Anuja – Interview with Film Writer / Director Adam J. Graves

Listen here. The following transcript has been edited and condensed for clarity:

So Adam, Anuja, if I may put it simply, it's not an easy film to watch because it's set in India. It revolves around two young sisters, workers, child laborers in a factory. So what drove you to a story like this, a story that's so grounded in reality?

Well, I take umbrage with that comment, actually. I hope it's not a hard film to watch. Definitely, the topic is a difficult, challenging topic of child labor. But at the heart of the film is really this relationship between two sisters. The soul of the picture is the relationship between these two sisters within the context of a new just coming-of-age. The thought that I had in making the film was — I was developing an idea for a coming-of-age story — in the vein of some of my favorite coming-of-age films, like Truffaut's 400 Blows, or the first film in the Apu trilogy by Satyajit Ray or even things like Ferris Bueller's Day Off, which was a huge film for me as a kid, or Stand By Me, which is like one of my all-time favorite films ever. What occurred to me is that a lot of the coming-of-age films that I see coming out today deal with kids in fairly affluent contexts. My wife and I came across this statistic while researching her own family's history of indentured labor. That's another story, a long story. But we came across this statistic that one out of 10 kids globally is engaged in child labor. One hundred sixty million kids around the world are working as opposed to going to school, and it just occurred to me that's one out of every 10 kids. But definitely, one out of every 10 coming-of-age stories is not focused on a child who lives in that world. The way that I see it is [that] it's a coming-of-age story that just happens to be set within the context of child labor. In researching the project, I did a number of site visits with nonprofit organizations to get to know kids who come from this background. The first thing that struck me was just how unbelievably playful and joyful these kids were. The fact that they were able to find joy and create magic within otherwise really difficult circumstances was something that I felt was inspiring and that I wanted to pay tribute to in the film. So the film, although it's couched within this context of child labor, which is a really difficult topic. I was hoping that it would actually be something that really inspires audiences in the same way that you would be inspired when you watch any coming-of-age film, and that would pay tribute to the magic and the mischievousness of these kids.

Based on what I read, Anuja was made in collaboration with the NGO Salaam Baalak Trust, which supports street children and working children in India. The lead actress in the film, Sajda Pathan, is also one such child that you got in touch with through the NGO. Can you tell me a bit about working with Sajda, considering this might have been her first acting role?

Yeah, it's interesting. I can't even take credit for having discovered her as an actress. About eight months before we shot, she was living on the streets of the Paharganj and begging, and she encountered a social worker for the Salaam Baalak Trust — this is an incredible organization that basically provides food and education to street children in Delhi. They have these centers set up throughout the city where street kids can come in and play games and engage in informal education. Sajda encountered a social worker who brought her to one of these centers to play games. She wound up engaging in some acting games that someone there by the name of Pankaj Gupta was organizing. Pankaj noticed that she was just a natural talent; she immediately noticed that she had this gift for acting. Roughly maybe six months before we shot our film, there was a French filmmaker by the name of Laetitia Colombani, who was filming a feature of a French production called The Braid and was looking for a child to play the daughter of the main character in that film. So Pankaj put forward Sajda, [and] asked Sajda, hey, would you like to try out for a film? And she's like, well, let's try it. So the irony is that although Sajda was living on the streets, in context, it's very similar to the character in our own film; she's living on the streets with no one but her older sister to take care of her. She actually, ironically, had probably more days on set than I did as a director when we made Anuja. But yeah, she's an incredible person. All of her life experience just really came through when the camera was rolling. She would do things spontaneously that weren't in the script, that she wasn't prompted to do, but that she was clearly drawing from her own life experience. Yeah, I can talk endlessly about how her spunkiness comes through in the film and by people who watch it, see it.

Yeah, we see she seemed natural; she was a great performance in the film. But I was also thinking about and considering how you said she had to draw for the performance [based] on her own real-life experiences.

As a filmmaker, and considering that you are far removed from her life story, how did you ensure that you're not exploiting her story or the stories of other children like her?

Yeah, great question. Well, I think making a film is such an incredible privilege. So few people get to get the opportunity to make a film or have the resources to make a film. My feeling is that if you're so lucky as to be able to make a film, why not use that incredible privilege as a way of shedding light on an important issue? I'm not saying every work of art has to have some social cause behind it. Of course not. But I think that as a human, I do feel some sense of moral obligation to use whatever artistic gifts or resources I might have to leave the world a better place. There's a lot of this; I could talk endlessly about this, but one of the things I'll say is that there aren't too many stories about these children. There are too few, right? 160 million kids. There are 160 million stories out there and I hope many more filmmakers join the effort to tell stories about people who don't have the resources to produce their own films.

