The making of Sister Midnight: a multinational fable premiering at Broadway Cinema

On a hot day in Mumbai, two East Midlands film producers arrived to produce a feature: Sister Midnight, a fable about the female experience, set in India’s largest city. 

The duo, Alastair Clark and Anna Griffin, began work on the film in 2016, but Griffin was first introduced to its writer, Karan Kandhari, even earlier in 2013 when she watched his short film Flight of The Pompadour at Bristol’s Encounters Film Festival. Griffin was drawn to Karan’s depiction of an outsider, a theme which they continue in Sister Midnight. 

When I met with the pair, I asked them to summarise the film and what makes it so special and they answered decisively: it’s Uma, the film’s central character. Brought to life by Radhika Apte, the distinguished Bollywood actor, who Griffin insists embodies the role. She affirms simply, “You don’t have Uma without Radhika.”

Uma is “unapologetic, she is chaotic, and she takes no prisoners, she’s a rebel,” they tell me. And the cause against which she rebels? Well, on the surface it’s her arranged marriage and the new life she finds herself in - “she doesn’t know the man she’s married to, she’s in a place she’s never lived” - but peel back a layer and it’s the feeling that she’s different. It’s the theme that initially attracted Griffin to Kandhari’s first short, that of the outsider. Uma doesn’t fit in, not into the mold of marriage, or with the neighbours on her street, and rather than alter herself to fit in, she rails wildly against her surroundings.

It would be reductive to say that Sister Midnight is simply a feminist fable. In Kandhari’s own words, the film explores the idea that “there is no manual for life, no one tells you how to navigate this world.” Yet Uma’s struggle is distinctly female, as she rallies against having to cook and clean. A close bond with her neighbour, Sheetal, provides solidarity. Griffin explains: “they occupy the space and mundanity of wives and through their dialogue and role-playing they poke fun at the world around them in a social critique kind of way.”

The street that Uma and Sheetal share is important for the development of their relationship, and acts as a vital limb on which the wider film stands. During the film’s earlier stages, Clark and Griffin explain that Karan’s dream was to use a street in Mumbai for shooting. But when the reality of blocking off a busy street became clear, the writer’s fanciful wings were rightly clipped by the practical producers. The result was a point of triumph, and the praise rests with their “amazing production designer” who skilfully re-created the original street; “it’s a mirror version of the street, it’s just phenomenal.”

This street was so intrinsic to Sister Midnight, that Clark and Griffin describe how it’s so baked into the film’s meaning that it is part of its ‘DNA’. Griffin talks frequently about the “DNA of the film” during our chat and it strikes me as an important phrase because it paints the film as a living thing - something with distinct characteristics with air in its lungs. Seeing the film in this way means that the setting in Sister Midnight is more than simply a backdrop for characters to exist in front of, and instead like a character all of its own.

For Clark and Griffin, Mumbai took on different characters during the filming process too - their drive to set during the day could take almost two hours and just fifteen minutes at night. “It suddenly becomes a ghost town at night,” Clark explains. “That’s why when you see the night scenes the film is just very sparse with just dogs barking.” Karan knew this shift between Mumbai’s night and day personally, and “he used that as a shifting character that Uma then occupies to her benefit, sometimes to her detriment.” It’s during these times of “detriment” that something happens to Uma, a twist teased at by Clark and Griffin - one to be eagerly discovered by viewers. 

Griffin Pictures and Wellington Films often focus on injustice and hardship in their projects. In a previous LeftLion interview, Griffin said: “I never make stuff solely for entertainment’s sake. I always want to make something that can start a conversation.” When I asked what kind of conversations, if any, they were hoping to start with Sister Midnight, one thing was conversations about poverty. “The poverty in Mumbai is unlike anything I’ve ever seen,” Griffin explains. “You see that with Uma and her husband because they are functioning within a very poverty-stricken environment which is just normal out there, so that’s a conversation starter.”

Another was Uma’s experience in Mumbai’s patriarchal society. Uma is “occupying a very patriarchal system and just in her very nature she’s not a textbook woman, so even before the shift that occurs, she’s already at odds with her world.” This is not simply a conversation about how men and women interact, but also about the complexity of women’s relationships with each other within a patriarchal system because, for Uma, “even the other women view her in a way they don’t view themselves.”

Often we talk about British cinema as being in a troubled place - there isn’t enough funding and often films are London-centric. Without negating this, Sister Midnight proudly comes from Nottingham-based production companies, is filmed in India with Indian actors, and the script is entirely in Hindi. It is a mixture of different places, of cultures, and should help us to feel hopeful about the future of film.

“As we show with this production, there are exciting voices outside of London,” says Clark “More than just championing the midlands, this film shows that “we don’t have to just shoot in the UK either. There are stories that British teams can tell all over the world.” 

Head to Broadway Cinema on Friday 14 March to watch Sister Midnight with an introduction from Alastair and Anna.

@wellingtonfilms