Director Anup Singh says in his Punjabi film 'Qissa: the Tale of A Lonely Ghost' he has attempted to probe the inner dislocation, prejudices and violence through a post-Partition story.
The film starring Irrfan, Tisca Chopra and Tillotama Shome will be screened today in the India Gold competition section at the ongoing Mumbai International Film Festival. It has previously travelled to festivals like Toronto and Busan.
Singh has revisited the theme of Partition after his first film 'The Name of a River', which was a tribute to Rithwik Ghatak's 'Titash Ekti Nadir Naam'. And it is Ghatak's simple and provocative question 'Who is not a refugee?' that Singh tries to probe in his story.
'Qissa' tells the story of Umber Singh, a Sikh who is forced to leave his village during the riots at the time of Partition in 1947. He tries to build a new home and identity for him but his family bears the brunt of his ambition and his intense desire to have a son.
"'Qissa' begins with the Partition of India but it looks more closely at the inner dislocation and separation that we continue to live with in our family and our country. We often lament about the savage and violent world that we inhabit today and yet we are unable to give up our communal, caste or class prejudices. We are unable to tear out patriarchy that keeps brutalising women in India even today," Singh told PTI in an interview.
"This is what 'Qissa' attempts to do. It looks at the larger picture of the Partition, to study the inner partition within us and how we are not only the victims of our history but in fact by ignoring the women in our families we create the smaller partitions within our world, within our families that leads to vast historical violence," he added.
