16th Annual NEW YORK INDIAN FILM FESTIVAL May 7 - 14, 2016
REVIEWS
examiner.com New York Indian Film Festival opens with tribute to 1960s Goan musicians
The 16th New York Indian Film Festival (NYIFF) opened Saturday night at Skirball Center for Performing Arts with Nachom-ia Kumpasar (Let’s Dance to the Rhythm), also the New York premiere of the 2015 Bardroy Baretto-directed Konkani-language film starring Vijay Maurya, Palomi Ghosh and Prince Jacob. Both the director and Ghosh were in attendance and participated in a Q&A with NYIFF festival director Aseem Chhabra following the screening.
The film takes place in the Goa of the 1960s and ‘70s, when the southwestern Indian state’s musicians performed in the jazz clubs of Bombay and strongly influenced the music of Bollywood cinema. The central characters of composer/bandleader/trumpet player Lawry (played by Maurya) and vocalist Dona (Ghosh) are patterned after Chris Perry, known in Goa as The Man with the Golden Trumpet, who introduced jazz to Konkani music and took it to a new level, and Lorna Cordeiro, The Goan Nightingale, whom Perry discovered.
The plot actually incorporates 20 popular Konkani songs from the period, mostly written by Perry, in an effort to spotlight the largely unrecognized contributions of the Goan musicians.
“They’re songs I grew up with as a kid, and I felt there was a story in it,” said Baretto after the NYIFF screening. After a successful career in advertising, Baretto wanted “to give something back to my state,” he said, while “giving recognition” to the state’s musicians.
The music heard throughout the film—swing jazz and jump blues with clever lyrics, even in translation--was indeed outstanding, as was Ghosh’s performance in particular. Hailing from the western Indian state of Gujarat, Ghosh noted that she had sung in a Bollywood band, but had never done anything musical on this scale.
But she said it was a case of “acting and singing coming together” in achieving an invigorating performance of the songs, some of which she actually sang herself on the soundtrack. She also marveled at the appearance of Lorna—now 69--at the end of the film.
“I never said I was playing her,” said Ghosh, stressing that Nachom-ia Kumpasar is “not a biopic.”
“I played by instinct as Dona would be,” she added. As for the veracity of the film’s romance between Dona and Lawry, Baretto said that the story was “fictional, but based on rumor.”
It was about falling in love, he said, adding that plotwise, he “put the songs in order--and there was the story.”
The plot actually incorporates 20 popular Konkani songs from the period, mostly written by Perry, in an effort to spotlight the largely unrecognized contributions of the Goan musicians.