When Nepali filmmaker Deepak Rauniyar and actor Asha Magrati were preparing to shoot their latest film “Pooja, Sir” in 2022, life threw them an unexpected curveball.
What started as a concerning throat swelling for Magrati, Rauniyar’s wife and frequent collaborator, during a trip to New York quickly spiraled into a series of cancer diagnoses that threatened not just the film, but Magrati’s life.
“We still attended Frontieres,” Rauniyar recalls, referring to the film market in Montreal where they were promoting another project. But upon returning home to North Carolina, where Rauniyar was teaching at the time, the couple found themselves in a race against time to secure medical care.
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“It was hard to get doctors, because it didn’t feel urgent for them,” Rauniyar says. “We struggled. And everybody had bought tickets. They were ready to fly to Nepal, and we were ready to shoot. So we didn’t know what to do.”
The first diagnosis came on Aug. 29, 2022 – Rauniyar’s birthday. A week later, they received another. In total, Magrati was diagnosed with three types of cancer, forcing the production to shut down indefinitely. The setbacks mounted quickly. Their investor disappeared, assuming the film would never be completed. Grants were lost as they couldn’t meet delivery deadlines. The couple relocated to New York for Magrati’s treatment, which lasted nearly a year.
“In between, she also lost her father,” Rauniyar adds.
By April 2023, as Magrati’s treatment was concluding, the couple faced a crossroads. “I personally didn’t want to come back home and just think about what we went through,” Rauniyar admits. “But the big question was how she could cope with that situation and still be able to play the role, and how we can find the money and be able to finance the film, because nobody was responding in that way.”
Undeterred, they began reaching out to friends for support. Three friends, including their physician, offered initial funding. A Nepali production company, Baasuri Films, provided local support in Nepal. Their director of photography Sheldon Chau offered to buy camera equipment and postpone payment. Actors and crew came on board, often working for reduced rates or deferring payment.
Support in the form of modest financial contributions snowballed to the extent where the production could consider shooting. And then Norwegian Film Institute’s Sorfond came on board, as did funds from Torino Film Lab and the Berlinale World Cinema Fund.
Written by Rauniyar, David Barker and Magrati, “Pooja, Sir” examines the caste system endemic to South Asia, where there is great emphasis on skin color. The film follows Pooja, a light-skinned Nepali police officer, who has broken centuries-old misogyny by becoming the first female detective in the country. While tens of thousands are on the streets of a border town protesting systemic discrimination against the dark-skinned Madhesi, two light-skinned boys have been kidnapped with an impossible ransom demand. Pooja has only 48 hours to save the boys and very few clues. A tough, no-nonsense cop, she is forced to seek help from Mamata, an outspoken, feminine, dark-skinned Madhesi policewoman.
For Magrati, the physical toll of cancer treatment was compounded by the emotional weight of feeling unprepared for a role she had been developing for eight years. “I couldn’t prepare as much as I wanted, and I couldn’t do the physical police kinds of exercise, and we didn’t have that much time to prepare my dialogs and dialects,” she explains. “It’s not my excuse, but I feel sad for that, because it is my dream project.”
The side effects of her ongoing hormone therapy presented additional challenges during the shoot. “My medicine tamoxifen made me like crazy. My hormones were going up and down,” Magrati recalls.
Despite these hurdles, Magrati’s determination never wavered. “She didn’t think twice, she said yes,” Rauniyar says of her decision to go to Nepal for the shoot. “I would have not been able to have that courage to go and do that heavy role,” Rauniyar says.
Filming in the Madhesh Province of Nepal in July, with temperatures reaching 44 degrees Celsius (111 Fahrenheit), presented its own set of challenges. Yet for both Rauniyar and Magrati, the experience of making “Pooja, Sir” took on new meaning in light of their personal struggles, with the couple saying that they gained even more empathy for the characters they had created.
The film’s central character Pooja, a queer police officer in Nepal, is inspired by real-life encounters during their research. “Talking about queer characters in the police force is very rare from our part of the world. So for us, like, when we decided to make a film about this, it felt truthful and relevant. And our hope is that it will provoke conversations,” Rauniyar says.
For Rauniyar, the experience also reinforced the urgency of the film’s themes. Race and queerness are topics the filmmaker sees as increasingly relevant globally. “It is a current subject everywhere,” he says, drawing parallels to racial tensions in the U.S. and recent riots in the U.K. “One thing we lack, we from South Asia, we’re not talking about race at all, we don’t recognize we even have a racial problem.”
“This is our story, our life story. And whenever we go outside, when we are traveling, the other light-skinned people, they talk about him Rauniyar so badly, they treat him badly,” Magrati adds. “It really hurts me. And I try to fight everywhere, wherever I go. This really urgent story we have to tell the people what we are doing. And also make them understand what they are doing, knowingly or unknowingly.”
As “Pooja, Sir” prepares for its world premiere in the Horizons section of the Venice Film Festival, Rauniyar and Magrati are looking ahead to future projects. They’re developing a horror film set in New York and another feature based on the true story of a Nepali immigrant in the U.K.
For now, though, they’re focused on sharing “Pooja, Sir,” which has already sold to a few territories, with the world.
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