Shardul Bhardwaj opens up on spending a month with garbage collectors in Kolkata for his role in the movie The Scavenger of Dreams.
The movie The Scavenger Of Dreams directed by Suman Ghosh has been selected for one of Asia’s most prestigious film festival, Busan International Film Festival. The movie stars Shardul Bhardwaj and Sudipta Chakraborty and premiered on October 5 in the festival.
In an exclusive chat with DNA, Shardul Bhardwaj who plays the role of a garbage picker in the movie, opened up on how he prepared for the role and revealed what all he observed while spending time with garbage collectors in Kolkata. He also expressed his happiness on his film The Scavenger Of Dreams being selected at the Busan International Film Festival.
When asked how did he prepare for his character in the movie The Scavenger Of Dreams, Shardul Bhardwaj said, “See i don’t think i play characters, i play different versions of myself by doing some research here and there. I have been fortunate enough to have played with directors like Suman Ghosh, who have given a certain amount of time to details and progress. Now herein, the process is very simple. It is to go in the field spend time and without trying to impose ideas of what marginalized people’s lives can be, learn the task. So in this particular case, I spent some time with Garbage collectors in Kolkata in a particular area for about a month. I spent time to not only understand but just be there. When you go out in the field and step out of your comfort zone, and just be you, without any role in mind, it does something.”
When further asked about his experience of spending time with the Garbage collectors in Kolkata, the actor said, “When you go there, you realize it is our lives. We as a society have pushed them to that kind of a margin, that we start talking about them as ‘they’. That’s learning you get from books, but as you grow up in your families, you are told that if don’t do hard labour, then you’d be the guy sweeping the roads and that kind of indignity is what we grow up with and that kind of unlearning is something that you know that has to happen within people. It is contractual labour where people don’t have any rights. So whether it is garbage collector in The Scavenger Of Dreams or Monkey Repeller in Eb Allay Ooo!, these stories kind of match.”
Shardul further added, “There are no rights, there are no safeguards, there is no dignity and there is constant threat of being thrown out of your job. So when you talk to them, you realize that the Garbage Collectors in Calcutta, for example I was spending some time with a guy named Sanjay, who was saving up money to help his daughter-in-law do her MA studies. One day when I reached the dump yard in the morning, at that time the War in Ukraine had just started and only two or three people among the 20 knew how to read they were reading the Bengali newspaper and there was very intense discussion about the fact whether Russia will be able to invade Ukraine or not. So they are more concerned about the current affairs than the people around us. We are living in a certain amount of shell or a bubble because we think that world affairs or going on politics don’t affect us.”
Shardul Bhardwaj further talked about how Independent cinema is not backed by big ditributors and said, “In independent cinema, we are not backed by very big distributors. In independent cinema, where we don’t have the money to work a lot more comfortably, there is a huge part of everyone’s life and soul invested into making that film. So, for example, a Ravi, a Monica or a Suman can’t just say we are cinematographer, oh i am a director, oh i am an art director, I am not going to be a part of actor’s research when we are going on the ground. We would do it together. We would chance upon things together. Even Sudipta, my co-actor was always there when it wasn’t her seen.”
He added that film festivals have somehow become the only exhibitions for Independent cinema and revealed his reaction to The Sacvenger of Dreams being selected to Busan International Film Festival, “We work in extreme hours, in extreme conditions and there are 4 more movies from India other than ours in Busan International Film Festival and most of them will get huge support from the platform of Busan International Film festival to get the access to the audience to come and see these films because the problem is our films do travel to some of the prestigious film festivals in the world, but our domestic audiences are rarely getting to see those films. We have to somehow find a way to make these people look at these films. It is not the fault of makers because whatever they had in themselves they have put in the film, whether financially, or bodily or mental space right. So, these film festivals somehow become the only exhibition spaces for our kind of cinema. So the reaction is that hopefully, this platform will help this film reach both domestic and foreign audiences in a larger manner than it could be.”
Helmed by Suman Ghosh, The Scavenger Of Dreams stars Shardul Bhardwaj and Sudipta Chakraborty and revolves around the story of a family of waste collectors and how their reality is juxtaposed against their dreams.
