Pan Nalin

Pan Nalin, a self taught filmmaker, was born in a very poor family in a remote village of Adatala, in India, and spent most part of his childhood on railway tracks and platforms where his father sold tea & snacks.

Right from a very young age, he was fascinated with mirrors, lights and shadows. Adatala village's remoteness and proximity to wildlife areas added to its natural beauty and tranquillity, where the imagination of a child had a vast scope for creation and innovation.

As a child, Nalin disliked schools. Instead he used to paint and draw and often used to stage plays with children or to participate in mythological dramas. But it was not until he was nine years old that Pan Nalin saw a film for the first time.

Later as a teenager, he left his family and village and ventured into a world completely unknown to him. When Nalin learnt that he would have to be a graduate to go to a film school, he started to learn filmmaking on his own. During the day he studied fine arts and during the night he worked to finance his studies and living.

Eventually Nalin was admitted to study at India's prestigious design school NID, The National Institute of Design. There, he studied visual communication but devoted most of his time to learn filmmaking. Besides, he managed a very successful film club where he screened and wrote about films. He often organised film festivals and retrospectives of the films of Tarkovsky, Godard, Bergman, Kurosawa, Eisenstein and Bunuel, among others.

After shooting some four animated short films and 20 small silent films with two 8mm and 16mm Bolex, Nalin began travelling across India and learning all he could learn about himself, his roots and the rest of the world.

Tired of his “nomadic and homeless” existence, he landed up in Bombay with 26 Rupees in his pocket and bagful of unfinished scripts. He joined a film production company, eventually as production runner and then as Production Manager. It took only a few months for the producers of the company to realise Nalin's talent and offered him to direct commercials and corporate films.

But even though the instant success in the commercial world brought him money, Bombay brought no creative satisfaction to Mr. Nalin – he refused offers to direct typical Bollywood masala films. One day, he sold all he owned and set out to travel in Europe.

On returning to India, he roamed the Himalayas and built a solid spiritual foundation besides developing ideas for several feature films. Along with the process of writing, he experimented with the short fiction film format, eventually landing up with many unfinished short films. Nalin has made several documentaries in collaboration with Canal Plus, BBC, Discovery, National Geographic, France 3. All his films evoke a unique universe of spiritual quests in light of eroticism, sensuality, faith, religion and society. It was in 1993 that he felt it was right time to make his first feature film Samsara but since then it has taken seven long years before this reality would turn into a dream.

Monsoon Films Private Limited