Monsoon, which premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival, follows the path of the monsoon in 2013, as recorded by Sturla Gunnarsson and his crew.
Director Sturla Gunnarsson made his first trip to India to film his 1998 adaptation of Rohinton Mistry's novel Such a Long Journey. He left just as the annual monsoon was arriving – a day before it hit.
"The skies were black. There was lightning. It was like 45 degrees. It was so humid you could swim. Everything felt like an altered state. And everybody was talking about this thing that was coming. So it kind of captured my imagination."
India had cast a spell on him. For years, Gunnarsson – who years earlier had married into a family from Punjab – made many trips back to the country. But he never managed to time his visits to coincide with the monsoon. Then, out of the blue, producer Ina Fichman called him and asked if he had ever thought about doing a film about the monsoon.
"And I said, 'Yeah, I've only been thinking about it 15 years,'" recalls Gunnarsson, drinking an espresso macchiato in Vancouver, the day after a screening at the Victoria Film Festival. "I think it's my most personal film."
Monsoon, which premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival, follows the path of the monsoon in 2013, as recorded by Gunnarsson and his crew. The documentary – best watched on a big screen – begins in the southern state of Kerala, as the system makes landfall, and ends as the monsoon does, in the state of Meghalaya, where the clouds – it is said – go to die. The people featured in the film – including a 12-year-old village girl, Akhila Prasad, and a Calcutta bookie, Bishnu Shastri, who takes bets on the rain – were selected by Gunnarsson and his son, Ari, during a research trip the previous year, before monsoon season.
In the film, the monsoon – vital, chaotic, always moving, unpredictable – becomes a metaphor for India. It is a powerful shared experience in this enormous, diverse country. "You have 27 distinct languages, hundreds of dialects, hundreds of thousands of gods, every major religion, a vast land mass. But what they all have in common is they all breathe the monsoon air – the particles, the same moisture. That's the thing that connects everything," says Gunnarsson, 62, who was born in Iceland, raised in Vancouver and lives in Toronto.
Wearing a big black fisherman's sweater as befits the descendant of Vikings, Gunnarsson explains how he set out to make a film where the character of the monsoon is revealed through its interaction with the film's human characters. "The elevator pitch I used was I said it's about 15 people – they don't know each other, they worship different gods and eat different foods and speak different languages and live in different places. What they have in common is a crazy relative who shows up once a year and wrecks the house."
One might think that finding stunning, illustrative visuals of India during monsoon season would be like shooting fish in a spectacular barrel, but even still, Gunnarsson wows with footage that he captured between mid-May and September, managing to be in the right place at the right time again and again with his ultrahigh-definition 4K Red Epic cameras.
In the days before the monsoon made landfall – as the earth seems to come alive with birds, insects, shoots of rice – Gunnarsson was filming at a farm when an enormous commotion broke out: a cobra had emerged.
On the final night of shooting at Kaziranga National Park, a wildlife sanctuary, the crew captured amazing shots of two rhinos – a mother and a calf – migrating away from monsoon-related flooding, crossing a highway – with patrols stopping cars to let the endangered animals pass.
The crew was setting up a shot outside Akhila's family's riverside home when the levy burst "20 feet away, just like that," Gunnarsson says. "And that becomes one of those things where … the documentarian in you is saying, 'This is golden,' but the human being is going, 'Oh my God, these people who I care so much for, they're losing everything.'"
And they were in Meghalaya as the clouds rolled off the Bay of Bengal, across the plains of Bangladesh and hit the mountains – a scene described in the epic Sanskrit poem Cloud Messenger, and one which has remained lodged in Gunnarsson's imagination ever since he read it. "Here we were just looking out on the plain and the clouds … seemed to be moving so slowly toward us," he recalls. "It was like this herd of thundering elephants … and it just rolled over us and we were so mesmerized by it; it didn't occur to us until we were in the middle: 'Run, get the cameras.' And we got that shot." What the crew captures there is awesome, in the true sense of the word.
"I think it's the most cinematic film I've made," says Gunnarsson (who has been named winner of an award for artistry in film at the upcoming Environmental Film Festival in Washington). "And that was the goal; I wanted to make something that was immersive. I was trying to create a film that you could just let wash over you."
Monsoon opens at the TIFF Bell Lightbox in Toronto Friday.
Marsha Lederman