The scene: The Rondo Sztuki art centre at Katowice, Poland. Onstage filmmaker Q and singer-songwriter Neel Adhikari are belting out the title song from Gandu to a wild audience. Backing them are six Polish men screaming a Bengali expletive in chorus.

Q (Qaushik Mukherjee, as he does not like to be called) is just back from Poland and Romania where he and Neel were touring with his film Gandu and and also performing as Gandu Circus. “We’ve created music outside the context of the film. Gandu the rapper is finally free of the clutches of the film,” says the filmmaker.

Gandu (probably untranslate-able in a family magazine) which released a few months ago on the global festival circuit has created a predictable enough storm with its explicit content (read expletives, frontal nudity, sex, masturbation).

Ok, so Indian audiences won’t get to see it just yet because it’s still to go to the film censor board. “In India, it’s going to be a long road what with censors, distributors etc,” says a seemingly unperturbed Q. Nevertheless, Gandu’s picked up accolades on the festival circuit. It had five sold-out screenings at the 61st Berlinale this year, preceded by a screening at the Slamdance International Film Festival in Utah. The film won the Best Director and Jury Prize Awards at the 2010 South Asian International Film Festival in New York and, more recently, won Q the Grand Jury prize for best director at the 37th Seattle International Film Festival.

Gandu was shot in black and white except for one scene (below) towards the end

Q, whose repertoire includes documentaries like Le Pocha and Love in India and features like Tepantorer Maathe (unrele-ased), Bishh and Gandu, has exciting plans for the future. He will start shooting a musical based on Rabindranath Tagore’s Tasher Desh (The Land of Cards) later this year. And this time he’ll have backing from Bollywood director-producer Anurag Kashyap, who’ll co-produce the film with Q’s company Overdose.

This is the first regional film Kashyap will be producing. “Q is the most courageous and unique voice in Indian cinema at the moment. And Gandu in time will be talked about as the most seminal film of our generation. He is to India what Gaspar Noe is to the West and we are proud to be on board his next film,” says Kashyap.

Meanwhile, Q is working on Sari, a documentary being made on a budget of Rs 1.5 crore. The film, expected to be complete in 2012, deconstructs the sari and is about “women, about patriarchy and control, and most importantly, about the idea of sensuality.”

It’s been a long haul for Q, who revels in the role of iconoclast. Asked why he’s called Q, he throws back a counter question: “Would you ask Fatboy Slim why he is called Fatboy Slim?”

Q was an advertising professional working in Colombo in 1999 when he began picking up movies at a video library, Mohan’s Video Vision. “I knew nothing about films . I used to go by their covers,” he says. Soon he was hooked on to the post-modernist narrative style, and a daily dose of three to four films.

He visited India in 2002 (he moved back here only in 2006) and, flush with film fever, started making Tepantorer Maathe, a dogma film (a genre where films are made without the use of elaborate special effects or technology and concentrates on the story and acting instead) about “reality and illusion”.

Love in India has been broadcast in 13 countries abroad

“The rough cut screening caused many heart attacks and the film was shelved,” says Q. (He still hasn’t given up on it though. “I will keep making this film again and again, every 10 years, till it’s time.”) But Q had about Rs 30,000 remaining and wanted to do something worthwhile before he left.

That’s when Le Pocha happened. It was an “intensive documentation of the urban underground sound in Bengal spanning over 30 years and featured Bangla bands like Mohiner Ghoraguli, Cactus and Fossils”. It became hugely popular and “made me a docu film- maker,” says Q.

In 2004, Q attended Docedge, an annual Asian documentary forum in Calcutta where he discovered it was possible to raise funds from European agencies. So, he pitched for Love in India, a movie about the notion of love, romance and passion in India. The film, completed in 2009 and made for a budget of around 190,000 Euros, premiered at HotDocs,Toronto, one of the biggest international documentary festivals. It’s been broadcast in 13 countries and was bought by seven channels including Arte, the Franco-German TV network.

What type of moviemaker is Q? Unorthodox would be putting it mildly. Shot in four-and-a-half months with just five actors and five crew members, Gandu had no script. Says lead actor Anubrata: “Once the camera started rolling, we’d make up our dialogues and play off each other for reactions.”

“Everyone did everything in the film, like we do in Overdose,” recalls Rii, Q’s girlfriend who played three roles in the film. “We act, we ideate, run errands. All the food shot in his films is cooked by me!” she says.

Q’s unfazed by the strong reactions to Gandu. “The voyeuristic nature in Gandu is a reflection of the repression in society. But the subconscious will accept the other layers of information and will affect the viewing to a large extent.”

“Q is a cool guy. Almost a satire of himself,” laughs Anubrata, adding “I think I would’ve wanted to be part of Gandu even if I was asked to just hold the camera.”

Music is Q’s driving force. And electronica is his thing. Tasher Desh will also be a musical with 18 songs and collaborations with international artists like Talvin Singh, Steve Chandrasonic of Asian Dub Foundation and Anusheh Anadil. Says Neel: “Q is the funniest guy I’ve met. Hyper-charged and a great musician in complete denial of his skills. He’s a great singer and writer. I think his life is a film and Q the musician is playing a role in it. The roller-coaster never stops when you’re working with Q.”

Ask Q about the future of indie films in India and he says: “We have the audience. All we need are channels to reach them.” He’s also hopeful about funding “thanks to organisations like Magic Lantern Foundation”, an Indian non-profit media and human rights group that garners support for documentaries and is also the co-producer of Sari.

He is even optimistic about the release of Gandu in India. He points out how Love in India was let off by the censor board with minimal cuts. “The narrative proceeds through these risqué sexual jokes where the worst part is the last line. They wanted to take out the punch lines. But finally didn’t,” he smiles. The film won a Rajat Kamal (Silver Lotus) for the Best Film on Family Values in the non-feature film category of the 58th National Film Awards in 2010.

But the indie movement needs more, Q asserts. He says: “A movement can be initiated by an artist. But it can only be made by people. The audience has to also take responsibility. They have to move, physically. Follow films, bands, artists. Pressurise the ‘system’. When the creators put in so much effort, can’t the audience try a bit harder?”