Actor Manav Kaul talks to writer Vinod Kumar Shukla and a film is born

Gamak Ghar director Achal Mishra’s latest film was made in 2022 but was completed only in April this year. Mishra’s documentary echoes its subject’s observation that the creative process requires patience – everything does not need to come out immediately.

Chaar Phool Hain Aur Duniya Hai (There are four flowers and then there’s the world) is strung together from vignettes of the renowned Hindi writer Vinod Kumar Shukla in his home in Raipur in Chhattisgarh. The film is framed as a conversation between Shukla and the actor Manav Kaul, himself a writer of recent repute. Shot and edited by Mishra, the documentary will be premiered at the Dharamshala International Film Festival (November 7-10).

Chaar Phool Hain Aur Duniya Hai emerged out of a meeting between Mishra, Kaul and a mutual friend, the screenwriter Nihal Parashar, in March 2022. When Kaul said that he was planning to visit Shukla in Raipur, Mishra tagged along with two cameras and sound recording equipment.

Mishra had been following Shukla’s work for a while, reading him first in translations by Arvind Krishna Mehrotra and later in the original Hindi. “There is an innocence, an almost child-like purity to his writing, it doesn’t seem calculated,” Mishra told Scroll. “The craft looks so easy even though it isn’t – there...

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