Aparna Sen is asking tough question with ‘The Rapist’ and winning awards

The filmmaker’s 16th film just picked up the top honour at the Busan International Film Festival. She discusses how she meticulously researched the subject and then trusted her instincts

‘Why does a man become a rapist?’ The question has been fermenting in filmmaker Aparna Sen’s mind for close to a decade. “The idea came to me first as a germ [she can’t remember if it was before or after Nirbhaya, the 2012 Delhi gang rape and murder case]. Then it gradually got fleshed out into a story with characters and setting,” she says. Now, with The Rapist, Sen has posed the question to the world.

A very matter-of-fact film — or as Variety magazine calls it, a “richly-layered discussion starter” — it takes no sides. It follows Naina, played by Konkona Sen Sharma, a criminology professor in Delhi who survives a brutal rape and assault, while putting forward various points of view and also questioning the validity of the carceral state and the death sentence.

In early October, The Rapist premiered at the Busan International Film Festival, and won the prestigious Kim Jiseok Award and numerous accolades. The actor-auteur’s 16th film, it was shot in 27 days in Delhi, in the slim window between the first and the lethal second Covid-19 wave. They finished shooting on April 6; the lockdown was announced on the 8th. “Actually, it was supposed to be a couple of days longer. We finished ahead of schedule thanks to our DOP [director of photography] Ayanaka Bose, who was extremely fast,” she says, recalling how they all stayed at The Leela Palace in Chanakyapuri. “We used to go down to breakfast along with the other guests staying at the hotel. So, it was not as though we were living in a bubble. We also shot in a real slum for four or five days. We were extremely lucky that [through the entire shoot] no one got sick.”