Film
The other side of paradise: Miransha Naik and Juze
His first indie feature, Juze, has been well received so far but getting it done has been the ride of a lifetime for Goan filmmaker Miransha Naik.
At a café in the western Mumbai suburb of Andheri, Miransha Naik, 34, orders a cup of tea and a club sandwich. Around his neck is a Jio MAMI Mumbai Film Festival badge, a ‘Gold’ pass that gives him access to all screenings at the event without having to stand in queues like regular delegates. The service isn’t great — a waiter brings us our order but forgets to bring cutlery. Naik, in a polite yet authoritative manner, points out the omission to the waiter who apologises and immediately rushes to get some knives and forks for our table. It seems like this is something he’s used to doing. I’m to find out why a little later in our conversation.
This is the middle of October and we’re in-between screenings at the 19th Jio MAMI Mumbai Film Festival, arguably the biggest and most prestigious festival of its kind in India. Naik has a fancy, all-access badge for a reason - his Konkani language debut feature, Juze, which had its world premiere in April this year at the 41st Hong Kong International Film Festival, is competing here under the India Gold category. It didn’t win any awards — neither here, nor in Hong Kong (another Indian film, Amit Masurkar’s Newton, took top honours there), and none at the Czech Republic’s Karlovy Vary Festival either — but early reviews in The Hollywood Reporter, CineEuropa, and Screen Daily have been quite positive.
Miransha Naik
© Miransha Naik
Naik’s journey as a filmmaker, however, is as thought-provoking and compelling as his film. Juze, a tale that examines social injustice, sexual identity, and structural violence through the eyes of a teenaged boy, drawing on various accounts from Naik’s own turbulent life. At nine, he lost both his parents to illness (he didn’t wish to elaborate on this further) and grew up in a low-income neighbourhood in the Goan hamlet of Borimol along with his grandmother and two sisters, one younger and another older. His film’s protagonist Santosh is also an orphan (albeit for different reasons) and is forced to work part-time for a cruel slumlord and local strongman named Juze; Naik too worked for a similar man, a man whom he calls a “tyrant”. The film, set in Borimol as well, takes place in 1999 and draws on several real incidents from that time that Naik remembers and depicts with some cinematic liberties. “Juze [the character] existed, and a lot of these things happened, but obviously some of it has been dramatised,” he says.
One of its underlying currents is the tension between ‘ghatis’ (people hailing from the Western Ghats of Maharashtra, often used pejoratively) because of their ‘outsider’ status, and locals that exist in these parts of Goa, not far from the famed beaches and shacks that draw in tourists from all parts of the world. In Juze, we see that version of Goa only a few times. Through the eyes of Santosh, Naik depicts a milieu in which violence, sexual and otherwise, casts its looming shadow on everyday life. Village fairs, teenage love, and academic stresses coexist alongside the very real threat of being beaten up or humiliated. “Even though Santosh is a local, because of his social status he doesn’t have anyone backing him,” he says. “Which makes you [practically] the same as an immigrant.”
Harsh realities of Goan slums
© Miransha Naik
Naik completed his schooling under similar circumstances, managing to come third in his tenth standard exams, and joined a government-run college in nearby Quepem. However, he dropped out of his BCom course in a year to contribute to household finances by working as a waiter at a restaurant in Benaulim. Within a year, his grandmother passed away and Naik, at 19, was saddled with the lion’s share of responsibility for ‘getting’ his sisters married. He proceeded to wait tables for the next four and a half years, rising the ranks and eventually saving up enough money to open a beachside shack (guest house and restaurant) on Benaulim Beach. The establishment, named Blue Corner, has been operational for the past 12 years. “Most of the staff working today has been there since the beginning,” he says. His demeanour with the waiter earlier now makes sense.
Through his twenties, once he saw both of his sisters get married and ‘settled’ as his business grew, he allowed himself to pursue things he’d always wanted to. During the monsoons, when few tourists visit Goa, he began travelling regularly, sometimes to Europe or hill towns in India. His obsession with films, which had begun in childhood, took full flight. “In those days [the early ‘90s], very few people in our village had TV or cable,” he says. “We would usually gather at a friend’s house and watch some Bollywood movie together.” Two scenes in Juze, showing kids gathered in a house watching an excerpt of Subhash Ghai’s Karz and Hero, hark back to these memories. “I loved these movies, but I also loved the slightly offbeat films like Saudagar [1973 film, starring a pre-stardom Amitabh Bachchan] and Mausam [1975, directed by Gulzar].”
