Shit One Carries [Shorts Session 4]

Avi, 45, returns home to India from California to care for his father. Unlike the warmth his father shares with his caregivers, the father and son’s relationship is prickly. One afternoon when the attendant is unavailable, Avi must deal with his father’s diarrhoea. A desperate Avi realises that he must let go of his own crap before he can clean his father’s shit.

Director

Shuchi Kothari is a Kiwi-Indian filmmaker based in New Zealand. She has written and produced award-winning films (Firaaq, Apron Strings, Coffee & Allah, Fleeting Beauty) that have screened at over 100 international festivals including Venice, Toronto, BFI, Telluride, Cannes and Busan. She teaches Screen Production at the University of Auckland. Among other projects, she’s currently writing an animated feature screenplay set in USA and Japan.

Shit One Carries is Shuchi’s fictional directorial debut.

Director’s Note: “Indian woman directs first film at 50” doesn’t have the same ring as “Oklahoma woman gives birth to quintuplets at 40”, but Shit One Carries is my labour of love.

As writer/producer of many successful films (all directed by women), I’ve enjoyed authorship at both ends of the filmmaking process but I’ve never wanted to direct. Until now when I finally asked myself the question: what choices would I make were I to take my script to screen? My directorial debut Shit One Carries is an answer to that question.

I wrote the script during a recent visit to India when my mother had a fall and was confined to bed. During this visit, I caught up with DOP Mrinal Desai. To my rather innocuous question “how was your morning?” he replied, “spent most of it trying to figure out who’s going to wipe my father’s ass.” That statement gave birth to this story.

My friends and I are now at that age when we frequently travel from our various locations to look after aging parents. Our homecomings may be motivated by genuine care, filial obligation, or a modicum of guilt but I’m not interested in interrogating motivations. Instead what interests me is the idea of awkward intimacies between adult children and their parents when caregiving roles are reversed.

The struggle to “do the right thing,” manifests itself peculiarly in Indian parent-child relationships where cultural norms and social pressures expect that all children when grown up will return the gift of selfless caregiving.