|
I remember mama >> Eisha Marjara's Bollywood masala by MATTHEW HAYS
Marjara, who's looking towards a Montreal release this February or March, opens a dialogue with the audience about her adoration of Helen, the star of over 700 Indian films. The experimental Desperately Seeking Helen, produced by the NFB, then jostles between various traumatic events in the filmmaker's life: the death of her mother and sister on board the 1985 Air India Flight tragedy and her own battle with severe anorexia nervosa. Marjara, who's spent the last four years working on the film, adeptly juxtaposes wildly divergent images: Bollywood musicals meet dramatic re-enactments of childhood scenes meet shots of Marjara's own emaciated body meet the Taj Mahal. Marjara says the making of the film was rife with roadblocks. When doing research in India, she was hit with a nasty bug and suffered a near-fatal illness. "Emotionally, technically, this is the most difficult film I've ever made," says Marjara, whose 1994 film The Incredible Shrinking Woman won an award at the Madrid Experimental Film Fest. She pauses when asked if the experience of making the film acted as a catharsis for the horrifying fate of her mother and sister. "There is no sense of closure with this. I don't really think endings are absolute. I'm waiting for the catharsis... it hasn't arrived yet."
|
Eisha Marjara's forthcoming feature, Desperately Seeking Helen, is a bizarre masala of autobiographical notes on the life and audience worship of Bollywood superstars.