Courtesy of Satyajeet Shobha Shriram

“Autobio Pamphlet” (“Aatmapamphlet”), debuting within the Berlin Film Festival’s youth-focused Generation 14plus strand competitors, takes on the dual duties of telling the approaching of age story of each its younger protagonist and of India.

The Marathi-language movie marks the directorial debut of Ashish Bende, who beforehand assisted on a number of movies in India’s flourishing Marathi business, together with award-winning Nineteen Seventies-set coming of age movie “Shala” (2011).

The movie depicts momentous events within the lifetime of Ashish, a so-called “lower caste” boy from the Dalit neighborhood in Nineteen Eighties and Nineteen Nineties Maharashtra, who falls in love together with his classmate from the so-called “upper caste” Brahmin neighborhood. The narrative is basically primarily based on Bende’s childhood and teenage years. It follows Ashish and his mates – who’re from a wide range of castes and religions – as they understand the divisive nature of the caste system, and overcome the difficult socio-political modifications round them via kinship and a celebration of variations. 

Indian National Film award-winning director Paresh Mokashi, whose 2010 movie “Harishchandrachi Factory” was India’s entry to the Oscars, wrote the movie, which stemmed from conversations spanning years between him and Bende.

“After I shared a 10-page story accounting multiple humorous and often pivotal moments in my life, and how the caste hierarchy affected me, Paresh took it and in a couple of months completed a draft of the film based on my story. Of course, he changed parts of it and ultimately gave an eccentric style to the final script and story as you see on screen,” Bende advised Variety.

Mokashi added: “Over 20 years or so Ashish shared stories of multiple experiences he has had with me. From his love stories to his experiences of the caste hierarchy in our region Maharashtra. But it never occurred to me that it could be made into a film. It wasn’t something that had ripened at the time. But, my sensibility and sensitivity to his stories evolved as Ashish was also evolving as a filmmaker and an individual.”

However, Mokashi needed to distinguish the movie from the “overdone genre” of a coming of age love story with a socio-political backdrop. So the author determined to “give a different flavor by adding exaggerations and eccentricities to both the romantic and wider communal narrative. As a result, this film shows both the coming of age story of Ashish and the coming of age of India.”

The movie employs melodrama and hyperbolic speech as a car to propagate a wider message of what love can obtain in occasions of division and turmoil. Mokashi’s purpose was to make sure that the story shouldn’t be one “rooted in issues of social hierarchy, or any of the caste troubles or religious troubles that are in Indian society. Instead, the story goes beyond these issues by transcending reality, like in sequences emulating black and white soap operas, showing the possibility of intergalactic friendship, and of course, the comical objectivity of the narrator recounting his own life.”

Bende mentioned: “This film tells a very universal story. The kind of discrimination it shows is present all around the world, just in different forms. So although this film is based in my hometown, it talks about a universal problem of some kind of division which can be solved through communal harmony.”

“There is an Indian saying which translates to mean ‘The entire world is one family, humans, the environment, animals, all of it,’ and that is the philosophy at the heart of this film,” Bende added.

“Aatmapamphlet” is collectively produced by Zee Studios, T-Series and acclaimed Indian filmmaker Anand L. Rai’s Colour Yellow Productions.

Rai advised Variety, “I think the film will resonate with a youth audience anywhere in the world. In Berlin, in London, in India, because of its universality when it comes to how children perceive love, friendship and community despite politics and division.” 

Zee Studios chief enterprise officer Shariq Patel added: “We are elated with the selection at Berlin and hope to make this the first stop in our festival journey. We want to expose the film to as many programmers and buyers as possible.” Discussions are on with main European gross sales brokers, Patel mentioned.