Karan Kandhari is the Bafta-nominated filmmaker with a punk streak

Karan Kandhari doesn’t do things the easy way. He doesn’t like the neatly paved path or colouring inside the lines. If he did, the genre-bending satirical comedy Sister Midnight—his fever-dream of a debut feature—would never have seen the light of day. The film, now ready for its theatrical release in the UK (on March 14), stars Radhika Apte and took a decade to come together. But it came out to an all-star reception—with a premiere at Cannes Directors’ Fortnight last year—and bagged Kandhari a Bafta nomination for Outstanding Debut this season. 

“I always wanted to make films,” says the 44-year-old filmmaker, his words full of that raw, restless energy that defines his work. He was born in Kuwait, where he lived until his family was evacuated during the Gulf War. After years of moving around, London, with all its contradictions, has been his home for two decades now. “It’s the people,” he adds, seated on a chair in his Hackney apartment, its walls dotted with canvases splashed with reds and aquamarines. When he’s not making films or doing the press rounds, you might find Kandhari at the Prince Charles Cinema, the National Poetry Library, or Café OTO—places that carry the “punk spirit” he loves and remains inspired by.

Kandhari’s career, like his film, is a defiant act of persistence. “I went to art school, studied film, but I struggled and did odd jobs like everyone else. Eventually, I made a short because I had nothing to show for myself. That short, Hard Hat (2009), took me around the world.” Then came Berlinale recognition with the short Flight of the Pompadour (2013), and then another short, Sidney, in 2013. And then followed years in development hell.

The jump from shorts to features was brutal. “Exhaustion was the biggest challenge,” he says. For 40 days, his crew relentlessly shot half the film in manic daylight, and the other half in the eerie solitude of the night. Through it all, Kandhari craved speed, but independent filmmaking is a slow burn. “It takes forever. I just wish it was quicker.”

Sister Midnight, a pulpy, nocturnal tale of marriage, survival, and urban alienation, follows the story of an arranged marriage between Uma (Apte) and Gopal (Ashok Pathak) as they navigate marital life, domesticity, and adulthood from the confines of their single-room chawl in Mumbai. A modern feminist fable, and a classically comic tale of disastrous misfits, Kandhari’s prowess as a storyteller shines in his capacity to mime a pitch-black, deadpan, quasi-Wes Anderson sense of humour in the most mundane of situations. 

It was a visit to the city in which his movie is based that set the ball rolling two decades ago. A trip, that he confesses, knocked him sideways. “It’s [Mumbai] got this massive personality, this impossible contradiction. It’s the busiest place on earth, but past midnight it’s a ghost town. That contradiction—chaos and quiet—was so cinematic,” he says.

Despite premiering in Cannes alongside Payal Kapadia’s Grand Prix-winning debut feature, All We Imagine As Light, the visual renditions of Mumbai in these two films couldn’t be more different. Where Kapadia used grain-tinted, exposed frames to locate grieving poetry in the lanes of the bustling, rain-drenched metropolis, Kandhari’s rendition is starker—the city is displayed in its nocturnal, neon-tinted glory. Through his lens, Mumbai feels less like a claustrophobic metropolis and more like a shot of electricity trapped inside a bottle.

But for all its grit, Sister Midnight isn’t a poverty postcard. Kandhari dodges the noble-poverty aesthetic many filmmakers fall into when tackling India’s margins. “People are neurotic, no matter their class,” he says. “I wanted to capture that without exoticising it.” The film’s protagonist, Uma, oscillates between domesticity and a Kali-like feral vengeance. “People see a bit of Kali in her,” he admits, “but I wasn’t thinking of Hindu mythology. More Jesse James and Billy the Kid. I wanted to create a new myth, an outlaw legend.”

Kandhari’s heroes have always been outlaws—misfits who refuse to fit the mould. “I don’t think I have a choice,” he says. “I’ve always felt like a misfit, moving around too much. I’m drawn to people who go against the grain, who exercise their own logic. My artistic heroes—Bob Dylan, Sylvia Plath, William Blake, Robert Altman—were anarchic in both art and life.” My mind immediately wanders to the closing lines of Plath’s Lady Lazarus. Indeed, the bizarrely fantastic image of a tormented red-haired woman rising from the ashes immediately beckons as a distant yet familiar brethren of Kandhari’s Uma. 

Kandhari’s film also carries that same renegade DNA, stitched together with a cinematic patchwork of influences—American ’70s cinema, Japanese samurai films, the French New Wave. “Culture is a feedback loop,” he says. “Look at Kurosawa borrowing from American Westerns, then those Westerns borrowing from him. Art should cross-pollinate.”

For all its grit, Sister Midnight isn’t a poverty postcard. Kandhari dodges the noble-poverty aesthetic many filmmakers fall into when tackling India’s margins.

Music pulses at the heart of Sister Midnight, and there was more than one moment where I half-expected the background score to belt an ’80s Asha Bhosle or Usha Uthup number. But Kandhari and his music director, Paul Banks (also the frontman of American rock band Interpol), took me by surprise at every turn of the way, with the choicest of punk tracks. “Punk is my first love,” he grins, citing The Stooges, Motörhead, Patti Smith, Leonard Cohen, and Iggy Pop among the long list of artists from his extremely enviable record collection that he kept listening to religiously while working on the film. And as for his Instagram handle @deathpunkbaby? “It’s a reference to Turbo Negro,” he laughs. “They called their sound ‘death punk’. There’s a lyric: ‘Give me death punk, baby.’ It stuck.”

Despite its intensity, Kandhari’s latest work is infused with humour. “It’s the poetry of cinema,” he reflects while stressing that he could never write a script if he failed to place the humour in it. “It is the thing that fills in the gaps between logic, the engine of storytelling,” he adds. And of course, without an engine on ignition, the vehicle that is filmmaking can never follow. Ten years to make Sister Midnight, and yet here it is—loud, funny, electric, and impossible to ignore.