A video poem on waiting, bodies, and the sea.
The poem grew out of the contradiction of city life — constant motion on the outside, and an interior rhythm that refuses to hurry. While everything demands urgency, there are emotional spaces that breathe slowly, almost underwater. The mermaid became a way of thinking about that state: present, watchful, slightly apart from the world moving past her.
The hustle is all that we see but there lies more beyond our knowledge . The quest to know that there is a world beyond ours.
How It All Started
At the crack of dawn, after changing a train from the Western Line to the Harbour Line, holding on to the tripod (and a good one is heavy) and the lens box, I trudged along with cinematographer Shubra Dutta. She was carrying the camera and speaking nonstop. We never give up the need to shoot during the morning magic hour, so this is how the choice of time came to be. At the edge of a city that never really sleeps, onlookers ( read truck drivers and crew) found two women trudging along what seemed like an endless line of parked tankers and trucks, en route from the railway station towards Sewri to watch/ shoot (on camera) flamingos. These magnificent birds visit us during late winter and stay until April.
We were moving in quick steps, two women at work, dressed like men, yet we could sense a gaze that we abhor. For the first time, in our safe city, this is how we collectively felt; this remained with me while shooting. That’s why I mention this here.
Both of us tried to be mindful of what lay ahead, but this 150-metre trudge felt like ten miles, our hearts almost audible against the highway that unfurled somewhere behind us. We reached the edge, where the land met the salt of the ocean. We breathed easy.
The ships you see in the poem are gigantic and overwhelming. The poem began to form then when we saw them. The tide was out, the birds were in, but this is the east, and the light was behind them. The birds were in silhouette, and we knew this magic hour shoot was not suitable for shooting them. The shots didn’t look the way we’d hoped. We would have to come again for the birds, but by then we had sighted a treasure. The ships and some of their smaller cousins were moored, which engrossed our lens. We started shooting, noting slowly the sunrise and the tide coming in, and the city grinding back to life, as if the gears had moved afresh.
The noise at times was deafening. We feasted on the pink skies through our lens and got flights of gulls. Then we heard young voices. Young boys fishing, and the tendrils of sunlight on the water and their line felt like a connection to the mermaid world.
May I invite you to watch the video poem and see how it all started and how it then got shaped into this interface of the hustle and hope, of a world that is perhaps deeper, alternate, and waiting…
Crew
Camera: Shubra Dutta ( Instagram: Shubrad)
Editing and Sound Design: Dark Chocolate Team ( @darkchocolatefilms)
Poetry & Direction: Barnali Ray Shukla ( @barnalirays)
Produced by: Dark Chocolate Films
Barnali Ray Shukla
Barnali Ray Shukla is a writer, filmmaker and a poet.
She made her directorial debut with ‘Kucch Luv Jaisaa’ in 2011, with Fox Star Studios, it is now streaming on Amazon Prime. . She was an assistant director on ‘Satya’ with Ram Gopal Varma, has worked on script selections with Sudhir Mishra and has been in writers’ room with Ekta Kapoor. She was on the Selection Committee for Mumbai Academy of Moving Images for three years in a row and that honed her view of the world and opened a gaze, beyond Bollywood.
She topped the University of Delhi at both graduation and post-graduation but she made a choice, to choose writing and filmmaking over doing genetic engineering in the USA.
Her poetry, creative writing and essays have been published in India and in the UK, USA, Australia, Singapore, China, Japan and Hong Kong. Some of her poetry has been translated to Chinese and Japanese. Her book of poems, ‘Apostrophe’ (RLFPA 2017) is her first, she is working on her next. She writes poetry in English.
She has four documentary films to her credits, Liquid Borders, Once Upon A Sky, All Is Well and her recent being I Run Into Chairs. They are available to view online.
Her recent Hindi feature film, JOON, is available on Amazon Prime, Apple + and BookMyShowStream . Joon was an audience favourite across film festivals and bagged 17 awards across Bolivia, Brazil, Norway, Sweden, Japan, USA, Indonesia, Ukraine, Croatia, India and France.
Mermaids Are Waiting is her first micro format work and she wishes to keep up such adventures and more, on her very young YouTube channel.