Mani Kaul was commissioned by the Festival of India in 1985 to make a film about the art of clay pottery in India. His response was to wander in a tourist bus (with his film crew of twenty persons) up and down North India looking at the lives and longings of ancient communities of potters. Museum curators complained that Mani Kaul had not stopped in to film their exquisite pieces of one sort or another; but Kaul was not interested in a catalogue of fine things. He wanted rather to discover the myths and states of mind out of which pots were made and to render these states of mind through his own shaping of the medium of cinema. “I wanted,” Mani Kaul says, “to know the anguish of the potter through my own anguish as a filmmaker.” (Satti Khanna)
Hindi with English subtitles
