'The Umesh Chronicles' this week at Babylon Theater

Director Pooja Kaul is appearing both nights this weekend to discuss her well-recognized film.

One of my favorite scenes in “The Umesh Chronicles,” featuring actors Zayn Marie Khan and Babil Khan (Screenshot from NYIFF upload.)

The Berlin premier of “The Unmesh Chronicles” is
Friday, July 11 (20:00) and on
Saturday, July 12 (20:15),
at Berlin’s Babylon Theater (on Rosa Luxembourg Platz).
Tickets here.

BERLIN (Monday July 7, 2025) — Real-world conversations like the one I had last week with film director Pooja Kaul are too rare. (Or at least they are for me.) My notes indicate that we talked — or could have talked — about Hermann Hesse (“Siddhartha”), Goethe and Christopher Marlowe (“Faust” and “Faustus,” respectively), Lewis Carroll (“Alice in Wonderland”) and film director Jonathan Glazer’s “Zone of Interest”. Also the classic Indian writers Dhanpat Rai Srivastava (1880-1936), better known as Premchand; and Suryakant Tripathi ‘Nirala’ (1896-1961).

All of which I can try to relate here, except for the practical information (=news) I’d like to emphasize for today’s Berliners, which is this:

Indian film director Pooja Kaul is scheduled to appear at this week’s Indo-German Film Week at the Babylon Theater (on Rosa Luxembourg Platz), for two showings of her newly released, award-winning film, “The Umesh Chronicles,” running Friday July 11 and Saturday July 12.

I encourage people to go see Kaul’s film and to hear its director talk about it afterward.

The more I think about and watch their work, ‘The Umesh Chronicles,’ the more my respect grows for these two filmmakers, Pooja Kaul and Jakob Ihre.

Disclaimer: I met Pooja Kaul about a year ago — just after her success at the 2024 New York Indian Film Festival — and count her as a great friend, along with her Emmy-winning cinematographer husband, Jakob Ihre (“Chernobyl”). My respect for both these filmmakers only grows, the more I think about (and watch) the work they’ve done together, “The Umesh Chronicles.”

Written by Kaul, “The Umesh Chronicles” is largely autobiographical, starting with the formal education enjoyed by its young protagonist, Radha, played by Aiza Khan. Immediately, we are introduced to Radha’s sometimes-subversive love of books at school. Kaul herself is a strong advocate of Education of the kind she herself enjoyed in India. Her film quietly emphasizes the value of reading, of travel, and even of immigration as being of tremendous worth to our humanity, globally.

“I want to make the point that education is not just an end in itself, but that it also sharpens our sensitivity,” said Kaul in a phone interview from Stockholm. “The more we are exposed to people who are ‘foreign’ to us, the more open we become — and the more rich and complex our lives become.”

In “The Umesh Chronicles,” the protagonist’s upper/middle-class Indian family is faced with the question of how to deal with its own unexpected “refugee crisis,” when a lost child from a distant village lands on their doorstep. (See also: Character Saroo, in the film ‘The Lion.’) The lost child, Sundar (played by Bobby Pal), stands to meet his fate at the hands of the Brahmin family, led by Radha’s grandfather (Amitabh Bachchan) and by her mother (Kriti Pant), a generous schoolteacher.

It is decided to bring Sundar into the family as a ward or live-in semi-servant. In view of their common age, Radha necessarily understands this new personality as something of a family member, if not exactly a peer or friend. The dichotomy of roles (played by all) — and the consequential moral dilemmas they imply — makes it easy for the audience, like the filmmaker, to ask: “Just how far into the family do they really bring him?” As the high-status, well-educated “inheritors” of the Brahmin (Neoliberal/British Empire) order, in other words, how do we “better-off” people put into practice all of our very good moral- and intellectual schooling, training, etc., and convert it into the responsible and sustainable social development (=education) of the human intellect?

“You get all this education and privilege,” as Kaul asks. “But then, what do you do with it…?”

‘Just how far into the family do they *really* bring him?’ asks director Pooja Kaul. ‘You get all this education and privilege; but then, what do you do with it…?’

Kaul remembers one moment while filming the scene introducing Sundar, in which Radha’s elders question the boy about his origins. The scene-shooting came at the time when Europe was dealing with “all the imigrants arriving at our doorstep,” Kaul remembered, adding that she was “struck by the parallel” between Sundar’s experience at the hands of Radha’s well-to-do family and the “welcome interviews” (or interrogations) that applicants-for-immigration then received upon appearing at the borders of Europe and the United States.

Like many of us, Kaul watched our EU institutions immediately, positively accept the refugees, but then resist the inclination to “fling them into some suburb of the city,” risking their ghettoization, to apply an American term. (Editor’s note: Conscious of its history, Berlin’s authorities seem to have been wary of the danger here — minority-segregation — and consciously designed (pro-integration) policies against it. That said, our city boasts entire districts full of war refugees who have proven their historical value to the literary world, at least.)

“The Umesh Chronicles” is set in India of the 1980s. Unlike other story-tellers, Pooja Kaul resists the temptation to brow-beat or blame 20th-century Neoliberalism — or, for that matter, to blame the British for a full century (1848-1947) of the "British Raj" colonial rule. She can appreciate the work of such writers as Keats and Orwell, for example.

“There are no redeeming features to the Indian caste system,” says Kaul. “But, interestingly, it does place the Scholar at the top of the heap.”

Kaul’s Brahmin family of scholars doesn’t necessarily challenge that system — even as they are scruitinized and assessed from below, both by their own questioning daughter and by Radha’s less-fortunate counterpart, the storm-tossed stranger, Sundar, (played as an adult by Babil Khan).

Kaul’s steadiness as an observer from this “view from below” helps her establish a rare and definitive trust with her audience. From the start, she wanted a film that showed actual events in people’s lives. She recognized this quality of film-making in the Oscar-winning film “The Zone of Interest” by British filmmaker Jonathan Glazer, which she watched after finishing hers.

“What I like about ‘Zone of Interest’ is that he (Glazer) places the facts in front of you,” said Kaul. (Loosely based on a 2014 novel by Martin Amis, “Zone of Interest” focuses on the life of a German military commandant and his wife, who raise their children in a home adjacent to his assigned camp, Ausschwitz.)

“As an examiner, Glazer just lays life before you, exactly ‘how it plays.’ ”(1) One of Kaul’s goals for her own work is to apply a similar kind of “bearing witness” — with no artifice, supporting a point of view that “allows you, as a viewer, to make your own decisions about the characters.”

Another word about the film’s cast, representing the historic diversity of India: “They are Muslim, Hindu, Catholic, and Jewish,” the director said.

With its nod to “Bollywood,” the ending of “Umesh Chronicles” — satisfying, if open to interpretation — challenges audiences with “a dare and a dream,” according to Kaul.

“Can we do this?” she asks. “Can we really put our (upper-class) education to a moral, ethical use in the world?”

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(1) In this, Kaul expressly cited the 1980s book by Joan Didion.

SOURCES:

(https://babylonberlin.eu/programm/festivals/indogerman-filmweek/8831-igfw-the-umesh-chronicles)

EXTENDED SCENE uploaded by Stockholm Film Festival:

(2024 NY Indian FF, immediately after which I met Pooja.)