Art has been known to connect people across cultures, and continents and unite people to form a community. The Outside In by Hansa Thapliyal is a 30-minute documentary that shows us the role of art in our lives, and the simplicity attached to it. It takes us through the doll-making practice of two women - Francoise and Milan, and the values they hold on their art form.
Thapliyal made use of Stop Motion Animation to tell us the stories of these two women. She believes that filmmaking is not a solitary activity and working with other people did help in the ideation of this film. “My collaborators on this film decided to use Stop Motion Animation along with a documentary style of a film”.
The director, in the process of shooting the documentary, let the artists speak for themselves, about their work and share their passion for the dollmaking art form.
Francoise was born in Belgium and trained as a nurse, now she makes dolls out of cloth and wool. She spends hours creating a single doll - spending time delicately stitching the parts together. Each doll has an elaborate backstory such as; a woman working in the fields, a scientist in the lab, a street-style sugarcane juice shop and a woman stitching clothes.
Notably, her dolls don’t have details of the face drawn - she leaves it open to the audience's interpretation. She photographs her dolls in their set-up and attaches a poem with each of these photos in her book. Hansa was able to get in touch with Francoise due to her feature article on her work in a Bangalore newspaper. Francoise believes “ we are meant to celebrate life…and to be passionate”
Milan specialises in making art out of scrap material, she transforms all the material she finds into works of art. By looking for inspiration in magazines, she finds ideas on what she can create through the material she finds. In her home workshop, she is often seen working among heaps of paper, bits of string, old newspaper and lots of old paintbrushes.
“Instead of throwing waste, you can transform it into something else”, says Milan.
She believes that her material talks to her, allowing her to think of what she can create with that material. She says ( in the film) “ all these materials do not become something new, they simply take the shape of a transformed image”
“There is no message as such in the film, the film is a living thing, (since) making documentaries is all about the possibility to engage with the world,” says Thapliyal, in response to a question at the Documentary Film Festival discussion.
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