IFFK 2023: It took a village to make Sthal

IFFK 2023: It took a village to make Sthal

It literally took a village for Jayant Digambar Somalkar to make his debut film Sthal (A Match), set in his childhood home in his native village, and starring non-actors from the region.

The Marathi film, which earlier this year became the only film to be chosen for the Toronto International Film Festival (TIFF), won the NETPAC award for the best Asian film, and is being screened in the Kaleidoscope section of the 28th International Film Festival of Kerala (IFFK).

“I wanted this film to be very authentic and real. While writing the film, I was visualising the places I have known and thinking a lot about my Dongargaon village located in the cotton belt of Vidarbha region in Maharashtra,” says Somalkar in an interview to The Hindu.

“In the end, I ended up shooting in the same house I was born in. I chose to shoot in real locations with real people. All of them from my village and the nearby town were facing the camera for the first time,” he adds.

For casting the protagonist, the team held an audition in the college he studied in, but the rest of the cast were gathered by looking for people from the village who fit the body language and traits of the characters.

“I was looking for people who spoke the correct accent of Varhadi, a Marathi dialect spoken in Vidarbha. Then, we did a basic workshop. We did not teach them acting, but we worked on their body language and made them open up,” says Somalkar.

“We wanted them raw. I didn’t want them to act like Shah Rukh Khan. I tried to involve my entire family in the process. So, you can see my mother in the opening scene, and my sisters dancing at a wedding. It is a very personal movie in that sense,” he says.