Subah-e-Banaras Film

The Film

Subah-e-Banaras is a documentary on the mornings of Banaras, produced by Moonlight Pictures with Jagran Prakashan.

The whole film lives inside one stretch of the day, from roughly 3:00 AM to 8:00 AM, and follows what the city does in it: the ghats, the narrow lanes, the rituals, the music and the ordinary life that fills them before the rest of Varanasi is awake.

How We Made It

The light across those five hours moves fast, from deep blue through bright gold to faded white, which makes continuity difficult to hold. The lanes are crowded and narrow, which rules out most of the equipment a film finished to this level would normally use. Both shaped how the film was shot.

The idea, and the writing. A cultural book and film on Banaras was first envisioned by Vikas Chandra, Vice President of Marketing at Jagran, who pitched it to his team during a session on innovation. Jagran Prakashan chose Moonlight Pictures as the producers and filmmakers. The writing of the book was taken up by the litterateur and poet Late Pt. Dharmsheel Chaturvedi, a Kashi man and the natural author for the subject.

Research first, film second. Research began once the initial drafts of the creative text started arriving from Pt. Dharmsheel Chaturvedi's desk. The narrow lanes of Varanasi, the culture and the people became our life for the several months that followed. Working further into the subtler parts of daily life in Banaras, we came across experts and advisors whose directions led us to places and practices we would not otherwise have found. Where most films and books on a city reach for its landmarks, this one went to the daily moments.

As the research collaged itself into an expansive pictorial journey, the project was taken into detailed discussion with Mahendra Mohan Gupta, Chairman of Jagran, and Sanjay Gupta, CEO of Jagran Prakashan, facilitated by Vikas Chandra. Several meetings later the agenda was settled, alongside early exploration of the music, the cinematic texture and the logistics of filming in crowded lanes.

Shot across a year, in RAW 4K. Filming was planned in bits and pieces over more than a year, so the film could carry the best hues of every season, festival and event in the city. It commenced around October 2015. One of the core decisions made before a single frame was shot was to run the entire schedule in RAW 4K, to preserve maximum detail — a very unusual choice for a documentary of this length, because of the storage capacity and editing power it demands.

Cinema lensing on a documentary. Equipment was chosen where the need for mobility met the need for quality. With a lot of moving shots and rhythmic tracking planned into the storyboards, we spent days walking the streets of Banaras with heavy stabilisation equipment and a cover-up crew. Documentaries usually skip cinema lensing because of those mobility, time and budget constraints; here we used it. Filming was done on Carl Zeiss prime lenses, with hours spent on location calibrating light, colour and mood before the cameras rolled.

Rhythm as the organising principle. For Moonlight, the soul of a documentary lies in its rhythm — carried through music, editing, shot movement and character blocking.

Praveen Chaturvedi, a lifelong poet of Urdu and Hindi, penned the opening nazm 'Ek Boond Raushni Ki' and the opening track 'Bheeni Bheeni Bhor Bhayi'. The score was composed and curated by Dr. Revati Sakalkar, the renowned Banaras singer known as Kashi Kokila, the Cuckoo of Kashi, who also sang the opening track. Two tracks came from Dr. Krishnakant Shukla, a yogi musician who was previously a Professor of Physics in the USA. For the first time ever, 'Siddh Bhajo Omkar' — a 1,400-year-old bhajan composed by Guru Gorakshnath — was rendered by Krishnakant Shukla and produced for the public. Across the other tracks, the magical works of Kabir give a subtle musical meaning to the subject and nurture the underlying philosophy of the film. Most of the music production happened in New Delhi, at one of Moonlight's partner studios.

Post, grade and the disk. Post-production meant working through hundreds of hours of uncompressed RAW footage, interviews and ambiences. It took over six months and a team of around five artists. Colour grading began at picture lock, working toward shots that resembled the feeling of being present at the location.

Moser Baer Technologies partnered on replication of the DVDs, which were mastered over a period of a month. The DVD art was held in continuity with the coffee table book we were producing in parallel; in the finished product, the disk sits with the book in a single luxurious collection box.

Where It Landed

The project closed at the official launch ceremony held at Hotel Surya, Varanasi on 3 October 2017, after more than two years of work.

The ceremony was attended by the Hon'ble Governor of Uttar Pradesh Shri Ram Naik, Padma Vibhushan Late Smt. Girija Devi and Padma Bhushan Shri Channu Lal Mishra, among others, with Jagran and Moonlight Pictures sharing the stage.

The film has been released free to the public on YouTube, and Jagran continues to receive orders for the physical disk and the collection box. It has won multiple film awards.

Watch the full film: Subah-e-Banaras