Meet The Filmmaker — Kavita Pillay
What is it about film that you are the most passionate about? In other words, why film and why documentary?
I like to cook. I especially like cooking elaborate dinners for large groups because there’s the challenge of coming up with an idea and planning and organizing and sometimes improvising, sometimes failing, and then presenting the final product (which may resemble the initial idea or may have morphed into something else) to an “audience” of eaters / viewers, who are offering you their time and trust as well as an essential organ or two – their stomachs, their minds. Eating and watching films are also multi-sensory, short-lived experiences, but I think that whatever you ingest (visually or otherwise) transmits something to your cells and stays with you in some way. Even if you forget about it entirely later on, it has had some small role in shaping you.
Why documentary? We all like to be listened to, we are all the heroes of our own stories, and documentary film is a chance to reveal those stories in a way that goes beyond the black-white-Republican-Democrat-communist-capitalist-straight-gay-Red Sox-Yankees binary worldview that often defines American media. Today’s documentaries seem to be the visual iteration of the New Journalism movement of the ‘60s and ‘70s. But I especially like Ira Glass’s idea that documentarians work in the tradition of Scheherazade, who spent 1,000 nights telling story after story, and in doing so, manages to turn a murderous misanthrope into a decent human being. At the very least, I’d like to think that working in documentary has made me a little more compassionate and a lot less judgmental.
Which artists have inspired you the most in your life/career?
In 1997, I saw Abbas Kiarostami’s Where Is the Friend’s House? and Taste of Cherry. I came out of the theater feeling annoyed and deprived because the end of each film felt not like an ending but like the beginning of a whole new story. But for that reason, they stayed with me long after the last frame. 13 years later, I still think about those films.
A few years later I saw Kiarostami speak in Washington D.C., and when people asked him questions about the significance of a particular character or scene, he replied by asking, “What do you think it means?” He seemed like a gentle man, very interested in hearing what the audience saw in those images and very uninterested in telling people what to think.
As of late, I’ve been amazed by some of the documentaries I’ve seen by young filmmakers from former Soviet Bloc countries. I’m thinking in particular of Andrey Paounov’s The Mosquito Problem and Other Stories and Juraj Lehotsky’s Blind Loves, both of which are composed of these visually stunning vignettes that are funny, sad, quirky, touching and occasionally disturbing all at once. I really like how both of these filmmakers hone in on the humor lurking within unfunny situations and how they cross between genres, to the point where you sometimes wonder whether you are watching fiction or documentary.
When did you decide to make My Good Name Is Stalin?
I spent about a year in Kerala in 2005 – ‘06. Soon after I arrived, I met a very sweet, shy, 14-year-old boy named Stalin. I was both disturbed and intrigued, especially when his mother mentioned that there were many Lenins and Stalins in their hometown of Thrissur. Soon after that, I heard about a reunion of Malayalis with Russian names in a village in central Kerala called Moscow Junction, and that’s when I started thinking that a film about Malayalis with Soviet names was a way to approach a larger story about Kerala. I did not realize that the larger story was about the so-called Age of Migration until I got back to the U.S. and could see things from half a world away.
Who do you hope your film will reach when it’s complete? What kind of impact do you hope to have? It’s easy to keep going when things are going well. What keeps you going when things are difficult?
I’d think that any story that allows a viewer to see the world in a more complex way has a social impact. And like most filmmakers, I want my film to eventually reach as many eyeballs as possible. Maybe an American viewer will be surprised to see communism and Christianity co-existing within the world’s largest democracy. Maybe a viewer in the Philippines or Cape Verde will see similarities between how outmigration has affected Kerala and how it has affected their own society. I was recently in Finland, and as in much of Europe, their discussions about immigration are continually taking on new and more complex dimensions, so maybe a European viewer will get a different perspective on the consequences of migration as seen from the global south.
Things going well is definitely the exception to the rule. Most of filmmaking seems to be problem solving, which is a big part of what I love about it. But in those especially difficult moments, I chant this Errol Morris quote to myself: “If everything was planned, it would be dreadful. If everything was unplanned, it would be equally dreadful.”
What’s the best advice someone has ever given you? About filmmaking or in life in general?
This Kierkegaard quotation came to me by way of either a fortune cookie or a birthday card: “Be with what is so that what is to be may become.” I think of it as the little black dress of good advice. It’s always in style and it can be applied in good times and in bad and everything in between.