Santosh, the protagonist in Juze
© Miransha Naik
In his mid-twenties, he decided to feed his interest in films by taking a short-term screenwriting course at Asian Academy of Film and Television, an institute in Noida, during one of his off-season breaks. His writing exercises there were “appreciated” and he further warmed to the idea of telling stories that were in his head. In 2010, once he was confident that Blue Corner could be run effectively in his absence by his younger sister and brother-in-law, he enrolled at Mumbai’s Whistling Woods International for a two-year screenwriting course. “My restaurant was my baby, so for the first two months I would drive down to Goa for the weekend quite regularly to check how everything was going, making it back in time for classes on Monday morning,” he says, with a grin.
His time at Whistling Woods exposed him more consistently to a much richer world of cinema, including Indian and international arthouse films. He co-wrote his first short, Remember A Day (2012) and then directed the short Ram (2014), a comedy about a young boy in a Goan village desperate to lose his virginity (Rushikesh Naik — unrelated to him — played the protagonist in this short before playing Santosh in Juze).
Naik was in a unique position - an aspiring indie filmmaker who, unlike many, was also the owner of a thriving, successful business. At this point, he was certain he wanted to make his debut feature, one that would fuse his life experiences and depict the realities he’d witnessed growing up. Now, he was on the other side - reasonably well-off and influential. “Goa is still very small,” he says, “and if you’re a local, you speak the language, and you have money, there are a lot of things you can get done,” he says.
Making decisions on set
© Miransha Naik
His business acumen got him funding (or promises only, in some cases) from various locals and friends. His original plan was to use Rs 50 lakh of his own money and crowdfund or borrow the rest, making the film in a total of Rs 1.5 crore. His share rose to Rs 75 lakh and with a crew of trusted friends and colleagues, Naik started shooting in Borimol and around, pulling favours from local panchayat members they knew and, in some cases, ‘shooting and scooting’ like true indie filmmakers everywhere.
There were other hiccups along the way. For the role of Maria, Juze’s wife, he’d initially cast a Mumbai-based actor, fearing that few local artistes would touch a role that had a number of sex scenes (including one in which she is shown receiving oral sex). However, the actor, being unfamiliar with the language, froze when she came on set and couldn’t meet Naik’s requirements. “I was very frustrated at that point,” he recalls, “and then a lot of people recommended Gauri Kamat for this role.” When he approached her and told her about the role’s requirements, she initially refused the film, saying that doing those scenes would be too much of a compromise for her. However, after Naik gave her an impassioned narration of the film and she saw his professional demeanour at work on set, she agreed to give herself to the role completely.
By late 2015, Naik had a new, more worrying roadblock - the money had run out before post-production. He decided to try his luck at raising funds through National Film Development Corporation’s annual Film Bazaar, which takes place in Panjim, Goa towards the end of each year. “I’d only heard about it the previous year, which is why I didn’t think of going there before we started shoot,” he admits sheepishly. Juze soon became one of the most talked about Indian films at the Bazaar that year, catching the eye of noted producer Olivia Stewart, who got Dutch production company Keplerfilm (who have award-winning films like 'The Lobster' on their roster) and the French company Cine-Sud Promotions to contribute another Rs 50 lakh towards the film’s post-production. It also caught the attention of Christian Jeune, a well-known Cannes Film Festival scout who is a regular at the event and a notoriously difficult man to please, as per the requirements of his job. According to many insiders, Juze was a hot pick for Cannes’ Un Certain Regard selection last year but failed to make the cut at the last minute for reasons unknown.
The poster for Juze
© Miransha Naik
I ask Naik to reflect on his life for a bit. “You know, when I started my business, I thought my luck had begun to turn,” he says. “I made some wise decisions and made good money.” Now, he says, that may no longer be true — since much of the funding was in the form of loans, he estimates that he will be Rs 2 crore in the red after he finishes paying everyone off. His debut film hasn’t quite made the kind of splash he’d hoped, despite having attracted the right kind attention in the world cinema circuit.
But his spirit remains undampened. As the film’s festival journey continues, Naik is looking forward to a Goan release in the coming months, eager for local viewers to see his story and perhaps see their own selves in it.