Only a month after his directorial venture Haq hit the screens, Suparn S Varma is presenting Flames, the maiden directorial feature of Ravi Kaushik. As it premièred at the Jogja-NETPAC Asian Film Festival on December 6, Varma says the movie’s “visceral and brutal” quality made him come on board almost immediately. “Meeting Ravi felt like meeting a like-minded, passionate soul who had put everything on the line. He was doing a full-time job while making his film. I remember writing my first script while still working at [a news website]. That’s how it is for so many dreamers without a back-up system,” he says.
Shot in rural Haryana with local residents and one professional actor, Vikram Kochhar, Flames follows a family under emotional strain while observing the caste currents woven into everyday village life. Varma analyses, “The [caste] divide can go unnoticed, yet it’s all around us. And when it hits you, it does like a hammer.”
For Kaushik, however, the theme of casteism came second. Flames was born from an emotional urgency — he had spent over a year developing another story about a father grieving a child’s death. “Those thoughts impacted my mental health adversely. As part of therapy, I pivoted to a story about survival and what a parent would do for their offspring. Once I found that emotional core, I had to get the film out of my system before it affected my personal life,” he recalls, before adding, “The caste layer forms the subtext, and naturally shapes what happens to the family.”
Suparn S Varma and Ravi Kaushik
That said, the engineer-turned-director has tackled the subject head-on. “Casteism may not always be overt, but you feel the undercurrent in daily conversations. While I focused on the father’s journey, it was imperative to reflect that underlying layer of discrimination and exploitation.”
Dec 6
When ‘Flames’ premièred at the Jogja-NETPAC Asian Film Festival