I should say that the film was partly inspired by my wife's family history. She's of South Asian descent, and her family was brought from Uttar Pradesh to Guyana in the late 19th century / early 20th century as indentured laborers. She's a visual artist, and her practice is rooted in an effort to reclaim her own family's history and her own ancestral past to work through issues of labor and also ensure that the voices of the women who informed her practice, like her grandmothers, are heard. Gender and labor are central to her practice. We, as a family, have always been conscientious about labor issues. So when we read the statistic that one in 10 kids is engaged in labor, we thought, well, we have kids roughly that age of South Asian descent. Our kids could be those kids, right? It felt close. The other piece is that child labor — it's not an issue that's there. It's an issue that's also here. Let's say it's a global issue. As consumers of products that are potentially made with children's hands, we're all morally implicated in the problem of child labor. I think we all have a moral obligation to face it, address it, and look at it straight on as a moral philosopher in my background and South Asian studies and philosophy. I'm a believer in Kant's claim that we have a moral obligation to look human suffering in the eyes and not to walk around it and avoid it. So, my sense is that I had an obligation to tell this story based on the ancestral history of my own children and my wife's family. In terms of the authenticity of the story told, what we did is we worked with organizations in and around Delhi that cater to the needs of children and working children and previous, formerly working children.

We did research both in terms of scholarly work, on child labor in the garment sector in South Asia, but also specifically, we read case studies that were very concrete case studies of children who are now living at places like the Salaam Baalak Trust or who are engaged in educational opportunities provided by Save the Children and other organizations. So we really grounded the film. It's not based on a true story, but it's an amalgamation of a variety of experiences and problems that these children have, in fact, faced. So one of the things that we've discovered that's fairly common across the globe is that young girls, in particular, often face the decision between staying at home and or staying out of school and working to contribute to the material well-being of their family, if they live in abject poverty, or go to school and potentially have the ability to build a better future for themselves. As someone who comes from a wealthier background, I think it's really easy to be condescending and just wave the finger and say well, of course, go to school. That's the obvious choice. In reading case studies and talking to these girls, I don't think that that choice is actually that obvious at all. I think it's an existential choice, it's an existential decision that it's really unfortunate these girls have to actually make — they shouldn't have to make this decision, but they're faced with it. In developing the script, working with these nonprofits, and meeting the children, I basically thought that if this film could bring the audience into that world and make them feel that existential tension, then I think we've succeeded as filmmakers.

What you said makes a lot of sense because what I could sense from Anuja, as a viewer, was that it was trying to be nonjudgmental because often what happens is whenever filmmakers — be it Indian or non-Indian filmmakers — when set out to make films in the South Asian context of children who are not from particularly affluent backgrounds, you have the risk of directing poverty porn, just like fetishizing the pain, or just the everyday life of a person like such that, it's then it turns into like a pity party for the viewer. You film in the streets, and you show these everyday struggles, even the tender moments of happiness that Sajda's character has with her sister as well. But how did you try to make your lens as unbiased and as nonjudgmental as possible? How do you execute that?

That's a wonderful question. Yeah, no, I mean, honestly, through a very conscious and deliberate attempt to avoid those cliches and to avoid bringing that Western colonialist gaze. I think part of this comes from my background in South Asian studies. I spent a lot of time in India studying Sanskrit and working with different nonprofits over the years, and part of my core studies is the literature on post-colonial studies, and my wife's artistic practice is rooted in undoing the colonialist conception of quote-unquote, "the other," and trying to recontextualize the past in ways that undo those biases and those prejudices and cast a new light on the work. The fact is that my wife, who's not just my producer but also my creative partner because of her own practice in doing that in the sphere of visual arts, it just became a core mission of the film itself.

One of the things that we wanted to avoid, for example, you said poverty porn. I think the idea is that using a child's suffering is a cheap and easy way of exploiting the empathy of an audience, casting characters as victims of circumstances that deprive them of their own agency. Those kinds of frameworks, we knew we had to avoid that. It was easy because when we met, when we were doing the research, and we're meeting with these kids, it's obvious that they're not passive victims. They share all of the qualities that I love seeing in the protagonists of the coming-of-age films that inform my childhood. Part of that is the fact that the kids are always smarter than the adults, and that's no offense to the wonderful adults who run these organizations. But, man, these kids are just so wicked smart. There's so much untapped potential and natural gifts there that it was easy to construe a story that focuses on a child who has natural gifts, and both sisters are outsmarting the adults in their lives throughout the film. That, to me, was essential to capturing these children as agents, and in some sense, who are trying as best they can to control their own destiny despite the terrible circumstances that they find themselves in.

Even smaller technical things like we all see these films that have the legacy of a colonialist gaze where you go to India, you shoot, and there's this particular light that's always there. It's true, there is. I mean, I'm not gonna lie — Delhi has a particular light. The light in Delhi is quite different from the light in Mumbai and the light in Varanasi. I think it has a lot to do with the burn of the agricultural fields directly west of Delhi during certain parts of the year. The winds blow the particulate matter. That does create a certain kind of light, but trying to avoid the cliche conception of how this world was supposed to look and the way that we tried to avoid that was to make it as faithful as possible to the spaces, the places, and the people. So we shot on real locations; we didn't dress sets or anything like that. With the exception of the factory, we had to make some changes in the factory because the factory was a real factory, but it was a jeans factory. They were making jeans there. They were making all the jeans the same navy blue color, and [they] were boring to look at. That was the one artifice, I think, in terms of the film. But everything else is completely authentic. There's a procession with dhol drummers; we staged that. But it's a real group of doldrummers who we were in touch with and asked them if they would like to come in and be part of the project. We didn't have to recreate the place and the people; we just captured the truth of what was already there.