MUMBAI, July 24: A smattering of satellite dishes and TV antennae apart, the summer of '47 seemed to glide very easily into the summer of '97 around the villages of Punjab, discovered Pamela Rooks. Which was just as well, as the filmmaker had by now taken on the onerous task of creating celluloid images of the well-known partition novel, Train to Pakistan, by Khushwant Singh.``The villages and the people on the outskirts of Punjab are pretty much the same as they were described by Singh 50 years ago, but there were certain Muslim pockets before Partition which are no more now. So I had to hunt out a couple of villages on the fringes of Punjab that could combine as Mano Majra,'' says Rooks.The shooting of Train to Pakistan is complete, and Rooks is in Mumbai now to tie up on post-production work. The film will be premiered on Star Plus on August 15. After the festival-crowd exposure that her first feature film, Miss Beatty's Children, based on a novel of the same name by her, received, the filmmaker is basking in the knowledge that her second feature film will receive a much wider audience. ``After the premiere, the film will be released commercially also,'' she adds. ``And it's appropriate, I think. For there seems to be a decided shift in audience preference these days, what with the success of films like Border and Gupt.''Although she has not seen either of the films Rooks is not worried that her film comes close on the heels of a somewhat controversial JP Dutt film on the '71 war.Ravi Dayal, the publishers of the book were rather hesitant with an `amateur' filmmaker, till Ravi Chopra of NFDC gave her the go-ahead. ``The book lends itself easily to cinema,'' says she. ``But the way I am telling a story is different from Singh's narrative. After all, it is not possible to be completely faithful to the original, one needs to seek its essence.'' Accordingly, Rooks' film is an extension from the original. The film begins with Hukum Chand, the district commissioner, recalling memories of people who left an indelible mark on his mind at a particular time. ``Then there are also certain throwaway lines in the course of Singh's narrative, which I have visually translated into film,'' she says.Rooks read the book when she was 17 to acquaint herself with the role of Nooran, the character she was to play for the film to be made by Ismail Merchant. The project never took off, but the novel remained with her, for she identified with it, having grown up on stories of the Partition from her parents.Being a documentary filmmaker (she has to her credit films on diverse subjects as Chipko: A response to the forest crisis, Girl Child: fighting for survival, Punjab: a human tragedy and Indian cinema: the winds of change) before stepping into feature films, shifting from the real to the make-believe has been an advantage with her, she believes. There have been certain parts of the film that were shot live, without the advantage of retakes. ``A religious ceremony at a temple, for instance. We couldn't have recreated such a scenario. So I told my cameraman to shoot it documentary style, the rest to be taken care of on the editing table,'' she recounts.The film stars Rajit Kapoor, Nirmal Pandey, Mohan Agashe, Smruti Mishra and Divya Dutt.
