I was half afraid a stiff intellectual, uninterested to talk, would walk into the hotel lobby, as we waited for Reena Mohan, who has been named winner of the lifetime achievement award at the International Documentary and Short Film Festival of Kerala (IDSFFK). But also playing in my head was her soothing voice, narrating, in the film On an Express Highway, the story of a businesswoman who had renounced the material world to choose the life of a Jain sadhvi. 

Shattering all these thoughts was Reena Mohan, walking in like a summer breeze, smiling and ready to tell her story of being an editor and director of documentary films. Before we begin talking about Kamlabai, the documentary that won her a national award in 1992, Reena hands us excerpts from the 2021 book, Balancing the Wisdom Tree: Anthology Of FTII’s Women Alumni. The book has that early story we begin with, why she chose to study editing at the Film and Television Institute of India (FTII) all those years ago.

It was an impulse, a whim, says the first line. Her father was in the army and she grew up in a family that didn’t differentiate boys and girls in providing education or letting them go on treks. By the time she graduated in English Literature, she wanted to do something different but didn’t know what. She couldn’t bear the thought of “teaching girls who were doing a Bachelor of Arts simply to improve their matrimonial prospects.” So, when a friend saw an FTII ad and told her about it, she applied.

When she got in, there were five women in the campus and about a hundred men. There, she didn’t enjoy the privileges of not being questioned because of her gender. She had to constantly prove herself, and was accused of taking a ‘boy’s seat when she’d anyway get married and leave editing’. It was also there that she realised she didn’t want to do fictional films. “I love watching feature films. But as a practice it doesn’t engage me at all,” she says.

What draws her are people, finding out the nitty gritty of their lives, how they cope with just anything. It was after reading about Kamlabai Gokhale in a magazine that Reena decided, in the late 1980s, to go to Pune and tell her story. Kamlabai was one of the first female actors in Indian cinema, who worked with Dadasaheb Phalke in his second film, Mohini Bhasmasur. Reena’s original plan had been to write a book on silent cinema. But Kamlabai ended up as a documentary, like none other made in those times. In the films before that, the filmmaking team would remain invisible. In Reena’s film, you see Kamlabai interacting with the crew, addressing Reena, and cracking jokes with them.

Kamlabai in Reena's documentary

Her first rough cut didn’t work out so well, Reena realised when she showed it to her friends. “They were like, it's so boring, it's so dead. They said I kept talking about how interesting and funny she is but it's not there (in the film) and that's when I realised that I was always switching off the camera when she was being funny and alive. After that I kept the camera running,” Reena says.

In the film, you can see a 90-year-old in her element, comfortable in the blouses and petticoats she preferred to wear, reenacting scenes she had done decades ago, teasing the crew. Reena had initially asked her to dress up in saris, changed the arrangements of the house, to suit the film, before she realised that was costing the spontaneity with which Kamlabai was speaking to them.

“It was really a lesson. If you are going to interfere with her reality and the way she is, then that's what you will get. It was a bit of a struggle. So the form really took time. After that I was never going to tell her what to wear, what she should look like. She was not concerned about it, why should I be?” Reena says.

Watch: Kamlabai, the documentary

In every film, it is the form that took time for Reena, not the filmmaking itself. Having studied and worked as an editor, I wondered how comfortable she felt directing films. She says it was not hard to be a director, she had made films as part of her course at the FTII, but finding the form was the hard part. In On an Express Highway, she was not allowed to shoot the woman whose story she was telling, nor to use her voice. She had thought of opting out of the film, even though she got funding this time (for Kamlabai, she hadn’t).

But she kept going and found her form. She narrates in the film how Jignya, the woman, had a similar background as her—urban educated, having a job. She narrates how in trying to understand why Jignya renounced everything and chose the life of a sadhvi, she began looking at her own life. I ask her why.

“What are the things that she is talking about? She is talking about controlling jealousy and anger, the kind of emotions that are bothersome in your daily life; you are not stopping to think about yourself. She is only talking about a way to be, she takes up renunciation so that there is no impediment in that pursuit. No distraction. I am perpetually distracted,” Reena says.

Watch: Trailer of On an Express Hgihway

Both Kamlabai and On an Express Highway are part of the 14th IDSFFK. The festival which began on August 26 in Thiruvananthapuram would conclude on August 31. Reena has made 10 documentaries, and edited more than 50 films. It is difficult to tell her films apart. A third film she’s made, which is also part of the festival, is Skin Deep, showing six fictionalised narratives of women, about body image and self identity. One of the women is a body builder, and in the documentary, you hear how her mother and brother make the usual patriarchal remarks—no one will marry her because of what she chose says the mother; the brother says that he wouldn’t want his girlfriend to be in such a profession, because she has to be home and not be stronger than him.

Such reactions never make her angry, Reena says. “I think as a documentary filmmaker you have to accept a lot of things that are shared with you. And I spent one year researching Skin Deep. I met a lot of women who had shared their experiences or their emotions around body, image and self-identity. So I wasn’t surprised. I knew what it was like. Any woman knows what it is like. He (the body builder’s brother) is not surprising. He was candid. I was absolutely floored that he could be unselfconscious in front of the camera. I was so grateful because I was getting all of this. As a filmmaker you are also jubilating about the material you are getting.”

Unless someone says on camera that they shot somebody, she is not going to be morally shocked or outraged, simply because it is so typical, she says.

Watch: A segment of Skin Deep

It is almost like Reena is cut out for the profession. And after choosing a line of work on a “whim” she has become so very clear about what she wants. In 2000, Reena won another National Award – for best editing – for her work in Sanjay Kak’s In the Forest Hangs a Bridge. Even so, she is pleasantly surprised at winning the lifetime achievement award at the IDSFFK. She considers herself largely as a technician, though she understands the award is to celebrate her many roles—as editor, director, curator and mentor. The only plea she’d like to make to the government of Kerala – a state from where hundreds of short films and documentaries are made every year – is to have funding for documentary makers.