Delhi, India – Not every first-time director has the luxury of shooting on location in the Himalayas. Director Rakesh Ranjan Kumar’s debut film had a 3 million dollars budget and is one of the most expensive independent films produced in the history of Indian cinema. His epic drama with sweeping landscapes shows that “History is a witness that things seeped in violence and injustice will ultimately fail,” says Kumar. His highly anticipated first feature film premieres at the prestigious Marché du Film film market that take place in tandem with the Cannes Film Festival.
Kumar marks his directorial debut with the Gandhi film”Dear Friend Hitler”–a movie that takes its name from two letters Mahatma Gandhi, the icon of peace, wrote the dictator in 1939 and 1940, on the eve of and at the beginning of the second world war. When drafting these letters, Gandhi used the standard written greeting of his time. He composed the first letter, hoping that he would be able to prevent the war.
Initially Kumar’s aspired to be a politician and proceeded to rigorously prepare himself to take the civil service examination. But after moving to Delhi and entering university, his focus completely shifted. “I developed a keen interest in cinema,” Kumar says. Theatre became his passion and Bollywood his destination.
Kumar grew up in a remote area near the India-Nepal border in a village that barely had a population of 2000. “The village still lacks basic facilities like electricity, schools and concrete roads,” he explains. “Almost all of the youth from my village are working in Mumbai or Delhi, doing petty jobs for survival. The primary school I attended was a small hut shelter for cows and buffaloes.” In Kumar’s hometown, cinema was basically non-existent.
While reflecting on his formative years, he recalls one of the fondest memories from his youth was “…akin to Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet,” he says. “I was enamored with a beautiful, well-educated rich girl from my village. Even though there were quite a few handsome eligible men vying for her attention, I was the only one she came to her balcony to see. Each day, for almost five years, I stood under her balcony at sundown, like Romeo.”
The director cites filmmakers such as David Lean and Sidney Pollack as having inspired him. “I am also greatly influenced by Mani Ratman’s style of visual presentation,” Kumar states.
It took almost two years to develop the script for Dear Friend Hitler. Initially the film was supposed to be a low budget movie, “But when my producer Dr. Anil Kumar Sharma got involved in the project, I was granted the liberty to exercise my creativity with utmost freedom.”
Kumar believes Raghuvir Yadav (Salaam Bombay!, Lagaan, Bandit Queen, Peepli Live), who stars in the film, was the perfect choice for the role. Avijit Dutt, a veteran stage actor based in India, plays Gandhi in the movie.
Dear Friend Hitler Film 