Vasan Bala: Showing his wares

Bala managed to get over his surprise, get on a plane and look perfectly cool in the 100 percent-filled hall when Peddlers premiered.

Bala worked in banking before getting into the film business, and started out by trying his hand at writing. He then worked with Indian producer/director/writer Anurag Kashyap, who co-produced Peddlers (he also raised money by crowd-funding on the internet), and with British director Michael Winterbottom (as assistant director on the film, Trishna) to make his bones.

Cannes 2012

Peddlers’ shows Bala to be a young man with a skill for writing and handling his characters.

“I refused to audition anyone to put them into a scripted situation, so they would play on their instincts. A low-budget film demands improvisation.”

The film hangs on a story of terminally-ill people being used as “drug-mules” and shows a certain social awareness. All this wrapped up in a large dose of very violent behaviour, especially from a corrupt, and impotent cop who starts out as a ordinarily sympathetic.

Bala admits to having been a “geeky type who fantasised at school about being a gangster.”

That didn’t happen, though, and he remarks that he’s “one of the last of the VHS generation, and the only films available in Bombay then, were Hollywood B-movies…” Later on, he says, “I discovered Martin Scorcese and Michael Mann.”

There’s no singing and dancing in the 116-minute Peddlers (except in a disco scene), and this is still a relatively new concept for many filmgoers today outside of India who like Hindi films. Bala is aware of being among a group of young Indian directors whose work better suits distribution circuits further afield.

“Bollywood is self-consumed. The market for that type of film is big enough in India to recover costs. For our kind of films there isn’t a venue now [in India], and there are going to be much better films coming out.”