The BAFTA validation for promising creators

Directors Ajitpal Singh and Prateek Vats get candid about being part of BAFTA Breakthrough India honourees for 2022

The British Academy of Film and Television Arts (BAFTA) has selected 10 promising talents in cinema, television and gaming for its Breakthrough India initiative for 2022. In the second year of this initiative, the honourees were selected by a jury that included music composer A R Rahman, writer Apurva Asrani, actors Anupam Kher and Ratna Pathak Shah, director Shonali Bose and producers Guneet Monga and Siddharth Roy Kapur. The selection intends to help the new cohort explore international opportunities for networking and professional development, with the support of BAFTA and Netflix.

Excerpts from an interview with two of the honourees:

Writer-director

Fire in the Mountains, Ajitpal Singh’s debut feature film, narrates the story of a mother trying to save money to build a road so that she could take her wheelchair-bound son for physiotherapy. His short film Rammat-Gammat explored how money and privilege differentiated two football players. The 2021 web series Tabbar (Family in Punjabi), written by Harman Wadala and Sandeep Jain and directed by Ajitpal Singh, is a crime thriller that follows a family thrown into the deep end and desperately trying to stay afloat, with a cast led by Pavan Malhotra and Supriya Pathak.

Ajitpal’s stories veer away from the mainstream: “I grew up in villages till I was 16, did my graduation in Ahmedabad and Mumbai has been home for the last eight years. I have family and friends in Ahmedabad and rural Punjab and this gives me insights into what is going on in India. I look for stories that reflect different people, not just the privileged classes.”

His father ran a cinema hall in Bathinda, but this is not where his interest in cinema stemmed from. Ajitpal remembers being more captivated by the coffee machine that dispensed cappuccino-like coffee with froth, rather than the films. His interest in cinema grew years later and he gravitated towards independent cinema.

Tabbar, for which he caught the attention of the BAFTA Breakthrough India jury, took shape after he had hit a high note with Fire in the Mountains being selected for the 2021 Sundance Film festival. He and the writers of Tabbar decided to keep the narrative realistic. “The production design, costumes and dialogues were non-filmi. I believe all this helps the actors to deliver true-to-life performances. We wanted to reflect the milieu of a lower middle class family in Punjab.”