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WILD RUN! A still from the film.

Umesh Vinayak Kulkarni is the R.K. Narayanan of Indian cinema. His directorial movie “The Wild Bull”, (Valu) is the first Marathi movie to be shown at the 37-year-old International Film Festival of Rotterdam. The post-production of the movie was funded by the Hubert Bals Fund of the festival. Released last week in Maharashtra, it is said to be running to full houses .

The plot can be summed up in three words. It’s about “catching a bull”. But the movie has a fable like quality to it. The camera plays the role of a listener to the fable. It allows the landscape and the people to tell their own story, without interfering. Like the short-stories of Narayanan, it deals with its subjects with a respectful simplicity. It is devoid of artifice and egotism.

Kulkarni explains, “We were looking for that Hrishikesh Mukherjee kind of humour. We felt that if we couldn’t create it, we couldn’t criticise the other spoon-fed kind of humour. It had to be understated.”

Unable to get a Marathi producer, this FTII Graduate had to produce the movie with his friends. Made on a substantial budget of Rs. one crore, he says with a laugh, “We are from a middle class family. So, we had no property to mortgage! But luckily friends came to our rescue.”

With 35 characters in the movie, its strength is that each character is fleshed out into identifiable real people. The bull itself is more a symbol than a single entity. The director explains, “The bull is all of us. It’s a free sprit. We all want to do something unconventional, something different. But we can’t…because…”

The movie is obviously about the capture of the bull. But it shows the place of a bull in a rural society. While a patriarchal society plots and plans its capture, the women secretly hope that it gets away. But as one wild bull is caught, another one is born. The circle of life continues. Kulkarni elaborates, “The spirit of the bull actually never dies…”

Shot over a month in a village in Saswad, near Pune, the movie has a soulful authenticity to it. Kulkarni recounts that he wanted to make a movie in Marathi only. “Hindi might reach a wider audience. But I’d never know the nuances in Hindi, like I do in Marathi. And with Hindi, I wouldn’t know where to place it. Which Hindi would it be? There are so many Hindis.” The director says that the movie is doing well in its home State. “We wanted to tour Maharashtra and see the response in the theatres,” he shares. Kulkarni has two projects in mind. In Marathi, “Antaraan”, is the story of an architect trying to find a place for scientific temple architecture in our meaningless modern architecture scenario. The second is a Hindi movie, which is a “road film on water.”

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