The intersection of cinema and mental health ft Aditya Kripalani!

Aditya Kripalani, the filmmaker behind films like Not Today, Devi Aur Hero, Tottaa Pataaka Item Maal, and Tikli and Laxmi Bomb, talks about how cinema can help us discuss mental health! 

Cinema uses emotions as opposed to a newspaper article that would try to persuade you using facts and figures. And this is precisely where cinema is oftentimes more powerful than fact-based mediums that depend on reality as a force! Take, for instance, how an argument between two people calms down when emotions have been thoroughly dealt with. Moreover, convincing someone emotionally seemingly works better than trying to convince them with facts. Hence, here is where cinema strikes gold! Taare Zameen Par is an excellent case in point, as everyone began to speak empathetically about dyslexia after the film. It not only gave us an overview of dyslexia but, through Ishaan, it made us realize how one might feel when struggling with this illness. 

Unfortunately, post that, we’ve had very few films that have dealt with any mental health issue head-on. It’s primarily dealt with as a general part of a character’s psychology, as we saw in Imtiaz Ali’s ‘Highway’, or Gauri Shinde's ‘Dear Zindagi’ up until the recent Avinash Arun's ‘Three Of Us' which deals with dementia straight on to such an extent that at times the pace of the film, the mood and feel, seem to want to make you feel what a patient with dementia feels and how they process things around them.

Though still at best, the Hindi film industry, specifically, has shied away from films on mental health. And if we take suicide as an example, then India has lost nearly 4,00,000 people to suicide in 2020, 2021 and 2022. Post that, magically, the figures aren’t clearly available anywhere online, and what stats are available are also questionable. Probably, they’re much higher because people in most towns in India don’t put the cause of death as suicide, even if it is to protect themselves from having to answer questions from multiple circles of relatives about why the person committed suicide and to avoid trouble from the police, who are equally happy just to let the cases go and prevent extra paperwork and legwork. Given this, we hardly have films dealing with suicide in India either, which is astonishing for a country that produces thousands and thousands of films over hundreds of dozens of languages every year.

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What's more disheartening is that films about mental health are also not welcome when writers or filmmakers approach producers, as India is a filmmaking culture where selling popcorn at a theatre is almost as or sometimes more important than the tickets sold. And the multiplex culture has made sure of that! Nowadays, one can’t imagine someone wanting to munch on more popcorn while watching anything disturbing. And so, a culture of escapism has pervaded all filmmaking for a while now. Moreover, when OTT platforms came in, they seemed ready to champion independently produced films that dealt with more disturbing material, but soon after the beginning of the pandemic and the skyrocketing OTT viewership numbers, they switched to star-studded, safer, more popcorn friendly content, thus leaving subjects of mental health again by the wayside. Even when we do deal with Mental Health in the popular, wide-reaching domain, it's in a song like ‘Give Me Some Sunshine Give Me some Rain’ in 3 Idiots or in a comedic manner like in Bhool Bhulaiyaa and Chhichhore.

There is some inherent fear that is marked on all of us, especially when it comes to dealing with mental health head-on. We’ve begun to deal with psychical disabilities in commercial cinemas or middle-of-the-road cinemas like Margherita with a Straw, but very slowly, and as an offshoot of a physical condition, some mental health issues are dealt with but never fully or thoroughly. Mental health is dealt with, sometimes, in a fleeting manner or as a character’s reasoning for behaving a certain way through the movie, or just before a catharsis moment as in Highway or Dear Zindagi, but again, its shied away for most of the runtime of a film. It’s dealt with as part of the psychological motivation of a character’s behaviour. We get into it, in Bollywood, purely to explain away someone’s behaviour or as a dramatic reveal at the end of act two or in a pre-climax. That much we seem to have become at ease with; a footnote as such. However, we are still afraid to confront it.

Aditya Kripalani is an independent filmmaker and author who, with the power of cinema and this knowledge, is trying to bring about a change in the world and the film industry. He is very active on social media to spread awareness, impart knowledge, and help budding filmmakers and cinema enthusiasts rise. His latest film, Not Today, set in Mumbai, is a powerful drama that explores the rarely addressed topic of suicide prevention through the story of Aliah Rupawala, a young counsellor who faces profound challenges on her first day at work.

You can check out our interview with him here, which discusses his film, the perception of suicide in our country, and much more! 

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