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“Tum camera roll karo, aage ka mai sambhal lunga!”
Mere Desh Ki Dharti is a satirical fictional film about a news reporter caught between manufactured narratives and the reality unfolding in front of his camera.
This project was created as part of my Master’s programme in the Fundamentals of Filmmaking module, within the fiction filmmaking category.
The film began with an interest in the strange relationship between news, performance and reality. We wanted to explore what happens when a reporter is asked to make everything look positive, even when the world in front of him clearly says otherwise.
The story follows Ranjish Kumar, an innocent and somewhat awkward news reporter who is sent out to report on the supposedly positive state of Ahmedabad and its surroundings. As he continues reporting, the reality around him keeps contradicting everything he is saying: a dry river, polluted water, burning waste, and eventually the larger spectacle of VIP culture.
The humour slowly gives way to something more uncomfortable as Ranjish realises that the problem isn’t simply that he is bad at reporting. He has been asked to hide what is actually happening.
We chose satire as the language of the film.
The early scenes deliberately exaggerate the familiar language and behaviour of television news, the confident delivery, dramatic presentation and forced positivity, while the camera gradually reveals what exists outside the reporter’s carefully framed world.
A recurring visual device was the gradual widening of the frame. What begins as a tight shot of the reporter slowly opens up to reveal the dry riverbed, mining activity, polluted surroundings and other contradictions that his words are trying to conceal.
The film also shifts with Ranjish. What begins as comedy slowly becomes frustration, and eventually determination, as he decides to stop playing along and report what he actually sees.
“The camera can frame the truth, but it cannot make the truth disappear.”
Mere Desh Ki Dharti uses a fictional news report to look at some very real contradictions: environmental neglect, manufactured positivity, media culture and VIP politics.
The final section moves beyond Ranjish’s individual story into a larger montage of crime and environmental news, bringing the film back to the reality it has been satirising throughout.
The title, Mere Desh Ki Dharti, becomes deliberately ironic: a familiar patriotic phrase placed against images and stories that question what we are actually doing to the country we claim to celebrate.
Story · Screenplay · Direction · Cinematography · Editing
Original Story: Asish Gajjar & Darshan Pathak Screenplay: Darshan Pathak
The film combines live-action filmmaking with green-screen/CGI-based sequences and a fictional television-news interface. The visual language intentionally shifts between tight news-reporting frames, progressively wider reveals, handheld/shaky transitions and constructed news footage.
The final sequence uses news-style graphics, headlines and a typewriter effect to bring together the film’s different concerns before returning to the title.
This film was created as an academic filmmaking project during my Master’s programme.