Staying true to his Indian roots

You can take a man out of India, but, definitely, never the India out of him. It is probably because of this that Kashmir-born director Vic Sarin addresses humanity in all his films. “All my dramatic films tend to have humanity in them. I don’t know if it’s my Indian trait or just me,” he says. “Or maybe, it’s both, adds Vic,  who left India with his parents during the partition, and now lives in Canada. Vic, who was in the city to shoot parts of his latest documentary project, tentatively titled Hues, goes to the extent that despite all the religions he grew up with, his religion is simple. “It’s humanity.” And it is because of this love to work with humanitarian issues that the documentary film touches upon the issue of skin colour and racism. It is absolutely okay to have, what Vic calls, “skin colour preferences”, but not being honest and open about it is what displeases him. “We are all hypocrites when it comes to the skin colour,” he says, almost under his breath. People fight against skin colour bias, but they go back home and stock up on fairness creams, he explains in near disbelief. And it is the women who are most affected by this stigma of colour, he informs. “Men are considered to be handsome, even if they are tall and dark, but when it comes to women, do dark and beautiful go together?” he rolls his eyes and explains his film, “It is going to be a personal point of view documentary – how I relate to the whole world of colours that I see is the story.” “The last thing I want to do is to put my face on it, honestly,” he says. That’s the thing about Vic. For someone who has made over 100 films in various genres, the kind of self-loathing that he has does not only come as a shock, but is also over-the-top. “At 16, when I began, I wanted to be an actor. But I quickly realised that I was not going to go too far as an actor, partly because of my English and partly because of my looks.” He shrugs it all off like it’s a part of an old, forgotten dream. “In the end, you have to touch people and how do you touch – it’s only by connecting on an emotional level,” he says. What Vic has mastered over the years is to take this emotion and combine it what he calls “life experiences” to make an honest film that touches people. “The visual media is the strongest instrument that we have to influence people and change people’s minds,” he says.