Leena Manimekalai’s new film Sengadal is both fact and fiction.

Chennai filmmaker Leena Manimekalai is best-known for her documentaries, so it’s not surprising that elements of non-fiction permeate her first feature film Sengadal (The Dead Sea), which is showing in Mumbai this fortnight. Sengadal mixes together documentary and fiction and takes a self-consciously art house approach to the issues faced by fisherfolk in Tamil Nadu. Their fates are intertwined with those of Sri Lankan Tamils fleeing civil war in their homeland. (The film was completed last year after the Lankan government wiped out the top leadership of the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam.)

Manimekalai fictionalises the experiences of fishermen and their families and portrays them as living in a state of fear and uncertainty because of harassment and suspicion by the authorities. Sengadal ran into trouble with the Central Board of Film Certification for its potentially incendiary critique of the Indian and the Sri Lankan governments. It was later cleared with an A certificate.

Manimekalai shot Sengadal on location in Rameshwaram with actual members of the fishing community and refugees. She included her own experiences in the film – both her participation in rallies demanding fair treatment of the Lankan Tamils as well as her questioning by cops in Rameshwaram. The self-reflexive approach may seem indulgent, but it was necessary, she told Nandini Ramnath.

Did a fictional approach allow you to explore the narrative, locations and characters in a way that wasn’t possible in a documentary?
There is always fiction in reality and reality in fiction. I wanted to try something and not to be trapped in some syntax. Sengadal is a participatory work. I just facilitated everything and I will not claim authorship for it. Everything in the film is the memory of a Dhanushkodi fisherman or fisherwoman or a thought of a child or a confession of a refugee or an incident a social worker had shared or an experience of a filmmaker herself or an interview of one of the Rameshwaram public. I just beaded them or scattered them into a shape according to how my mind responded during the process.

The script evolved from a series of my workshops with Dhanushkodi fishermen and Mandapam refugees. And I collaborated with my writers Jerrold and Shobasakthi to evolve my raw materials like monologues, interviews and scrap books.

Sengadal unfolds as a film within a film. Why did you choose the self-reflexive approach?
I am criticised for being self-indulgent, [but] I have always been a sucker for the idea of an artist being an organic part of his or her work. I also believed that the whole journey [to make the film] is much a failure to the filmmaker as it is to the community he or she deals with. I was constantly interrogated by all kinds of forces like the police, the Criminal Investigation Department, the Navy, Railway police and coastal guards. I was doing nothing but trying to document fishermen’s lives with a camera. Documentary filmmakers in this country are always seen as terrorists with bombs in their waist belts. I think I identified my travails with the travails of fishermen’s community, though not on the same level.

Do the fisherfolk and refugees play themselves? Did you mix up professionals and amateurs?
Casting was an outcome of my many visits over the duration of a year and workshops. But there were situations when a person who was chosen at a workshop, given a character and dialogue wouldn’t turn up on the day of shoot. I had to randomly pick people and train them again from the scratch on the locations. Almost everyone in the unit, including the boys who served us tea, were made to act. Towards the end, we ran out of people to cast for supporting roles.

It was a nightmare thinking about the shocks you get every day when you venture into shooting. Managing with refugees was the most challenging task for me. People you would find the first day would disappear the next day because they found a better-paying job or did not want to lose the day’s wage or because they had to return to their original camps or they had just gotten an agent and left for Australia. I had to forget my lessons about continuity in cinema. It was madness coming to terms with reality. Fishermen would leave us if there were low seas and they saw a catch worth more than acting in this stupid film where they were made to walk some 10 times. The rural public who did supporting characters would refuse to wear the same shirt out of boredom or disgrace. I can go on and you will have a book written at the end.

I was limited in many ways, like no money, no production support, no professional actors, constant intimidation by vigilance forces, harsh weather conditions and an impossibly difficult location. There was something driving me – the fisherfolk’s amazing ability to live a midst so much of violence.