by Dov Kornits
“I like to think we’re ahead of the pack, that we got there first,” says filmmaker Molly Reynolds when we ask about the inevitable wave of COVID films. “When Mat Kesting [Adelaide Film Festival director] described it as the first, it didn’t quite occur to me that this was necessarily a pandemic film, because I had the idea of collaborating with Shekhar for a couple of years now and I think it was just the pandemic that released him.”
Molly Reynolds’ film is ShoPaapaa, which she co-directed with Shekhar Bassi, who also plays the ShoPaapaa of the title.
“Shekhar is a dear friend in London,” says Molly about Bassi, a filmmaker and actor who she met in 2006 at the Cannes Film Festival when there with her partner Rolf De Heer for the world premiere of Ten Canoes.
“We created the character and Shekhar had the camera gear and was able to start shooting and he shot for 50 days, barring one,” says Molly about their process of co-directing ShoPaapaa, with her in Tasmania and him in London. “The character was drawn from his life experiences and then he expanded his repertoire to include the adventures and misadventures of someone who can’t leave their home for a sustained period of time. It’s like a psychological thriller.
“We’d talk every day for an hour or so,” she continues about the collaboration. “We’d generally talk about other things, about the pandemic, politics… because of the time difference, I would not yet have an opportunity to see what Shekhar had shot that day, but every day it came in, I would watch it and I would log it and begin to build the framework of what this could be.”
With a background in documentary [Another Country, My Name is Gulpilil) and digital media, Reynolds believes that ShoPaapaa, the one-person feature film that she has co-directed was right in her wheelhouse. “I tend to be quite experimental with form and ways of telling story,” she says. “I always look to say, ‘Well, how can we cut this cloth slightly differently?’ And I think that with ShoPaapaa, there’s a lack of convention there. It’s not working with known conventions. And in fact, when I pitched it to the Adelaide Film Festival, I thought, ‘Oh God, I’d better play it safe’. So, I said, ‘Well, I’ll give you a 40 to 70 minute film’, and it’s dropped in at 90 minutes. So, it’s both terrific to work with constraints and, at the risk of sounding contradictory, it’s also great to work without constraints. We had no constraints and this work could become what it was.”
And how is this lack of convention going to work for audiences? “You’re always going to have a percentage of the audience that says, ‘Nope, this is not for me’, and also a percentage that goes, ‘this is the best film I’ve ever seen’. Your objective as a filmmaker is to hopefully have a larger percentage of the latter, but my thing as a filmmaker is I would always prefer people to respond to what I’ve created or made with my team, rather than them just say, ‘Oh, that was okay’. I prefer a visceral response.”
ShoPaapaa is screening and streaming at the 2021 Sydney Film Festival
It was great to be out and watching movies instead of binging on stuff at home. Been living in Adelaide a few years now and you get to know the culture scene and you hear about documentary filmmakers like Molly Reynolds. Saw Another Country and loved it. Came across Shopaapaa in the Adelaide Film Festival programme and thought a feature film, that’s going to be interesting. Managed to see it on Saturday. Still can’t find the right words to do it justice. It is brilliant but I don’t think that is good enough as a real compliment. I have never seen a film like this and its the only one that’s stayed with me. How did two directors living in different parts of the world pull it off?! You just have to watch it and once it started I wanted to know more. Love the character of shopaapaa. The acting is effortless. Didn’t know where time went but you don’t move or think about something else when you watch this movie. I smiled and I cried. I have never cried watching a movie before. There was dead silence when the film finished. Walking out behind a couple of people I heard one say it was the bravest film they have seen in ages. That’s true it is brave, it is honest and I am still thinking what happened to the hero afterwards. A honest, positive and beautiful film to come out of such a year as 2020 is a gift to us all.