In Their Shoes is a must watch for many reasons. The story of a typical middle-class father reconciling with the need of a brighter future for his son depending on the reality of him going away from home adds a kind of intimacy that separates a good story from others, says GAUTAM CHINTAMANI
New Indian filmmakers would shift gears or even take the time out to attempt something out of their comfort zone. And if you happen to be someone young who has made an impression with a studio backed commercial ‘Bollywood’ debut then a break to do a self-produced documentary that has nothing to do with cinema can only be termed as strange or bold or both. If Atul Sabharwal’s transition from writing and directing the crime TV series Powder (2010) to making the urban thriller Aurangzeb (2013) seemed standard, and while on the face of it, his decision to make In Their Shoes (2015) — a searching documentary that contrasts the history of Agra’s shoe industry along with his own family’s story — might seem strange, it’s perhaps more natural than one could imagine.
Hailing from a family that settled in Agra, Sabharwal’s father didn’t want him to join the family business, which incidentally wasn’t even directly involved with the city’s leather trade. Having witnessed the city’s rise as the shoe capital of India and then seeing the trade undergo many changes, Sabharwal’s father ran a business that supplied materials and it was an innocuous comment from him while looking at a shoe in a store that germinated the idea of In Their Shoes within Sabharwal. The young writer-director was in-between Powder and his debut feature Aurangzeb when on a vacation he visited a shoe store with his father who smiled looking at a shoe and said, “Everything has changed…’ it made Sabharwal think about… well, everything. Even though Agra is widely acknowledged as the center of leather shoe trade in India, many don’t know about the history behind it and similarly, Sabharwal never truly understood why his father didn’t want him to remain in the family business or even in Agra. It’s these questions that his documentary In Their Shoes explores and while following the dual narrative of the city’s tryst with leather and his father’s decision, the film also weaves in a bigger tale of how global incidents such as the fall of the Berlin Wall or the disintegration of the USSR impacts thousands of lives in Agra.
At the heart of it, In Their Shoes is a father-son tale and this being a documentary the realism in the narrative makes it more personal, but the motif binds most of Sabharwal’s work. The story of Powder might be about the drug trade and truckers of Bombay/Mumbai but it was also about the transition of power across two generations. Similarly, Aurangzeb addressed the dirty tricks of land mafia in and around Gurgaon but at the same time, the father-son struggle between the characters played by Arjun Kapoor-Jackie Shroff or Prithviraj Sukumaran-Anupam Kher and even Rishi Kapoor, who plays Prithviraj’s father-in-law, proffer multitude of layers to the urban thriller. His father’s comment resonated in Sabharwal’s mind during the making of Aurangzeb and interestingly enough, even when the camera wasn’t rolling, the real lives of his actors kept that father-son encounter alive. Almost every single male member of his film was either the son of an illustrious father such as Rishi Kapoor, Arjun Kapoor, Prithviraj Sukumaran or like both Jackie Shroff and Rishi Kapoor, were fathers to sons who had joined the same vocation. like his father, many of the characters in his documentary are second or third generation craftsmen and traders involved in the family business and in that sense Sabharwal’s non-fiction mirrors his fictional creation.
Sidestepping from the mainstream to follow up Aurangzeb, which easily qualifies as a success, with a personal documentary could be risky in terms of a career move but Sabharwal doesn’t seem to be too troubled. Irrespective of the medium his urge to tell a story is paramount and perhaps this once the narrative demanded this particular format.
Intriguingly, In Their Shoes like both Powder and Aurangzeb blends its characters with the landscape and while this gives a tinge of realism to his fiction it makes the narrative here more poignant. The relationship that the documentary’s characters share with not just their craft but also their city and the families as well as the trials that the trade continues to undergo in terms of limited state help, global competition from synthetic Chinese materials that are fast replacing leather and even the Government’s decision to allow export of leather makes In Their Shoes a must watch for many reasons. And in the middle the story of a typical middle-class father reconciling with the need of a brighter future for his son depending on the reality of him going away from home adds a kind of intimacy that separates a good story from others.
In Their Shoes released on March 13 at select cinemas. The writer is the author of the best-selling Dark Star: The loneliness of Being Rajesh Khanna | tweet him @gchintamani