Chasing the Monsoon

by dee Hobsbawn-Smith

Canadian Filmmaker Sturla Gunnarsson’s Monsoon is a documentarian’s record of the spectacle of one rainy season in India.

“I see in the monsoon an awful, beautiful, unfathomable phenomenon and wanted to both experience and meditate on it,” Gunnarsson said in a CBC Nature of Things interview. It’s also a travel diary, tracking what Gunnarsson called “big weather … mystery and awe that’s as close to god as this non-believer will likely ever get,” as well as an exploration of faith, and one man’s self-described love letter to India.

Monsoon plays at the Broadway Theatre on March 10 with Gunnarsson in attendance for a discussion after the screening. The showing is sponsored by the ICCC, The Broadway Theatre and PAVED Arts with support from SaskTel and Business for the Arts – artsVest.

The movie’s showing was a natural outcome for the ICCC after a delegation of faculty and staff from the University of Saskatchewan went to India in November 2013 to initiate partnerships with Indian universities. Since then, Indian faculty have been hosted by the U of S, a formal agreement was signed between the U of S and Jawaharlal Nehru University, and faculty across the College of Arts & Science are co-leading a four-week workshop with the Indian Institute of Technology Gandhinagar this spring in Ahmedabad. Screening Monsoon strengthens existing academic relationships, opens the doors to new areas of collaboration, and connects the university to the community.

Monsoon begins in southern India in late May 2013 and tracks diagonally across the continent to the northeast, observing the upheaval and richness that follows in the wake of the annual three-month flood which permeates the lives and cultures of the nation’s billion-plus occupants. The country’s former prime minister Jawaharlal Nehru once reportedly called the monsoon the “true finance minister of India” because the nation used to be entirely agrarian, relying on the monsoon for drinking water and plant irrigation. Nowadays, only 15 per cent of India’s gross domestic product is agriculturally derived, but the monsoon continues to have a huge impact—on governmental financial allocations and on individuals’ lives.

Gunnarsson, who married into an Indian family and has lived at times in India, travelled extensively through the subcontinent on research prior to making Monsoon. While in a small boat in the southwestern state of Kerala, he met Akhila Prasad, an English-speaking twelve-year-old schoolgirl. He returned with his camera crew eighteen months later. The team’s hand-held cameras recorded in cinema vérité-style, capturing up-close the lives of fishermen, bookies, farmers, conservationists and meteorologists—and the loss of Akhila’s family’s home due to the flood. Predictably, much of the filming took place during torrential rainfall, and the film crew resorted to high- and low-tech solutions to keep the camera dry and the lens free of fog, ranging from high speed rain deflectors and electric blankets wrapped around the lenses to a huge umbrella.

A rich and visually stunning film, Monsoon “captures the epic scale of the monsoon on the breathtaking Indian landscape, while maintaining an intimate sense of the humanity affected by it,” Gunnarsson said.

When the monsoon arrived in Mumbai, Gunnarsson and his team filmed thousands of people as they gathered to watch the rains begin. “The sense of one people, living in the same moment, experiencing the same elemental event,” he said. “Lightning cut the sky and the monsoon rains arrived. Some people huddled under umbrellas, others got soaked in the warm baptism of rain and I felt this incredible sense of oneness with the thousands of people on the seawall.”