Keeping the faith | Ritwik Pareek's 'Dug Dug'

When filmmaker Ritwik Pareek first conceived Dug Dug, his debut feature, he wasn’t thinking about religion. He was thinking about belief itself. “I wanted to make a movie on this idea about thought shaping your reality,” he says. “Superstitions are superstitions because we start believing in them. They don’t work if you don’t believe in them.”

That kernel of an idea grew into a sharp, surprisingly warm satire about how faith is made and sold. Inspired by the Bullet Baba temple in Rajasthan, where a Royal Enfield motorcycle is worshipped as a deity after its owner died in a highway accident decades ago, the film follows Thakur, a middle-aged alcoholic whose death on a desert highway sets off a chain of increasingly absurd events. His motorcycle keeps mysteriously returning to the spot where he died, its locks broken each time the police haul it back. Rumours spread. A shrine appears. Soon enough, an entire religion has sprouted around a dead man and his bike, complete with devotees, rituals and, inevitably, commerce. It’s a fable that could only be set in India, and Pareek tells it with a straight face that makes it funnier.

The film travelled the festival circuit in 2021, garnering critical acclaim. But as any independent filmmaker in India will tell you, making a film is only half the battle—getting it seen is another thing entirely. With no recognisable actors in the cast, distributors weren’t biting. It was during this long, uncertain wait that filmmaker Anurag Kashyap gave him a piece of advice: don’t sit around waiting for your first film to release, start writing the next one. Pareek took it to heart. “The best thing I could do was to work on the next one,” he says. “I’m still working on that movie right now.” Eventually, Kashyap, Vikramaditya Motwane, Nikkhil Advani and Vasan Bala came on board as executive producers, and nearly five years after its festival debut, Dug Dug finally arrives in theatres on May 8.