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Interview with Ronny Sen: “Modernity thinks it can deal with addiction, but it cannot. It is incapable to do so.”

was born in 1986 and is an Indian film director, writer and photographer. Before he made his debut feature “Cat Sticks”, he published two artist books and worked for the BBC directing documentaries. “Cat Sticks” was the only entry from his home country included in the 2019 program of Slamdance Festival. With many positive reviews and reactions to his film under his belt, Sen's film has been selected by many other international festivals, such as , which took place from the 11th to the 15th of September.

We sat down with the director to talk about his views on drug addiction, the responsibility of the writer and the role of his home town Kolkata for his debut feature.

Cat Sticks” screened at Filmfestival Oldenburg 2019

Since “” deals with addiction, do you think the society you are from as well as our global society do a good job in dealing with addiction?

No, I don't think so. I think addiction is understood from the monologue of psychiatry, which is very limited. Addicts who are treated exactly like mad people are put in a place such as a psychiatric ward where doctors think they know who a mad person or an addict is and how they can be cured, because modernity thinks it can cure these people and bring them back to a genetic normal life.

There is a standard idea about a normal human being and psychiatry's obsession is to provide cure to the addict with no real understanding of what addiction is, what it is capable of, or how it is truly possible to help the still suffering addict. Society on the other hand thinks it's a moral disorder or bad behavior. The state thinks it's an issue of crime or law and order. So it's really complicated and very medieval to an extent.

In countries like the Philippines, or many parts of Asia, the government has massacred hundreds of drug addicts in the name of dealing with drug-related crimes and addiction. These are just examples of the fact we really do not know how to deal with these people.

Underrepresented communities have to deal with society and morality, while drug addicts have to even deal with issues like science when it comes to psychiatric and psychotropic medicine, for instance.
The entire business of psychiatry is dependent on the notion that it can cure addiction which I think is totally flawed. 

We have to include the drug addict into society and start a dialogue. We have to understand her/his loneliness. When I was working in India with some of the primitive tribes, I noticed that the way they deal with substance abuse or addiction/addicts is completely different from how modern societies deal with it. The acceptance and tolerance is much more for an addict. They work with a lot of compassion, love, empathy and not mercy as we do. Their attitude is fundamentally different from our so called modern societies.

Modernity thinks it can deal with addiction, but it cannot. It is incapable to do so.

Do you think this kind of mentality influences how the drug addict thinks of him-/herself since most of the addicts in “Cat Sticks” tend to choose abandoned or secluded places to give in to their addiction?

They have to hide from society in order to do drugs. The drug addict has to engage in some form of criminality or anti-social behaviour in order to be able to support their drug use.

There is a difference between gratification and happiness. The first has to do with performing actions which are against social norms whereas happiness is something which is completely different, at least for the addict. The “birth” of an addict takes place much before she/he uses drugs. The manifestations can be seen much earlier in life, when she/he does something against the social norms which is followed by a feeling of pleasure and gratification. From then on, the addict seeks that feeling over and over again while the “normal” person will always be seeking happiness. However, this process progresses over time and takes the addict from one object to the next and from one drug to the other, until she/he finds a chemical of choice (favorite drug). It's an involuntary selection which is biological.

But this journey begins much before. The guy who takes heroin in the abandoned airplane in the film has probably stolen money from his parents when he was still attending school and derived pleasure from that. Or he must have watched pornography while his school classes were going on. Or he hid himself in the school toilet smoking and took pleasure from that. In the end, this process is similar to biological, behavioral, genetic conditioning and has nothing to do with substances. There is no proper explanation for the birth of the addict. It's a disease like diabetes, which is incurable but can be arrested. If you try to understand the reason for someone's addiction you will inevitably be manipulated by the addict. It's self defeating. 

Given your understanding of addiction and addicts, as a writer and director do you feel a certain obligation or responsibility when portraying these topics in a certain way?

My strength has always been withimages. In any art form, be it painting or music or film, one has to take into account the history of the particular medium and the language it uses. There is always a content and a form.

With “Cat Sticks” I knew the content, because it was the story I grew up with, which surrounded me. It is not based on research, it is my, or rather our story.

The form on the other hand is something which is “muscle memory”, it deals with craft, it's practice, working repeatedly with certain kind of images, a certain kind of ideological position, and then working with sound and actors. Black-and-white photography, the night, the rain and the darkness in “Cat Sticks” establish a layer, a fundamental base from which I could tell the story. In painting you have to know the size of the canvas, the boundary which is the foundation of the image you create.

The first job is to created the mood, everything else is secondary. The viewer has to be “driven into” the film. One has to hold the hands of the viewer and take them on a new journey, the viewer should also feel the adventure, the thrill to see what is unseen, hear what is unheard. I reject the idea that there are no new stories to tell. It's a postmodernist scam.

