The future of cinema is on the digital medium… So it seems, judging by India’s most well-known contemporary filmmaker Shekhar Kapur’s abstinence from the large screen in favour of more accessible mediums of expression.
Shekhar is now off to the US to make short film on Gautam Buddha.
Revealing his plans Shekhar says, “It is actually a 12-minute virtual-reality film on Buddha’s enlightenment. I am making that because the dynamics and distending dimensions of that human emotion called compassion have always fascinated me”
So no feature film for Shekhar even now? The last full-length feature film that he did was Elizabeth The Golden Age in 2007.
Shekhar takes a deep breath. “ I won’t say , no movies. In fact I am working on a bio-pic on Bruce Lee. The aura and romance of the movie theatre can never vanish. The thrill of holding hands in the dark cannot be replicated in front of a computer. But yes , VR(virtual reality) is a reality all of us filmmakers have to face. My film on Buddha addresses that reality.”
Shekhar is also working on a film on compassion that he is very excited about. “For me the quest for self-awareness began when I was very young. Why do we do what we do in life? And what makes us so self-absorbed? Why is it so difficult to look beyond one’s own ego? These are the questions I seek to answer in my documentary The Science Of Compassion.”
Not that there are any easy answers to such questions.But Shekhar has always been a seeker.
“When people ask me why I haven’t made a feature film for so many years I have a simple explanation. I’ve never seen myself as a filmmaker. I have always seen myself as storyteller. It could be on the big screen or it could be on television. It could be on phone or the internet. It could be a tweet. As log as I have something to say it will find a medium of expression.”
Shekhar has always been a creative nomad. “I started blogging long before it became fashionable. I was one of the first to take to Twitter.And now I am embracing Virtual Reality,because that’s the future.”
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