“I was seven years old when my father’s car collided with a scooter on an afternoon in Lucknow. Within minutes an angry horde descended upon the car, trapped us inside, and demanded that my father step out. The memory of myriad accusatory faces looking in at me haunted me ever since and became the central image that inspired me to make Uljhan”’ says Ashish Pant director of Uljhan: The Knot. His film questions if high walls and locked gates can banish the nocuous effects of grave inequality? The barriers we erect for our safety are everyday trespassed by our domestic helpers, every day, they negotiate the boundaries of the class structure and clearly a revolt is on the rise.
Pant reveals that “Mrinal Sen’s film KHARIJ (1983) that deals with the hypocrisy and tendency for self-preservation in a middle-class household following the death of a domestic helper
had a great impact on me as a child. I recognized the truthfulness of the world that he had created and it provoked me. Over the years I have been deeply impacted by the exploration of the complicity of the bourgeoisie in perpetuating societal problems in the films of Michael
Haneke and Asghar Farhadi. My goal is to make films that force us to confront the larger implications that might result from our seemingly small acts and the moral dilemmas that they might present. By couching my thematic concerns in the form of a suspenseful drama I hope to reach wide audiences in India and abroad”.
Ashish Pant is based in New York where he teaches film at the College of Mount Saint Vincent and HB Studio. Uljhan (The Knot) is his debut feature film.