By the third day of WAVES (World Audio Visual Entertainment Summit), the latest sarkari symposium held in Mumbai, I used to be tuckered out. Prime Minister Narendra Modi delivered the inaugural tackle; thenceforth, periods upon periods — about cultural tender energy, about innovation and the ‘orange economy’, about how Netflix created 20,000 jobs by its native productions in India.
Wandering across the huge Jio World Convention Centre in BKC, what caught my consideration was a a lot easier merchandise on the agenda: a movie poster-making competitors. Arranged on easels, outdoors one of many venues, had been 10 hand-drawn work. The competitors was co-organised by the National Film Archive of India (NFAI) and ImageNation, a Delhi-based artwork group specialising in graffiti and murals.
In the age of generative AI and the off-putting Studio Ghibli pattern, the younger members — hailing from numerous artwork and movie institutes of India — got three hours in which to complete their work. But what delighted me most was the selection of movie they had been tossed: Kundan Shah’s corrosive political satire Jaane Bhi Do Yaaro.
The irony was unmissable. A comic book skewering of paperwork and crony capitalism from the early Eighties, celebrated, over 4 many years later, on the coronary heart of company Mumbai. The successful entry — a sly evocation of this dystopian imbalance — was by Drishya Ashok, a 25-year-old artwork path scholar from the Film and Television Institute of India (FTII). Born in Palakkad however introduced up in Pollachi, Tamil Nadu, Ashok studied structure and later assisted in the artwork departments of the Tamil movies Demonte Colony (2015) and Naane Varuvean (2022). She watched Jaane Bhi Do Yaaro for the primary time in preparation for the competitors — “It’s so political and timeless!”
Ashok’s successful Jaane Bhi Do Yaaro poster
The third eye
In Shah’s endlessly entertaining traditional, two foppish however penniless nonetheless photographers, performed by Naseeruddin Shah and Ravi Baswani, come upon proof of a political homicide. Their slapstick sleuthing unfolds towards the backdrop of a reworking Bombay, the concrete wilderness taking root. In Ashok’s portray, an analogue Pentax digicam friends down from a flyover, keenly surveying a metropolis bent off form. Seen from a distance, the digicam virtually resembles a surveillance drone.
“In film school, we are taught that the camera is the third eye,” she says. “It can manipulate you, provoke you. Currently, surveillance is happening everywhere through CCTV… and in the age of AI, the camera can even control itself. It can choose what to watch and where to watch.” While most of the different entries interpreted the movie actually, it’s this forbidding retrofuturistic high quality to Drishya’s portray that places it in dialog with current occasions.
Ashok lists Blade Runner, Solaris, Stalker and Metropolis as a few of her favorite sci-fi works. Her regard for the style isn’t misplaced with Shah’s legacy. In his guide, Jaane Bhi Do Yaaro: Seriously Funny since 1983, Jai Arjun Singh studies that the filmmaker had written an unfilmed script in the late 70s known as A Detective Story, which mixed parts of ‘psychological thriller, social commentary and science fiction’. The plot centred on a harmful ‘wonder drug’ that eliminates starvation.
I reached out to Binod Pradhan, the cinematographer of Jaane Bhi Do Yaaro, for a touch upon Ashok’s portray. “The first thing that struck me was the unique font of the title Jaane Bhi Do Yaaro. It went well with the rather dystopian world created by Drishya,” he shares. “It’s so modern, far away from the times we were in during the making of the film. The images look like [they are] from the film, but as if [they] were made in the modern world. The camera that smashed the bridge and the two characters hanging desperately onto celluloid film — as we wish we could in real life as filmmakers. That’s a wonderfully thoughtful layer in the poster!”
Published – May 08, 2025 12:46 pm IST
