Deepak Rauniyar: “Pooja, Sir is more than a film: a work of love”
Meeting with the Nepalese director of this exciting thriller featuring a female cop in a squad made up to 95% men, embodied by his wife Asha Maya Magrati
Pooja, siryour third feature film features a female cop in a service almost entirely made up of men. A woman loving women, with a short haircut who, calling herself sir, deny her kind to be as transparent as possible and be entrusted with important investigations. How is the idea of this film and this character born?
It all started with love, between two people, my wife Asha Maya Magrati- who plays Pooja and wrote the script- and I in a country divided by misunderstanding. We come from different universes. Asha is Pahari, like Pooja in the film. I am Madhesi. Before our meeting, even she believed in stereotype that someone like me was a stranger, a “bhaiya”. But love has the gift of breaking the walls. In 2015, we turned White Sun In the mountains when the south plains, at my house, demonstrated. The border has closed. Children are dead. People have suffered. This pain, this silence, gave birth to something in us. We started to discuss, not only as filmmakers, but as two people trying to understand their respective worlds. I experienced the silent discrimination of being Madhesi. I was the victim of harassment at school. I was the target of mockery of my teachers. I was invised in textbooks, media, films. That’s why Pooja, sir had to see the light of day in my eyes. It is the first Nepalese film to stage a Madhesi character without making it a mockery subject.
Why did you choose the prism of the police investigation?
Above all, we didn’t want to make a lesson giver film but first and foremost touch the public. This is why we have chosen a police investigation – something familiar, but tinged with truth. It took eight years. We have lost funding. Asha had cancer. We lost his father. There were times when we thought we never finished it. But love continued to manifest itself – with friends, in strangers, in small subsidies just in time. Pooja, sir has become more than a film. A work of love. And we hope he will open hearts as he opened ours.
You have written this screenplay with Asha so but also David Barker, with the collaboration of a French screenwriter, Mathieu Taponier. What was everyone’s role?
Asha and I lived this story. It’s very personal. But when something is important to you, it is difficult to see clearly. This is why David’s presence on board was precious. David has accompanied me from the start. He made my first film, Highwayand we co-written together White Sun. We started to develop Pooja, sir At the end of 2016. David is gifted to step back and ask questions that push you to deepen. But this film having taken a long time, David found himself busy by other projects, and we needed a fresh look. This is where we met Mathieu Taponier. I loved his work as an editor on Saul’s son ; It was one of the films I had in mind as a reference. We first engaged in this position and started to discuss the scenario. Mathieu is lively, attentive and working with him is really pleasant. But when Asha’s diagnosis was made, everything stopped. We lost our French funding and partners. So we could not work long with Mathieu, but the moments spent together were enriching. His contribution left traces.
The great success of your film is the way you tell the intimate story of the policewoman which is the heroine without ever leaving the investigation aside. Has this balance formed the greatest challenge of writing?
Neither Asha nor I had a connection with the police. I would add that I have never had good experiences with them. My father has often been arrested for no reason and spent nights in police custody. To write this script and tell the police of the interior, so we did a lot of research and interviews. We knew very early that the main role was to be played by a woman. But in Nepal, less than 3 % of the police are women. It took time to establish confidence. Little by little, some police officers began to confide, inviting us home, in their offices. And over these conversations, we discovered something unexpected: many policemen from the generation of Pooja were queer. It has changed everything. We decided that Pooja would be queer too. And we have indeed tried to tackle many subjects – gender, caste, identity, sexuality – while trying to maintain the current investigation. It was difficult to balance. Writing as well as editing. But these difficulties helped the film find its own pace.
The other great strength of this film is that it never seems intended for a Western audience: you are never afraid to lose us in specific Nepalese social issues. Was the reaction of the Western public really different from that of the Nepalese public?
It touches me that you have noticed it. For me, it is never necessary to explain everything. Anyway, I knew that whatever I do, people would not understand all the cultural details. And that’s okay! We have never tried to explain Nepal in the world. We just wanted to tell the story with honesty, at its own pace. We were convinced that if the emotions were sincere, people would connect. And that’s what happened. We could see it in Venice for its world premiere, as in Amsterdam or Sydney. The Western public may not grasp all the cultural strata of Pooja, sir But he identifies with silence, strength, struggle. The Nepalese public, he necessarily discovers the film differently, with clean experience. He notices the small details: the way the language evolves, the behavior of people in a police station. We used three languages in the film. In real life, the police rarely speak to people in their own language, even if Nepal is multilingual. We tried to reflect this. And we could see that even the police were affected by this film, especially women.
Have you had specific cinematographic references to create the visual environment of Pooja, sir ?
As was my first police film, my director of photography, Sheldon Chau, and I watched a lot of films together. Saul’s son of which I was talking earlier, because he gave the impression of a larger world by showing less. Cold War For his singular work on the frame. Zodiac For his photograph. I also watched Memories of Murder,, Mad dog And Between heaven and hell from Kurosawa. We were inspired by these films but I would say that the style of Pooja, sir was born from the truth of history and the world that we were looking to show. And by ricochet of our exchanges on our own world: our characters, our filming places, our weather. I give you an example. In Nepal, the power cuts are frequent. The parts are lit by a single bulb. So we kissed this darkness in a film where each character tries to be someone else. At the start, I thought I used to use an image format 4: 3. But I finally opted for the Widescreen which allowed us to better marry the inner world of Pooja: his vision of things, his movements in spaces that were not designed for her. My goal was not to create something too stylized. Above all, I wanted everything to appear realistic.
Pooja, sir. De Deepak Rauniyar. With Asha Maya Magrati, Nikita Chandak, Dayahang Rai… Duration: 1h49. Release on July 23, 2025
