“A Hymn to Being an Outsider” | Karan Kandhari, Sister Midnight
In Sister Midnight, the audacious debut feature from London-based Indian artist and filmmaker Karan Kandhari, rebellious small-town misfit Uma (acclaimed Indian actress Radhika Apte) arrives in Mumbai to find herself totally unsuited to life as a housewife. At odds with her prying neighbors and under the constant oppressive noise and heat of the city, she decides to break free from the shackles of domesticity and follow her own path.
Screening Monday, May 5, at 9:45 p.m., at the Music Box Theatre as part of the Chicago Critics Film Festival (get tickets here), Sister Midnight is a bold, unpredictable, and darkly funny debut.
Featuring an eclectic soundtrack (Interpol frontman Paul Banks makes his debut as composer) and singular visual aesthetic, the film world-premiered in Cannes’ Directors Fortnight and won the award for Best Film in the Next Wave section at Fantastic Fest.
Ahead of Sister Midnight screening at the Chicago Critics Film Festival, Kandhari graciously took the time to answer this year’s CCFF filmmaker questionnaire. Below, his individual responses.
How did you first become interested in filmmaking? What was your path toward directing your first film?
It’s all I can remember wanting to do. I’m an artist and work in many mediums. Film just happens to be the main medium with all the other things I make—collage, photography and drawings—feeding into the film work.
The path to make this was a tough one. It took ten years, because the film very much does its own thing with the narrative. Without the public funding bodies we have here in the UK—Film4 and the BFI—I doubt the film would have got made.
What inspired you to make the film you're bringing to the festival?
It’s a meditation on not having a manual for life and a hymn to being an outsider.
Tell us about a film that you consider a guiding influence (whether it has informed your overarching vision as a filmmaker, directly informed the title you're bringing to the festival, or both).
I’m trying to make films with the least amount of dialogue possible, because I believe film is an audiovisual medium, so it may seem strange that a director whose films are known for their talkiness would be one that has had the biggest impact on me. But Robert Altman was a true anarchist of cinematic form, a rebel whose work proudly thrusts a fist in the face of authority. He was also one of the greatest chroniclers of human messiness.
Altman dismantled and subverted well-worn genres. In fact, he would pretty much deface them. Whether it was the war film with M*A*S*H, the detective film with The Long Goodbye or—in the case of McCabe & Mrs. Miller—the mythos of the American Western, he may well have been dismantling America as an idea throughout all his work.
This film moves me like no other. It may be one of the greatest misfit stories ever: inverting the gender roles, expectations and archetypes of the Western hero between both Julie Christie’s Miller and Warren Beatty’s McCabe. The result is something so achingly human, desperate and sad. While this wasn’t a direct influence on Sister Midnight, its spirit no doubt led me there. A scene towards the end, with a battered McCabe flopped out in the snow, gazing at a wild horse gliding by, is pure magic. In the hands of another director, this could be pure cheeseball. With Altman, however, you get something altogether more strange and beautiful, without an ounce of sentimentality.
Tell us about a location that's held significance to the film you're bringing to the festival: a setting where filming took place, a geographic area that provided a source of inspiration, or another type of space that comes to mind for you in thinking about the film. What made this place so special?
I’ve always loved films where a city becomes a visceral character within the film itself, like LA is for American Gigolo, Hong Kong for Chungking Express, and New York for Taxi Driver.
Bombay is an intoxicating, weird powder-keg bursting with life, culture, and contradictions. It has a very recognizable personality and feeling—from jam-packed inner-city suburbs to the soot-covered remains of the colonial era downtown on a tropical peninsula. One of the things I set out to capture was how it is the most populated place on Earth, literally exploding with human activity, then becomes a sparse and almost surreal ghost town after midnight.
The theatrical experience brings us together to celebrate artistic experience and expand our horizons as human beings. Tell us about a memorable theatrical experience from your life.
Without a doubt watching a battered 35mm print of John Waters’ Pink Flamingos in a dark cinema full of strangers was one of the most memorable cinema experiences I’ve ever had. The communal laughter and joy it invoked was like a form of transcendental delirium for everyone in that room.