Pan Nalin

Adtala is a village in Amreli district and there was no film industry anywhere near it. Until he was twelve Nalin helped his father sell tea on the railway platform at Khijadiya Junction. He disliked school, painted instead, and staged mythological dramas and folk plays. He left home young, did a year of fine arts at M. S. University in Baroda, discovered world cinema there, and then went to the National Institute of Design in Ahmedabad.

He paid for it by shooting some fifty wedding videos. He bought old film cameras off Ahmedabad's Sunday flea market and made four animations and twenty short silent films with them. He could not afford the editing, the sound or the lab work, so none of them were ever finished and some of them disappeared entirely. That is the origin story sitting underneath a film about a boy who cannot afford a cinema ticket.

Samsara is the story of a Buddhist monk who leaves the monastery to find out what he is renouncing. Nalin sent it out and collected 170 rejection letters and emails before a screening of two of his short documentaries at the Cinematheque in Paris put him in a room with the German producer Karl Baumgartner, who mounted it as a co-production between Germany, France, Italy and India.

It was made in a four month pre-production and a three month shoot with fourteen nationalities on the cast and crew. It premiered at Toronto, Miramax and around fifty other distributors bought it, and it won Best First Feature at Durban, a Special Jury Award at Santa Barbara, a Grand Jury Special Mention at AFI Fest and Most Popular Feature Film at Melbourne. He had gone from unfinished silent shorts to a Miramax release without an industry behind him.

What followed reads like a passport rather than a filmography. He drove fifteen thousand kilometres across India to meet traditional physicians and came back with Ayurveda: Art of Being, a documentary that reportedly ran for a year in Spanish cinemas and two years in French ones. Valley of Flowers in 2006, shot in the high Himalayas and in Japan, was pre-sold to nearly thirty five countries. Faith Connections took him to the Kumbh Mela in 2013 and to Toronto.

In 2015 came Angry Indian Goddesses, which he has described as India's first female buddy film, shot without a script and with handheld cameras so the actors could move in and out of frame at will. It finished runner up for the People's Choice Award at Toronto. Four fiction features in twenty years, funded by five countries, and not one of them in the language he grew up speaking.

Chhello Show is about Samay, a nine year old in Chalala in Saurashtra, who bribes a projectionist with his mother's lunch in exchange for a summer in the projection booth. Nalin cast six village boys from local communities in the region and shot in Saurashtra villages and at a railway station, just ahead of the pandemic lockdown. He brought in old celluloid Hindi prints and a technician who still knew how to run the projectors.

It premiered at Tribeca on 10 June 2021, the first Gujarati film ever selected for that section, and won the Golden Spike for Best Picture at Valladolid the same year. Roy Kapur Films and PVR Pictures released it in India on 14 October 2022, more than a year after the world had seen it. On 20 September 2022 it was named India's official entry for Best International Feature Film at the 95th Academy Awards, and it made the shortlist. At the 69th National Film Awards it won Best Feature Film in Gujarati and Best Child Artist for Bhavin Rabari.

Nalin has said that each story is born with its own cinematic style. Samsara was storyboarded frame by frame and the actors were forbidden from improvising, with a small book handed to the crew called Notes on Zenematography. Angry Indian Goddesses had no script at all. That range only exists because he spent two decades working outside any one industry's habits.

It is worth stating the cost plainly. A boy from Amreli district could not make a Gujarati film in Gujarat. He had to become a European co-production director first, and only then was there money, a festival circuit and a distributor willing to carry a film in his own language. Chhello Show did not come out of the Gujarati new wave. It came home to it.