Coming back almost a decade after his National Award-winning debut film, Thithi, director Raam Reddy feels that his sophomore feature, Jugnuma, is more personal. It tells the story of an orchard owner living with his family in the Himalayas in the 1980s. While recounting a tender, intimate, and nostalgic tale, the film adds a touch of magical realism. A scene in the trailer shows a man with wings jumping off a cliff and flying in the sky. “I wanted to tell a suspenseful, mysterious story with magical elements,” says Raam, adding that it bothered him to see magical realism as a thriving genre in just literature. “People sit in a room and write what they want. Whereas in cinema, it is a bit more complicated as you have to convince an ecosystem to believe in a particular dream. I wanted to fight for that dream, and that’s why I took this leap,” he says.

Due to its experimental nature, Raam wanted to give maximum clarity to his team about the film. So, he worked with animator and storyboard artist Upmanyu Bhattacharya to turn the entire script into a 378-page graphic novel. “We used that as our bible on set. It gave me a lot of clarity on how I want the film to come to life,” says Raam. He explains that adding a magical touch to the film involved a lot of technical precision, location scouting, and working with VFX. “The film has over 600 VFX shots, but no one will be able to spot anything. It was meant to create a world of fantasy, but at the same time, you should not feel it as the story is also set in a realistic world,” he says.

What adds to the magnetic charm in the visuals is also the decision to shoot on 16mm film as opposed to digital. It lends a new texture to the frames, igniting the memory of a different era. Raam describes himself as a ‘digital baby’, having shot most of his work in the format before. It was still his dream to shoot his movie on celluloid, saying that the entire ‘feel’ of it is different. “It brings a certain rigour to the process as you are working with something that is physical and there’s going to be wastage, so you cannot overshoot,” he says. At the same time, it brought its own share of challenges as Raam was not able to look at his monitor after each shot to have a better look at it. “Being a digital baby, I work off the monitor. If someone told me to make my film without looking at the monitor, I would be lost,” says Raam. “So, it took some time to get used to the process. It was in a way disarming not to see everything that you are shooting.”

For Deepak Dobriyal, who plays a pivotal role in Jugnuma, acting for the film camera has its own significance. “I feel respected with just the sound of the camera rolling. It feels as if your heart has started beating when the camera rolls. It is that powerful,” Deepak says. “You also know that you cannot give multiple takes. In digital, you keep on experimenting, but with the film camera setup, you don’t feel like doing that.” Tillotama Shome agrees, recounting memories from her debut film, Monsoon Wedding (2001), which was shot on 35mm film. She feels that it changes the atmosphere on set. “There is a sense of indiscipline that comes in digital sometimes, with an actor forgetting lines, and you don’t realise that someone is holding the boom mic for twenty minutes,” Tillotama says, adding how working with film was a good learning process. “You cannot be casual on set. It is all about teamwork. So, you getting into the ‘zone of an actor’ and ‘not feeling it’ is very overrated,” she says.

Jugnuma is also not the usual Friday release. Headlined by Manoj Bajpayee, the film operates at a different pace than some of the mainstream films, going for a subdued, subtle exploration of emotions. Deepak feels that there is nothing obvious in the film. “Everything is done in a novel way, be it the narrative, treatment, performances, or how it is shot. We have all tried to do something different with the film,” he says. Raam feels that the only thing that makes the film an ‘indie’ is that it was made independent of external influence. “When people say indie, they mean slow. But it is all about pace, and Jugnuma has a narrative pace. It was always meant to match the studio scale. We have designed it that way,” he says. Raam doesn’t feel it is an ‘arthouse film’. “I feel like I have to fight with the tag. As a filmmaker, I am not subscribing to that tag. I am just telling a story the best way I can,” he says. Tillotama adds, “I think distributors have to believe in a film. They are the ones who place it in different categories, which is an old way of looking at stories. It is time people moved on from the outdated narrative of independent versus commercial.” Tillotama feels that independence comes from having the autonomy of telling a story and has nothing to do with the stylistic choices. “You can have an extremely pacy thriller which is independently funded. The independence comes from the director’s vision being protected,” she concludes.