Mithya isn't a film for children, but about children, for adults: Sumanth Bhat

Sumanth Bhat on Mithya, Grief, and the Inner Lives of Children

The filmmaker speaks with Subha J Rao about capturing the quiet ache of childhood sorrow, the invisible weight of loss, and the hope that love (and patience) can mend what’s broken.

VERY FEW FILMS speak of the emotional suffering of children, the non-physical injuries they carry, the sheer weight of survivor’s guilt. Sumanth Bhat’s Kannada feature Mithya (streaming on Amazon Prime) is the rare film that trains its eye on an 11-year-old — Mithya (Athish Shetty, in a sheart-stealing turn) — left to deal with the world and its complexities after his parents die. All we know is that his mother ended her life, and that his father’s death is shrouded by doubt.

Mithya is not a film for children, but about children, for adults — it is a lesson on how words hurt, love heals, and hope floats despite the dreariness of it all. It underscores how generational trauma can be broken if one makes an effort.

The film, backed by actor-director Rakshit Shetty, received rave reviews from critics and had a half-decent run in theatres. Set in coastal Karnataka, the film is about a boy uprooted from Mumbai who has to relearn life, in a village far removed from the bustling metropolis he is used to, in a home with a doting uncle and relatively affectionate maternal aunt, while fiercely holding onto memories of his parents, and the life he once had. There’s also a custody battle, and time spent in a juvenile home.

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Writer-director Sumanth speaks about why he wanted to make the film, the tone he adopted, the experience of working with children, and more. Edited excerpts:

Mithya features children who are real, never precocious. How did you approach writing children?

My entire perspective about children changed when my nephew was born in 2010. He spent a lot of time with us in Udupi, so I had a good chance to observe him. We know kids are smart, but to see it is…joy. When he was about three or four years old, my father was plucking flowers for worship. “God put the flowers on the plant, right? Why are you plucking those to offer to God?” he asked. It was so profound, and it made so much sense. I realised that when uncorrupted by larger concepts, children see things at face value and process them well.

Siblings take time to settle into their bond, something films rarely touch upon…

True, we tend to box children into our preconceived ideas as to how their bonds should be. I again dipped into my life and experiences to write this. My brother and I had a childhood where we competed with each other, not very pleasantly. I watched how perfectly happy/sweet children suddenly developed anger and animosity when the mother was pregnant with the second child. So many speak of the elder child going to hospital and not wanting to bring the younger one back home. In my own house, my daughter is the silent type. But, when I held the younger one, I saw she would deliberately pinch her. I wondered where this cruelty was coming from. It might be harmless, but I tried to understand what was going on. At that age, they don’t want their love to be diluted, and this manifests in strange ways.

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Adult grief has found many iterations on the big screen, but not so much children’s grief. How did you write that?

When my dad passed away in 2016, I saw how my nephew, who was very close to him, struggled to express himself. While the adults spoke about their memories, he stayed quiet. His relationship with his granddad was tender, and I am sure his passing was traumatic. I then wondered how kids process grief and loss, and how they move on.

The immediate provocation for Mithya was this distant relative who passed away in Mumbai; his wife ended her life shortly. Their two children had no idea what was going on, and the younger one laughed and played. I wondered how my daughter would react when she understood the concept of death. When do children make peace with it? My quest was to find answers to that.

Children see life through a very different lens. How did you manage to capture that?

I think observing them closely helped. Growing up, we have all seen children with unanswered, unexpressed pain. That is something kids who had a secure upbringing only saw from the outside. I grew up around children who had zero privilege. Some had been abandoned by their father, and the mother was expected to wait for the husband to return some day. How do the children react to a parent missing for some years? They are either too young to understand or old enough to react, but not old enough to have a say. Society rarely gives them an avenue to address the question. Becoming an orphan when a parent ends their life is a different kind of abandonment, because it is accompanied by questions, shaming, and more.

When I was researching my 2018 short film Neere Melina Gulle , I read about how pain keeps simmering even when people are 40 or 50 years of age. This was mainly research based in the US and the UK, but it was heartbreaking that they had to carry that weight for so long. Why cannot they express that pain and leave the weight behind? I think the film spoke to many such people. Many who walked up to speak to me after the film were adults who had known this pain.

When Mithya is in the shelter for children, he is suddenly thrown into another trauma. Children can be cruel. How did you write and decide the tone of how you’re going to show that cruelty?

When Mithya meets this other boy who speaks Marathi, and who is violent and capable of harming himself, it’s almost a mirror image of what Mithya can turn into, without intervention. We take the cushion of parents and grandparents for granted. How would a child who came from a loving family, and who has stayed with well-meaning relatives, cope with an environment where the others have not known love? He can easily go off into a different zone. Mithya understands he can easily turn into one of them, who bullies other children for no reason. That’s why he holds on to the screwdriver; for him, it is a sense of standing for oneself, defending oneself.

There is an inherent violence or need for catharsis in all of us. We do enjoy watching people beat each other up on screen, don’t we? The only difference here is that Mithya knows he has a family and he does not want to live here.

Children possess the ability to intensely feel emotions, be it tenderness, jealousy, anger or sorrow, and show it too, but somehow society prevents them from expressing themselves. Those emotions get bottled up.

So, conversation is the key. Is that why many feel the scene in the auto with Mithya and Surya, his uncle, is a pivot point.

Yes, in that conversation, you see how one person tries his best to break generational trauma, and how Mithya finally understands that Surya (a fabulous Prakash Thumminad) is a safe space.

Now, Mithya has our empathy, but he’s not exactly kind. But even when he’s being cruel, you don’t feel disgust, you feel terrible for his lost childhood. How did you approach this?

While he’s quiet, Mithya has questions: Why did his parents start fighting after they adopted Vandana? