Pix by Rupinder Sharma

Indian movies that narrate stories about indebted farmers contemplating suicide are great recipes for box office disasters. But debutante director Anusha Rizvi’s Peepli Live, made on a shoestring budget of Rs 10 crore —that includes the cost of production, promotion and publicity — has grossed Rs 24 crore in its opening week.

The story behind the screen unfolded back in 2004. Asked how she managed to sell her film idea to producer Aamir Khan, ex-journalist and documentary filmmaker Rizvi, 34, says, “It was pretty simple actually.” Between making tea for us and ruing the lack of milk in the house, she narrates how she e-mailed Khan the idea in 2004. She had heard how Khan was indeed scouting for fresh scripts and decided to give it a go.

And she kept at it, fixing appointments with him whenever he was in the capital. Things took off from there — though it did take a few years to come to fruition. She needed a year to complete the script which was followed by narration sessions. And Khan, with a consistent finger on the box office pulse, asked her to shoot some of the toughest scenes from the script, where she held her own.

Shooting, however, was postponed by two-and-a-half years since Khan’s own directorial venture Taare Zameen Par was nearing the finishing line.

Finally in 2008, Peepli Live was shot in 64 days flat in Bhadwai village in Madhya Pradesh, in Gujarat and in Delhi with a very unorthodox cast which Rizvi and co-director Mahmood Farooqui thought would be just right for painting a picture of society that’s menacing in its treatment of the downtrodden and mass media that has a habit of sensationalising issues.

“We’d been working with Habib Tanvir’s Naya Theatre for a long period and some of the members met the script’s requirements,” says Farooqui, who’s also the casting director of the movie.

Mahmood Farooqui, co- director of Peepli Live, zeroed in on an unorthodox cast for the movie Pix by Rupinder Sharma

So, both Omkar Das Manikpuri as Natha, the lead character, and Shalini Vatsa in the role of his wife Dhaniya are from the Naya Theatre repertory, with their performances finely complemented by actors from several Chhattisgarhi theatre groups who were selected after multiple auditions.

Another crucial role — that of a Hindi local journalist Rakesh is played by National School of Drama graduate Nawazuddin Siddiqui while Urdu scholar and actor Farrukh Jaffer as Amma is one of the most vibrant flavours in the Peepli curry. “The cast for the film came from the most unlikely of places. We even auditioned a woman who begged on a Mumbai railway station for the role of Amma before rejecting her for her local dialect,” states Farooqui.

“Of course Naseeruddin Shah had to be in Peepli Live because our association with him goes back to Dastangoi (the lost art of Urdu story telling that Farooqui is working to revive) and he is now a family friend,” says Rizvi.

In the movie Natha is offered several gifts from politicians when his decision to commit suicide spreads far and wide; (below) elder brother Budhia’s role in convincing Natha to end his life is one of the poignant moments in the film

Despite such a low on buzz star cast, the satellite rights of the movie itself has been sold to Zee for Rs 10 crore and the music rights for another Rs 4 crore to T-series. Without doubt, the marketing muscle of Aamir Khan has made all the difference. The movie has made journeys to several film festivals including Sundance, Berlin, Edinburgh and Durban where it won the best feature film award. “The festival crowd at Sundance was very excited while that at Berlin, though appreciative, was mature in its understanding of Indian politics,” points out Rizvi.

According to Aamir Khan, festivals help a movie to garner good reviews. It’s the first exposure to an audience, and today with the Internet, Facebook and Twitter, people who see the film talk about it.

Peepli Live has been greeted by a deluge of critical acclaim and it has been a runaway hit at the box office. It’s a first of sorts for a non-mainstream film with rank newcomers in its cast to have such a spectacularly wide theatrical release. What’s more, with 109 overseas prints it grossed another $640,000 (Rs 2.88 crore) abroad.

“It’s been a lot of hard work,” says a modest Rizvi, who has no formal training in scriptwriting. She worked at NDTV for a time and after quitting journalism, she made documentary films for National Geographic Channel and BBC before feeling the urgent need to tell a story. “The movement from journalism to filmmaking was not really a progression. It just happened,” she says.

Rizvi’s unique storytelling has won her many accolades: Says filmmaker Shyam Benegal, “I really liked watching the film. Her directorial feat lies in engaging the audience with a light touch through the entire length of the movie and delivering a punch to the solar plexus right at the end.”

Rizvi also approached the rehearsal workshops of actors in an unusual manner, asking them to perform something that they thought should precede or succeed a particular scene in the script.

Another feather in her cap is the crisply written dialogues of the movie that are both hard hitting and philosophical at the same time. “The film raises some pertinent questions about our delivery system of government entitlements. It is rather mechanical and bureaucratic in nature without being personal,” says Benegal. Rizvi, meanwhile, is allowing everything to sink in at the moment. “No, I don’t have another film in me right now.” But whenever there is, it will have something to say, much like Peepli Live.