Manish Saini graduated in film and video communication from the National Institute of Design, Ahmedabad, India. His first feature film “Dhh” travelled to prestigious film festivals like TIFF Kids, Toronto & Shanghai International Film Festival. His second film “Gandhi and Co.” won Golden slipper award at Zlin film festival, Czech Republic, 2022. “The Scavenger“, his latest short, is doing its festival run and we caught it in Short Shorts Film Festival & Asia.
The Scavenger is screening at Short Shorts Film Festival and Asia
The protagonist of the 24-minute movie is an old man who never seems to speak. He is very poor and the “jobs” he does barely allow him to buy a bit of food and medicine for his sick son. One day however, and as he frequently roams around the locations where the dead are burned, he decides to pick up a couple of clothes of the deceased, which are left on top of a tree in the burning grounds. He washes them in the river and then tries to sell them, something he manages quite quickly, even if his first customer kind of tricks him. His success instigates him to repeat his deed, getting more and more clothes from the tree, all of which seem to sell in the blink of an eye. His conscious, however, begins to bother him, and when a mother asks for kids’ clothes and a bit later he hears of school bus crashing with all the students inside getting killed, his guilt catches with him as hard as possible.
Manish Saini directs a film that revolves around three contextual axes, which are actually interconnected. The first one is the lives of the poor in India, as mirrored in the old man and the people around him, all of which seem to barely make a living, surviving in extreme poverty and without any particular hope for a better future. Kids lying in the street, poor mongers of whatever, rundown houses, all create a setting that looks like it came out of a hardcore drama, but is actually one of the harsh realities of India. The second axis, which derives from the first, is the extremes people reach in order to survive in such a setting, with the old man’s actions, which is essentially stealing from the dead, seeming like a cardinal sin in his case, as the secrecy with which he takes the clothes signifies (according to the director, It is inauspicious and taboo to wear the clothes of the dead, they are left unattended, tossed and dumped in the corners of crematoriums and funeral grounds. Furthermore, he is not informing his customers, which is considered a sin as much as crime in some parts of North India). The third one is the concept of crime and punishment, which, in this case, gains a karmic hypostasis due to the death of the children, although the ending signifies that not even that is enough in the face of actually making
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Apart from the rather rich context, the film also thrives in production values. DP Swathy Deepak captures the particular setting with realism, not omitting, though, to include a number of images of extreme and ominous beauty, where the coloring and framing also find their apogee. The tree in particular will definitely stay on mind each time it appears in the movie, as much as the room with the son. Saini’s own editing results in a relatively slow pace that suits both the story and the elderly protagonist.
Sanjay Mishra is great in the role of the old man, communicating a number of different feelings and psychological statues with just his eyes and body stances, with the fact that he never speaks working quite well for the movie.
Manish Saini’s “The Scavenger” illuminates the harsh realities of poverty in India, exploring the moral dilemmas faced by its main character. It benefits the most by its visuals, acting and the steady directorial hand of Saini, who manages to shed a very pointed but realistic light on the complexities of the human experience.
