Pondicherry on an iPhone: How Marathi filmmaker Sachin Kundalkar captured the town and its characters

The National Award-winning filmmaker’s latest feature stars Sai Tamhankar, Vaibhav Tatwawadi, Amruta Khanvilkar, Tanmay Kulkarni and Neena Kulkarni

Sachin Kundalkar places a lot of emphasis on his films’ locations. To him, they are as important as the people that inhabit them. This prominence for the place is readily apparent in his latest feature, Pondicherry. The evidence is not just in the title. The film’s poster, for instance, has a pastel-coloured tiled-roof house with long windows, a vintage lamp post, coconut palms, a bicycle and other quintessential aspects of the erstwhile French colonial town.

The film revolves around a Marathi woman, Nikita (played by Sai Tamhankar), who stays in an old villa in Pondicherry with her eight-year-old son and runs a homestay. Her husband, a Tamilian, is in the Navy. So, he is away from her most of the time. Pondicherry is about the characters Nikita encounters and the resultant conflicts that arise from these encounters.

“We meet so many migrated Maharashtrian families with amazing stories to tell. And nobody’s telling them. So, my co-writer Tejas Modak and I decided to make a film about this Marathi family, who’s staying away from Maharashtra, in a multilingual place. That was the genesis of of P ondicherry,” explains Sachin, a two-time National Film Award recipient.

But it could have been any place in India. Why Pondicherry in particular?

“We chose Pondicherry because it’s not just beautiful but also houses many cultures. It has so many languages, so many kinds of people come there in search of something.”

But to know Pondicherry, it was not enough to just visit the place; he had to live there. “When you go to Paris, the day you get extremely bored of the Eiffel Tower and the Mona Lisa, that’s when you start living there,” he says, “Likewise, in Pondicherry, there is an influx of weekend tourism and people come there to visit the ashrams. You really have to get rid of both these extremes to find your own Pondicherry.”

And, “finding Pondicherry” took several months. He rented a homestay, travelled around in two-wheelers, went for long walks, brought groceries, and cooked his own food. As much as he could, he imbibed the town. The buildings, roads, foods, and the colours of Pondicherry fascinated Sachin. .