{"id":199167,"date":"2013-10-18T15:31:31","date_gmt":"2013-10-18T10:01:31","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.tehelka.com\/?p=199167"},"modified":"2013-10-18T15:31:31","modified_gmt":"2013-10-18T10:01:31","slug":"journalism-made-me-see-cinema-as-more-than-just-entertainment","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/tehelka.com\/journalism-made-me-see-cinema-as-more-than-just-entertainment\/","title":{"rendered":"\u2018Journalism made me see cinema as more than just entertainment\u2019"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><figure id=\"attachment_199178\" aria-describedby=\"caption-attachment-199178\" style=\"width: 250px\" class=\"wp-caption alignleft\"><img decoding=\"async\" loading=\"lazy\" class=\"size-full wp-image-199178 \" alt=\"Janaki Vishwanathan 43, Filmmaker\" src=\"http:\/\/www.tehelka.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2013\/10\/JANAKI-VISHWANATHAN.jpg\" width=\"250\" height=\"397\" data-id=\"199178\" \/><figcaption id=\"caption-attachment-199178\" class=\"wp-caption-text\"><strong>Janaki Vishwanathan<\/strong> 43, Filmmaker<br \/>Photo: Balaji Maheshwar<\/figcaption><\/figure><br \/>\n<strong>How did you get into filmmaking?<\/strong><br \/>\nIf someone had told me 15 years ago that I would be making films, I would have laughed. It was writing that I had always been interested in, from school onwards. So journalism seemed like a natural choice. I have worked in both print and electronic media. I think, making films was then a natural progression. I am more of a communicator than a filmmaker. This is another medium.<br \/>\n<strong>How did your National Award-winning film <em>Kutty<\/em> come about?<\/strong><br \/>\nAfter leaving my job with a TV network, I had started dabbling in documentaries that were supported by some friends and by the Ford Foundation. One of the last interviews I had done for the network was with Santosh Sivan, who had then won a National Award. He asked me to try making films. I suppose a seed was sown that day. That\u2019s when Sivasankari, the Tamil novelist and activist whom I was close to, gave me her novel <em>Kutty<\/em>, which many others wanted to make into a film.<br \/>\n<strong>What draws you to your topics \u2014 child labour and <em>devdasis<\/em>?<\/strong><br \/>\nMy training as a journalist made me pick on something that has a basis in reality. Also, I ceased to see cinema as just entertainment. It\u2019s more than that. It can entertain but also inform. Even in mainstream cinema, the issues that these films talk about come from society. It\u2019s the treatment that dilutes the issues for entertainment.<br \/>\n<strong>Why use fiction then, instead of the documentary style?<\/strong><br \/>\nComing from Tamil Nadu, I cannot tell you how much of an impact cinema has had on our society, on our politics. Even in the rest of the country, cinema is an undeniable influence on our culture, even if it cannot be quantified. Someone who had seen <em>Kutty<\/em> called me once to say that he had taken his maid servant, who was a little girl, back to her parents\u2019 house and was sponsoring her education. Even one call like that makes it worthwhile.<br \/>\n<strong>Is <em>Yeh Hai Bakrapur<\/em>, your latest film, a departure from the style of <em>Kutty<\/em>?<\/strong><br \/>\nIn a sense, yes. Though the topic is as serious as those of my previous movies, I\u2019ve adopted a satirical tone, given it a comic treatment. Also, this is my first Hindi film. The change in language, however, did not affect me much, as I am familiar with Hindi.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Chennai-based Janaki Vishwanathan started her career in journalism before moving to films. The Tamil filmmaker\u2019s debut Kutty, on child labour, won the National Award in 2002. Yeh Hai Bakrapur, her latest and her first film in Hindi, will be screened at the Mumbai Film Festival. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":73,"featured_media":199404,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[21],"tags":[7051,7275,7676,3181,7677,5728,7675,7678],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/tehelka.com\/rest-api\/wp\/v2\/posts\/199167"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/tehelka.com\/rest-api\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/tehelka.com\/rest-api\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tehelka.com\/rest-api\/wp\/v2\/users\/73"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tehelka.com\/rest-api\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=199167"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/tehelka.com\/rest-api\/wp\/v2\/posts\/199167\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tehelka.com\/rest-api\/"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/tehelka.com\/rest-api\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=199167"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tehelka.com\/rest-api\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=199167"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tehelka.com\/rest-api\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=199167"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}