NEW DELHI: Some of the cast and crew of "In Which Annie Gives It Those Once', the 1989 film by Arundhati Roy and Pradip Krishen, came together to share their memories of making the campus comedy at the screening of its 4K restored version here at PVR Plaza on Saturday.
The film, produced and directed by Krishen and written by Roy, was recovered and restored in 4K by the Film Heritage Foundation.
The restored version was screened at the Berlin Film Festival recently, though Roy skipped the screening to protest jury head Wim Wenders' comments that filmmakers should remain apolitical when asked about the conflict in Gaza.
Roy was in attendance at the film's screening last night where she looked back at the making of the movie with fondness.
The Booker-prize winning author said the film was "a celebration of utter ridiculousness".
"And maybe at a time like this, that's all we have to celebrate. Looking back at the film now, all I see is a group of young people who were so radically different from what goes on in the world today. They forgave each other, they celebrated each other's failures, they celebrated each other's eccentricities, it was not about who had how much of what, or how many likes on social media.
"So when you look back at that, it looks like a kind of radical thing, a sort of joyful sound. And it is what it is, because actually, all of us work together like a little band of musicians playing and jiving to the same beat. There were no stars, there was nobody all that special, but everybody was special," she said.
As for the rather unusual name of the film, Krishen recalled one incident when a passerby asked what they were shooting.
"Instead of telling people the entire name, because it was a mouthful, we would just say we are shooting 'those ones'. And a gentleman told another, 'Oh it's a film called Do Jawaan'," Krishen recalled to a theatre filled with guffaws.
The film's Delhi screening was also attended by Arjun Raina, who plays the lead Annie; Cecil Qadir, who plays the art professor, and other actors and crew including Shuddhabrata Sengupta, Shantum Seth, Deepak Castelino, Bobby Bedi, Golak Khandual, Viveka Kumari, Ashim Ghosh, Jagan Shah, Siddharth Wig, and art director Ravi Kaimal.
The film follows a group of final year students at the National Institute of Architecture, inspired by the School of Planning and Architecture in Delhi. At the centre of the film is Annie, or Anand Grover, a misguided visionary who has spent nine years in the five-year course because of a supposed slight to the principal YD Billimoria, played by Roshan Seth.
Raina said that it is a "deeply healing thing" to see the restored version of the film in which they bared their hearts and souls.
"What I found most healing is the fact that we all have a heritage now through this film at a time when our history is being taken away from us. There's a wonderful work of owning of heritage and I put my heart and soul into this film and there's so much love which you can see in these little eye movements," he said after the screening.
"There was a sense that when one puts one's heart and soul and reveals almost everything, eventually it was a tacky thing. But yet what is most powerful in this is every character now comes alive, everyone has a voice, every sound, every movements and certainly it's a work of art that I am proud of and we are proud of and it is beautiful to share our souls with you," he added.
In one of the sequences in the film, Annie, who is besotted by cabaret dancer Bijli (Himani Shivpuri) and yearns to marry her, is arrested by the police and slapped. Raina credited Roy for picking a real life incident and incorporating it in the film.
During the anti-Sikh riots of the 1980s, coinciding with the film's making, there were barricades at every junction across Delhi. Raina claimed to have been detained by the police during one of his outings and was "beaten up".
"Because Arundhati was the most beautiful writer and woman that one had seen in one's life, every sordid story that one could pick up one would go and tell her. I immediately went and told her that I was picked up and slapped and that's how this sequence happened," he said.
He recalled that when the actor playing a cop slapped him, the real police officer on the set said, "Step aside, you could not even turn his face red. Let me hit him for you."
The restored version of the movie, which also features Shah Rukh Khan in one of his earliest roles, has been released across 14 cities and 19 cinemas.