For brothers Kanish and Rish Arhant-Sudhir, family fun means collaborating to write and direct a film based on their culture, creating characters based on their own grandmother and casting their great aunt to play her.
The duo’s first feature film “Namaslay” does all of this as a horror satire that ignites conversation about the appropriation of yoga in the West, proving culture is the blood that keeps the past alive. To accomplish this “incisive” commentary about exploitation, the brothers reflected on their newly developed relationship with their own grandmother, who directly inspired Paati (played by Usha Krishnan) and helped them pursue this nuanced story.
“I think it’s because of this relationship between the grandmother and the granddaughter that we’re able to articulate that maybe more sensitively than we had initially,” Rish explained at the Variety Screening Series. “Having these sorts of relationships to skew the script — more blowtorch, less flamethrower — really became instructive.”
Along with their real-life relationships, their family’s lived experiences also shaped the story and how they wanted to tell it.
“There’s something that’s truly slapstick almost about the whole experience, but then there’s also something beneath that’s kind of sinister,” Rish said. “It’s a lot of strains of colonialism. There’s commoditization that’s happening. There is an extraction and then a resale at a premium.”
Kanish echoed, “An identity is not a story. It’s a part of a character that affects how they interact with a story, and there are a lot of movies that have characters who have various identities that are not palpable at all, but the identity of a character in and of itself is not enough to undergird a narrative.”
In conversation and in the film’s script, their brotherly dynamic reveals itself as they finish each other’s sentences: “Always trying to entertain each other,” Rish said.
“Sometimes when I’m writing my parts, I’m just like, ‘All right, I think I’ve written enough and I don’t know what to write next, so I’ll just send it to him and then let’s see what he comes up with.’ Then he passes it back to me and I’m like, ‘Oh, what the hell is all this stuff?’ And then I want to see where I can take it,” Kanish said. “That helps all of our stories feel very organic because as soon as the first draft is done. It’s already been passed back and forth, and it’s already been reviewed and hammered upon by both of us at different points.”
Not only are true stories and the Arhant-Sudhir family at the forefront of this film, but also several of their close friends. The brothers enlisted their best friends as department heads after experiencing several rounds of rejection.
“There were a lot of times in this journey where people would just say, ‘You guys can’t do this. There’s no way that you could ever pull this off,’” Rish said. “All of those possibilities only became realities because the department heads took chances on us.”
“Even if I didn’t know them at all, I would feel so lucky that I’m getting a front-row seat to this precise level of artistry and then it just so happens that we can also have a drink with them outside and be eating this food and be chatting about our lives,” Kanish added.
Seven years in the making, financial difficulties or being told no were never enough to deter the duo, especially since they have each other to lean on.
“There’s never ever been a day where both of us have given up, ever and there will never be such a day on our horizon because as long as one person is looking ahead and says, ‘The sun will come up,’ that’s enough for the other person to be like, ‘Well, if he thinks it, then I think it as well,’” Kanish said.