The stations of this journey you mention are also kind of interesting, locations like the abandoned airplane or the various street corners. Are all of these in Kolkata and how did you choose them?

These places are all in Calcutta. But I wanted to avoid showing the quintessential signifiers of the city which is like making a film in Paris without showing the Eiffel Tower or portraying New York without a shot containing the Brooklyn Bridge.

Calcutta was one of the biggest cities in the world in the 19th century and there are many known sights, such as the Victoria Memorial or the Howrah Bridge. Today the city is dying and I wanted to show the dark underbelly of it, but I did not want to make it rooted in Calcutta since the story of drug addiction is universal. As a person who has grown up in the city, I do not think these aforementioned signifiers represent the version of Calcutta I know. The city is made with its people, the people from its streets.

Subsequently, we tried to find locations which are neutral in a way. So the place is in Calcutta, but it can also be in a city in Germany like Oldenburg, in Belarus, in the USA . It can be anywhere in your neighborhood, since there are locations, for example, the abandoned mill, which is a place everyone knows or recognizes as the mill in their backyard which is abandoned for decades.

How did you work with the actors and prepare them for the scenes in the film?

There were all trained actors. Raja Chakravorty, who plays the role of the man smoking in front of his son and who turns into a transvestite at night. He teaches acting in SRFTI, the only film school in Calcutta. 

Then there is Saurabh Saraswat, who was trained in the biggest film school in India, the FTII. Lastly, there is also Tanmay Dhanania, who plays the character of Byang and who has studied at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art in London.

Most of them were, as I said, trained actors, but we did acting workshops for two or three months. The actors had to spend a lot of time with each other, they had to lose a lot of weight for their roles and had to leave their homes to rent shabby apartments in Calcutta, places where their character would have stayed in. Some even lived on the streets.

Additionally, we went to a lot of rehabs and spoke to suffering addicts who were recovering from their addiction and told us about their experiences. It was important to know the biology and habits of addicts, the rituals, the mannerisms, for example, how to make make a perfect pipe with aluminium foil. These things had to be perfect.

In the film, there is a scene in which some characters steal from a shop. The actors did not tell me beforehand, but they explained later they had shoplifted for real and returned the goods to the shop owner later on. They just did it for the experience. (laughs)

Apart from your personal connection to the story, “Cat Sticks” also seems to draw from a very rich background ranging from Greek art to the works of directors such as John Cassavetes, especially the compassionate perspective towards the characters you show.

That is very kind of you.

More than taking a humanist stance, for me it is also almost ethnographic. It is a very historical account of people at that time living on the streets of Calcutta using “brown sugar”. There are no other records as far as I know. A sense of compassion and brotherhood has always been at the core of my heart. It is my belief that the cowards deserve to live, and not only the powerful or courageous in society. The cowards also have the right to live in dignity, and that is more and more important.

In Calcutta we used to have a very rich tradition of literature and cinema. We grew up watching films which had a lot of compassion for their characters so it was not something I felt forced to do in my film. Everything felt very organic.

The scene of the two men performing this ballet dance to find a vein in the other person's body is a sequence we shot in two or three takes. Much of what you see is probably from the second or third take, but as a filmmaker you have to believe in miracles which can happen, and you have to able to embrace them when they happen.

Can you tell us something about the design of the music and its role in “Cat Sticks”?

Moushumidi Bhowmik, who I have known for a long time, is something of a legend in this part of the world. She is like our version of Joan Baez and she
very lovingly wrote and sang a song for us which comes at the end of the film.

She introduced me to Oliver Weeks who composed all the music for “Cat Sticks”. Oliver is a UK-based composer, and the only information I could give him was that when people use “brown sugar”, there is only a specific kind of music they can listen to. Since this drug is a downer and not at all like cocaine, people associate it with, for example, 80s or 90s grunge. While chasing “brown sugar”, you cannot listen to high-tempo music.

Oliver also has a very distinctive take on the film, considering he has worked in Calcutta so he knows the sound of streets, the sound of Bengali music or what people in Bengal listen to. He was not interested in making a “cool” score for a drug film, but he actually attempted to understand the journey the characters in the film. What they go through and where they are coming from.

Thanks for the interesting interview and lots of luck with film.

About the author

Rouven Linnarz

Ever since I watched Takeshi Kitano's "Hana-Bi" for the first time (and many times after that) I have been a cinephile. While much can be said about the technical aspects of film, coming from a small town in Germany, I cherish the notion of art showing its audience something which one does normally avoid, neglect or is unable to see for many different reasons. Often the stories told in films have helped me understand, discover and connect to something new which is a concept I would like to convey in the way I talk and write about films. Thus, I try to include some info on the background of each film as well as a short analysis (without spoilers, of course), an approach which should reflect the context of a work of art no matter what genre, director or cast. In the end, I hope to pass on my joy of watching film and talking about it.

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