and the casting of a soft-spoken farmer as a fiercely solitary hunter. Here are edited excerpts from the conversation.

What binds The Gold-Laden Sheep & the Sacred Mountain and Hunter’s Moon? There is a marked continuity between the films.

Hunter’s Moon came out of my longstanding relationship with the Gaddi community. I was friends with a lot of Gaddis even before The Gold-Laden Sheep happened. That film was the result of those friendships as well as my curiosity about the mountain and the notion of sacredness. In some way, the new film continues my quest for the meaning of life.

I am originally from Maharashtra, but I never lived in the state. I grew up in Rajasthan, studied in Gujarat and then settled in Goa. The idea of home is not there for me. I am more drawn to nature, to places that give me the sense of a deeper connection. That’s what led me to the mountains long before The Gold-Laden Sheep was conceived.

Like in the previous film, we worked with non-actors. The production was similar: a small team mostly consisting of local people. We shot this film too on solar power.

Formally, there are differences. In the last film, I was trying to replicate the physicality of the mountain. The pacing, the compositions were trying to give you the feeling of being on the mountain.

In Hunter’s Moon, I was trying to create a form that mirrored the act of hunting. The results of the wild encounter of two animals or human and animal are very unpredictable. That was a big difference between the films.

There is an eight-year a gap between the productions.

I started working on other projects after The Gold-Laden Sheep. One of those projects, Ashwamedh, was selected for the La Fabrique Cinema programme at the Cannes Film Festival. I went to Cannes with my producer, Kartikeya Singh. Ashwamedh is large-scale. It is set in the 10th century BC and is about a horse that is selected for sacrifice for the Ashwamedh yagna.

To conceive that project within the European co-production mechanism felt difficult. I had to restructure the film. It disillusioned me to change the entire idea because it didn’t fit into a funding mechanism. I felt I had to make something else in the meantime.

I had always been interested in the figure of a hunter. Hunters don’t just hunt animals but enter this moral wilderness. There is no one to judge them out there. They aren’t hunting for antlers or hide, but for meat. They have a lot of rituals and a strict code of ethics. I was interested in someone who is killing but is more ethical than a priest.

I met a few hunters and saw how dangerous their work is. They go by themselves or in pairs. They live really high up somewhere looking for animals.

The story took me to deeper ideas of life itself – like, what is food, and how the moral values that society teaches us don’t hold true once you are in the wilderness. We are human too, creatures burdened by dreams and ego. But we are also just animals. In the wild, that dilemma really hits you.

How would you describe the lead character, Jarm Singh, and his relationship to his environment?

Jarm Singh is a solitary figure. He has a line in the film in which he says, it’s easy to get lost in the forest but because I’m alone, it’s not that difficult to find myself again.

He would like to stay in the wild all his life, but he also has a family. When he is with his family, he doesn’t know how to behave, how to be the right husband or father. Gaddi culture has a word that translates into something like half-widows, and applies to women who don’t know if the men will ever return from the forest. There are folk tales around this.

Jarm Singh is a victim of this divide between society and the wild. When you expose yourself so much to nature, in your attempt to become one with it, you may lose your connection with the outer world.

The thief is somebody who doesn’t have a choice. In the wild, you have parasitical creatures, who feed off others. There isn’t a moral compass in nature – you are within your rights to steal, hunt, kill, whatever.

Chamel Singh, who plays Jarm Singh, has a lot of heavy lifting to do, from narrating the philosophical voiceover to enacting the conflicts with the thief and his family. How did you find him?

Chamel Singh is a very wise man. He is actually a farmer, but he has a mind that is not satiated enough with just being a farmer.

He had played a small role in The Gold-Laden Sheep. We became good friends, and we stayed in touch. For this film, his initial task was to find me a good hunter.

I was staying in his house, and we would talk about the story and the lead character. When we were meeting prospective actors, he would describe the character so vividly that I felt he could be the hunter himself.

He’s actually a soft, timid-looking man. But I saw the character in him. He had a thin moustache, so he needed a beard. He had never worn a beard before.

We discovered the character through workshops. The other actors too are from the region. The Nepali character, Lokendra Gurung, is also from The Gold-Laden Sheep.

What conversations did you have with cinematographer Mehul Bhanti?

Hunter’s Moon has a lot of unpredictability. All the shots had to retain that feeling. We didn’t know how something would play out.

Also, we didn’t want the film to look too beautiful. In that landscape, you can find a nice frame wherever you point the camera. It was actually more difficult to find a not-beautiful frame. This was the only way we could depict the side of nature that we wanted to talk about.

Although you have worked in tough conditions before, the new film must have been a challenge too. How did you manage the crew and the equipment?

There were only three film professionals apart from me. There was Mehul, sound recordist Alok Kotian, and a woman named Maheshwari, whom I had met at a screenwriting workshop. She came along for the shoot and worked as the assistant director. I sent her to learn prosthetics and make-up, so she did that too for the film. We also worked on the art direction and costumes together.

Apart from that, the locals were trained to work as assistants. There was this one guy who wanted to be part of the film from the very beginning. I realised that he was good with sound.

We didn’t have a boom operator. It’s a very difficult, very specific job. How do you train someone for it? I gave him a long pole with a torch at one end. He would practise holding the pole aloft like boom operators do.

A couple of other guys had been part of the camera group for The Gold-Laden Sheep. They are farmers and porters in real life. They came back for Hunter’s Moon. They developed a shorthand with Mehul. He would say, bring the 16 [mm lens] and they knew exactly what was needed.

We didn’t have cars or vehicles. We had to walk a lot between shots. We don’t even have behind-the-scenes videos because we were conserving our batteries for our phones and the camera. There were no other people I could trust more than these guys to carry my equipment.

How did Amit Dutta get involved as the editor?

He has been a mentor figure for me for a very long time. I happened to be at the National Institute of Design when he was a teacher there. We have this close friendship. We were also working on some other projects.

This is the first film he has edited beyond his own work. A lot of the writing happened on the go. Amit came up with a crucial sequence about life, death and the in-between. He was very meticulous in his approach. He would respond to one day’s footage at a time. He maintained the discipline.

He found the film’s form within the footage itself. He embraced those things in the same way we embraced the limitations we had during the production. Also, because he is so familiar with hill culture, he was interested in the ethnographic details that I was able to capture, the Gaddi culture, the dialogue between humans and nature.

You did the rounds of film festivals with The Gold-Laden Sheep & the Sacred Mountain. You have a bunch of producers for Hunter’s Moon. Was it easier the second time round?

The first film was self-produced. With the second film, I wasn’t a rookie anymore.

There are two major producers on Hunter’s Moon. Kartikeya Singh was the first producer who heard about the vision around the film and the story even before it was written in any form.

Kartikeya believed in it completely. He felt that this was a film we could pull off ourselves, without waiting for European co-productions, funds or any external support. He had the confidence that we could make this film through private equity, by raising smaller amounts from several producers instead of depending on one large source of funding. That belief became the model we followed to make this film.

So in many ways, before there was a script or any formal plan, there was Kartikeya’s faith in the story and in the possibility of making it.

Also read:

A Himachali shepherd hunts for treasure on a mystic mountain in a film about a pastoral community