‘A product of love’: Nepali director Deepak Rauniyar on his police procedural ‘Pooja, Sir’

In Nepali filmmaker Deepak Rauniyar’s Pooja, Sir, a police detective and her team investigate the kidnappings of two children in the shadow of conflicts involving the Madheshi ethnic group. Adding an extra layer to Pooja, Sir is its heroine, who wears her hair cropped, tapes her chest and insists that her colleagues don’t refer to her as “ma’am”.

Written by Rauniyar and his wife and lead actress Asha Magrati, Pooja, Sir has been inspired by true events and political unrest in 2015 in southern Nepal as well as Rauniyar’s own Madheshi identity. The tense and complex thriller examines sexism, bigotry and issues of gender and caste identities.

Rauniyar’s third feature after Highway (2012) and White Sun (2016) is part of the South Asia competition category at the ongoing MAMI Mumbai Film Festival. In an interview from Boston, where he teaches a film course, Rauniyar spoke to Scroll about the challenges of making Pooja, Sir and the recent resurgence in Nepali cinema.

How much of your own experiences were built into Pooja, Sir? Your wife and you come from different communities.

We have always been interested in showing something we have experienced. There is a lot of Asha and me in the film. Also, Pooja’s father is very much inspired by Asha’s father, whom we lost during the year before we filmed.

The whole movie is...

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