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HYDERABAD, Jan 13: He is a Frenchman in love with India. His Indian connection started way back in 1952 when he got married to an Indian girl from a Royal family in UP. For Francois Villiers, whose film Manika Manika, the girl who lived twice, was one of the widely appreciated films in the Visions section of this film festival. India provides a vast scope to explore in the cinematic medium.
He has so far directed eight feature films and has worked with almost all the top French stars. ``In this film, I introduced Ayesha Dharkar when she was a small girl and now I am happy that she has stormed the Indian cinema scene with a brilliant performance in Terrorist which is in the Indian panorama,'' he says.
He came in 1970 with the intention of making film for the French television but ended up making a feature film called Sun rises in the east. ``It is about some of the European generals who came to help Maharaja Ranjit Singh during India's independence struggle against the British. The Maharaja's role in the film was played by Saeed Jaffrey,'' he says.
Soon after this in 1972, he came to India to make a documentary on the battle of Panipet. ``At that time, I read in the newspapers about a child getting back memories of her previous life. It was totally strange to me as the Westerners are not aware of the rebirth and reincarnation. Then I also read a book by an American scientist Ein Stevenson in which he mentions about 20 different cases of reincarnation''.
``This gave me the inspiration to do this film. I did some research into this and came across this case of Shantidevi which was much in the news in the 50s. I decided to take this as the base and weave my story around that.
``Manika, the small girl in the film is born in a Christian fisherman family in the Kerala but she feels that she had been closer to the Himalayas and strongly believes that her husband Ranjit is waiting for her. I followed the original story to a major part and only changed the locales. Shantidevi lived up to the age of 40 but never got married. Her brother who is now an old man narrated the story. I was very much moved by the story of this courageous girl and so I decided to make the film,'' he said.
His efforts have borne fruit and the film won an award at the Cannes Festival and has been screened all over Europe. As to why he chose to make the film in English, he says in Shantidevi's house, they spoke English only. ``But there is no problem, this film can be dubbed in any language and released here as the subject is truly Indian,'' he said.
Copyright © 1999 Indian Express Newspapers (Bombay) Ltd.
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This story was printed from Net Express located at http://www.expressindia.com. Net Express provides a portal to India, with news from The Indian Express and The Financial Express along with sites on travel and tourism, the entertainment industry, the power sector, the environment and much more.
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