The Quiet Exodus: On Vinod Kapri's 'Pyre'

The Wire

7 days ago

An old man walks along a craggy mountain path, his back slightly hunched, a small drum in hand. With each tap of the drum he chants, invoking the goddesses. Behind him, an elderly woman follows, wrapped in layers of faded cloth, her steps steady but slow. Mist curls over the stone rooftops of their deserted village as they walk away from it onto a cliff-like rock jutting over the turbulent waters of Kali Taal.
This is the opening image of Pyre, Vinod Kapri's stunning film – a world built on silence, ritual and the tender endurance of two people who have refused to leave what the rest of the world is abandoning: the hills of Uttarakhand.
From the very first scene, Kapri signals that Pyre will not hurry to tell its story. The pacing of the film is masterful, allowing the viewer to walk among the hills, to experience the mountains in a way that only a director intimate with their rhythms could achieve.
I love those hills and have a sense of them more than any other mountain range – not the Aravallis I belong to, nor the Alps I experienced as a child – the Garhwal and Kumaon hills feel familiar like no other, especially as they've been part of my reporting life as well.
A still from 'Pyre'.
Depictions, by others, of what matters to you – literary or cinematic – often makes you critical. Your natural possessiveness (and sometimes knowledge) push you to notice every real or perceived lapse, every stereotype – something to critique, a way to reclaim what you love from a writer or director. Which is why I'm frankly stunned by how completely this film – and the hills, their people, their life – seem to belong to Kapri. Or perhaps it's the other way around: Kapri belongs to them. He renders their world with such care and fidelity that there's nothing to reclaim, only to recognise.
It's not surprising, then, that the film was shot in and around Kapri's father's village, where he grew up. The actors – the lead protagonists who had never faced a camera before – Padam Singh, or Bubu, a retired soldier played by Kapri's uncle and Amma or Tulsi played by Hira Devi, a farmer. Anoop Trivedi, an actor and NSD graduate, worked with these two and in fact, the rest of the cast to produce an authenticity rarely seen. They speak and bicker not as performers, but as people who have lived these lives. This lack of affectation cuts straight to the core of the film's emotional truths.
Pyre follows Bubu and Amma, an elderly couple living in quiet isolation, waiting for their son Hariya, who left years ago for the city. Their days pass in everyday routines – tending to the goats, bickering, lighting bidis, fetching wood, trekking down to hospitals, repairing their hut. "He said he would come this year," Amma mutters, more to the wind than to Bubu. Their love plays out in quiet gestures – gentle banter, teasing glances. Each time Amma falls ill, Bubu calls out to a villager, offering a goat in exchange for helping carry her down the mountain paths to a road, the only way to access medical assistance. As the village empties, and their isolation deepens, a question begins to loom – who will be left to help when no one remains? Hariya's return becomes more about holding on to a memory rather than reality.
The truths lie in the real-life story of the hills and of people much like Bubu and Amma. Kapri has spoken of how the idea of the film came from a couple he met in Munsyari. The man had a herd of goats – he would give one to anyone willing to help carry his wife down from their home, a steep trek to the main road and on to the hospital. "As long as I have goats my wife will survive," he told Kapri, and that dialogue is verbatim in the film.
A still from 'Pyre'.
Kapri said it reminded him of Gabriel García Márquez's No One Writes to the Colonel – a very different story, about a colonel waiting in poverty for a pension that never arrives. Despite the distance in geography, language and context, the film and the novel echo each other in spirit: the dignity of agwing, the persistence of hope against all odds, the quiet heroism of enduring. That connection lends the film a universality that reaches beyond its setting.
A brief meeting with Hira Devi and Padam Singh reveals how deeply this story is theirs. Hira Devi says she weeps each time she watches the film – it mirrors too closely the grief of those around her. She confessed to fighting with the director, begging for a gentler ending: "At least in cinema, if not in life, I wanted relief." Padam Singh, who has lost his wife and is undergoing cancer treatment, still lives in a village hollowed out by migration. Each thunderstorm eats away not just at homes but at memory, at belonging.
One such thunderstorm – a scene of shattering beauty – was captured by cinematographer Manas Bhattacharya. Framed through their blue-painted windows, Bubu and Amma sing old folk songs to pass the night, their voices rising against the sound of wind and rain. By morning, part of the adjacent hut collapses. Without a word, Bubu attempts to repair it. There is no dramatic music, no dialogue – only the quiet act of rebuilding. It is perhaps the most profound expression of love in the film.
Kapri's use of sound is as textured and thoughtful as his visual storytelling. The ambient world of the hills – the rustle of wind through pine, the rhythm of goats' hooves, the distant rush of the Kali river – is captured with quiet precision. The music by Oscar-winner Mychael Danna, of Life of Pi fame, and a song penned by Gulzar add to the experience, but it's the use of the folk songs sung by Bubu and Amma that stand out. The music does not draw attention to itself; it deepens the experience. Folk songs – Bubu sings a ballad about the "stars of heaven, moonlit night" – are used sparingly, without exoticising the culture or signalling their "folksiness". Instead, they emerge as part of the world that Bubu and Amma inhabit.
A still from 'Pyre'.
Kapri has managed to create a love story in the midst of exploring a key issue in Uttarakhand, one that is hard to resolve – the migration away from the hills of its own people. As a Pithoragarhi living and working in Bombay and Delhi, Kapri knows what this entails: A guilt for having left the hills but also an understanding of what endures for people who have stayed behind.
The film brought to mind the words of environmentalist and activist Chandi Prasad Bhatt. I last met him in the aftermath of the June 2013 flash floods that devastated the Uttarakhand hills – what is now often referred to as the Kedarnath tragedy. Bhatt, who has spent a lifetime warning against the damage wrought by unchecked development, spoke then of a deeper irony: While development remains the official narrative, the reality is one of steady erosion – the mountains are emptying out, not just by landslides, but by a slow, relentless exodus, compelled by shrinking livelihoods.
By situating this predicament, Kapri brings into focus a crisis that few narratives capture, and one that cinema, in its most restrained and empathetic form, is uniquely equipped to reveal.
Pyre won the Audience Award at the Tallinn Black Nights Film Festival, along with several other international accolades – for its actors, its director and its deeply affecting story. But awards aside, what this film truly deserves is greater viewing, conversation and love in the country it so intimately belongs to: India.
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