Before a personal pyre, in Garhwal...

A still from ‘Pyre’

You know how old, drunk uncles often rag young ones at a party - as Padam Singh Kapri, a retired havildar from the Army, was doing with his nephew, Vinod, at his dad's 80th birthday.

At the time, Vinod was planning a film, about a lonely old couple, set and shot at his ancestral village, Berinag, up in the mountains in Garhwal, Uttarakhand.

Which is also, obviously, where Padam was born, raised and lives, currently. He launched into Vinod, "I hear you've become a big director and all… Looking for a hero for your movie... Take me!"

I'm assuming, on a lark, Vinod placed a bottle of Blender's Pride opposite Padam, to stand in for his old wife, and asked him to perform a few lines from the script.

Everyone at the party clapped. Vinod recorded this clip, forwarded it to a few associates, including actor Anup Trivedi, who was to subsequently host a workshop for the cast.

Filmmaker Vinod Kapri

Padam is the star of the film, Pyre, written-produced-directed by Vinod Kapri, that premiered at the Tallinn Black Nights film festival (winning the audience award), and is set for an Indian theatrical release, October 30.

It's decidedly an art-house movie. Which has multiple connotations, including, and legitimately so, a DIY kinda low-budget production.

The definition that fits better is a story that's distinctly more character-driven, rather than pulling along on genre or plot alone. And that it's expressly personal.

Nothing precious happens in Pyre, in that sense. Besides, that you're drawn to the vulnerable 80-year-old man, Padam, and his 70-year-old wife, Tulsi (Hira Devi; also a local, non-professional actor), whose only son has been away for several years.

They live in near-isolation at a remote, hill village, that's progressively depopulating as a result of migration to the cities. The wrinkles on their deeply poetic faces already tell a story.

It's the village Vinod knows from his summer holidays - where his father migrated from, and was the first one in the family to do so.

Up until a couple of years ago, there were no roads to commute to this village, despite Vinod petitioning several chief ministers in the past, whom he personally knew as a journalist.

I know Vinod from before he made his directorial debut, Miss Tanakpur Haazir Ho (2015), a socio-political satire, starring Annu Kapoor, Om Puri, among others.

He used to be a TV news editor then - "highest paid" in the profession, as he puts it to me, vested with the measurable responsibility of drawing TRPs (viewership ratings) into channels, such as Zee News, Star News, India TV, etc. He saw numbers, but no satisfaction. The kinda work where he found the latter - more in-depth, serious stories - the audiences went missing. One of them was a documentary on Anna Hazare. He received a call from director Rajkumar Hirani for it - telling him he shouldn't waste his time/talent on news.

"This was a Sunday. On Monday, I handed in my resignation to Rajat Sharma, my boss (at India TV)," Vinod recalls. He was already middle-aged. He spent some time on the sets of Madhur Bhandarkar's Fashion, which was only his first experience of a feature film shoot.

Vinod has, since, directed a couple of documentaries: Can't Take This Shit Anymore (2014), on open defecation, centred on women; and 1232 KMS (2021), following a bunch of migrants getting displaced from Ghaziabad to Saharsa, Bihar, during the pandemic lockdown.

Likewise, both his feature films, including Pihu (2018), a tragic thriller about a two-year-old girl, home alone, are based on true events. As it is, all fiction is nonfiction from the subconscious. So is Pyre - also inspired by his drunk uncle Padam's own life, who happens to play the protagonist!

Vinod says the movie equally mirrors a doddering old couple, now no more, whom he once met in the same hills. They would regularly barter goats, from their flock, for favours, such as someone ferrying them to the nearest hospital, which was miles away. "What happens when you run out of goats?" Vinod had asked the man. "Bakriyon se pehle hum khatam ho jayenge (We'd be over before that)," he said.

Similarly, growing up, Vinod saw his widowed grandmother and her mother live together, all alone, desolate, in the mountains, in a house exactly the same as the one he's filmed in Pyre.
Here's the thing about loneliness + old age. Whether or not inevitable - as issues, they're certainly universal. Uttarakhand is merely the setting.

Taking a chance with music composer Mychael Danna (Life of Pi, Monsoon Wedding, Capote, Moneyball), who was on a sabbatical, Vinod says, he simply sent him over rushes of his film.

Mychael replied, "This could be my life 10 years later." Mychael scored the super-indie Pyre's music for a tenth of his market price.

Mayank Shekhar attempts to make sense of mass culture. He tweets @mayankw14
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