“Feast of Varanasi” is the first film from Producer-Director-Writer Rajan Patel but judging by this piece of commercial art, Patel has a fantastic future in movie making.
Film is a second career he has developed in addition to his first one.
Rajan’s successful day job is as a Town and Country Planning Consultant, but he’s turned his passion into reality with funding from his own resources and by putting some of the film word’s best people around him.
The movie Rajan has created is a tense thriller set in the northern Indian city of Varanasi on the banks of the Ganges. The city is as much a character as are main cast members.
At the start of the story, four young girls have been gruesomely burnt to death. A CBI officer, Arjun Das, (Adil Hussain), is sent from New Delhi to investigate. As Holi approaches, the killer claims the greatest sacrifice of all to attain moksha.
Meanwhile, following her mother’s suicide, Helen, (Holly Gilbert), a young English teacher arrives in Varanasi to deliver her mother’s final letter and a special pendant to her aunt Agatha (Judi Bowker, who was in Clash of the Titans). Helen discovers something shocking about her past and starts to bond with Nana (Ashwath Bhatt, who was in The Reluctant Fundamentalist). He brilliantly plays a reclusive priest who lives in a forest. Helen’s own life and safety are soon in jeopardy.
The film has a surprise ending, leaving the door open for a sequel. It’s due to open March 11th nationwide in 23 British Cineworlds, Manchester and Leicester Odeons. It’s also premiering in India.
Drawing from Silence of the Lambs and Apocalypse Now, the film is an exciting, shock-inducing fast paced work that leaves you dazed and educated at the same time. All the performances are superb and each production role is brilliantly executed.
How did Rajan Patel pull off the near impossible task of producing, directing, writing and financing his opus, that, incidentally, he has written a book for too?
Not without the solid, loyal and consistent support of his wife Ketal, for a start.
Born in Uganda August 7th (the day Amin expelled the Asians) to a trading family, Rajan’s parents settled in a tough council estate in Kingston, London. It’s probably one of the reasons he’s so self-reliant.
“I had skinheads put a knife on me when I was seven years old telling me to go back to my own country. You grow up quite tough, I've got an older brother and a younger one; you just look after each other,” he said. The siblings have looked out for each other ever since.
While many others were setting up newsagents, unusually, Rajan’s parents used to take their children off for European holidays, so the boys grew up well travelled.
From an early age, the middle son developed a healthy passion for film. It crystallized at university. Though Rajan studied architecture and planning at the Bartlett, UCL, he was still in a creative environment.
The film maker -producer wrote his first film script in 2009.
He also started, with his brothers, creating large black tie New Year’s Eve events at venues like the Grosvenor House Hotel ballroom in Park Lane. The sell out parties cost the brothers a lot to put on but they all made their money back. That gave Rajan the knowledge of how to create spectacles; so when he turned to film making, he hunted down the right people to team with like veteran producer/script supervisor Caroline O’Reilly and director of photography, James Aspinall.
“My editor, Sean Barton spent 13 months editing Georges Lucas' film. When he agreed to do my film in my budget and I spent three months with him every day, I had my own personal tuition,” Rajan enthused.
Rajan had the idea for the film after watching a Hindu funeral in London and wondering if the priest really was the holy man that everyone thought he was.
It wasn’t easy; nine months of draft-writing followed by an immersive visit to Varanasi came before more years of drafts and a one year break following the passing of his own dear mother.
Rajan’s initial budget was £100,000 but is scaled up to four times that with an expansion in the quality of the crew and equipment.
“It might take one line on a page, but it can take you 10 hours to shoot it! And then you start listening to these people because they say, “Look, you're starting off with a 165-page script and you can do this differently. You reconstruct your script, get things out that don't help the story, get characters out that don't drive the story forward. And your script drops down to 110 pages; you budget that.”
And this is only the start- Rajan has more blockbusters in the pipeline!
