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“I didn’t feel like doing these jobs for life. It wasn’t a fulfilling experience,” he says, confessing to the habit of switching things in life—be it education or job—if they don’t seem to be making a larger sense to him or taking him on any fruitful journey forward.Cinema came to Natesh by chance, through an article on Abbas Kiarostami’s Closeup. He went to watch the film and came out of it a changed person. “I realised that filmmaking can be an intimate practice,” he says. He made Kiarostami the fulcrum, watched all his works and those of the filmmakers who influenced him and those who Kiarostami influenced in turn—from Robert Bresson to Jia Zhangke. “My understanding of the medium has come from watching films,” he says.Quite like Kiarostami’s cinema, Pedro packs in a strong human statement with quietude and subtlety. Natesh didn’t want the political punch to be triggering, wasn’t insecure about whether a nuanced take would reach out to the audience and be understood. “I am not just interested in the issue or the sloganeering. However, I don’t want my work to be irrelevant either. There must be a balance between the idea and cinematic form used in expressing it,” he says.Pedro is one of the most damning and hard-hitting cinematic indictments of feudalism and fanaticism and the benign cruelty they unleash on the powerless. It’s about how feudal structures are all about humiliating men and exploiting women, how religious bigotry brings out the beast in humans. It’s all about a game of trust, deviousness, conspiracy and betrayal, in which every player is equally guilty and in which an innocent life hangs tenuously. The ultimate note struck is that of poignance, the chilling awareness of the easy dispensability of an underprivileged life.
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The human and the beast
