What enlightened and inspired me as a director, was something that we had been hearing since childhood which were the prophetic lines from a poem composed by Achyutananda in the 16th century. Since I was familiar with the area, I took the actor through the very same trauma and followed a story for a month. We had no screenplay, no story or a script, but only an actor and the local man with his ideas and understanding of the submerged villages. So, I set up a team that had no idea what we were going to shoot and arrived in this no man’s land, traversing a non-motorable road for 7 kilometers crossing two crocodile infested rivers.įor this feature film Kalira Atita (Yesterday’s Past), the only base I had was a man who lost his home and family to the sea. I wondered what those people who lost their lives, families and livelihood went through.
This film was rather a sense of my own emotional trauma of seeing village after village become a victim of the ferocious sea. It was rather shocking to me that the hand pump from which we used to drink water, is the one which you see on the poster and is now consumed the sea. There were a few houses which remained to keep shifting every two years around the mangrove forest due to the fast sea ingression. That is how I followed the story for a decade, and eventually by 2018, I saw all the villages being consumed by the sea. Upon arrival with my small team and as we were hiring a boat to get to sea, a mentally disturbed man started chasing me and said, ‘look, look see that was my home, can you take me there?’ While exploring the story the village head along with the Revenue Inspector informed us on how two villages had already gone under the sea in last decade. The exploration of this story eventually led to a documentary – “Satavaya” which means cluster of seven villages located in east coast of India (Odisha). It was surprising as a hand pump which was generally located in the middle of our villages which used to pump ground water is now in the sea. In 2006, on the front page of a national daily newspaper, I saw a frightening picture of a lone hand pump standing tall amidst the sea.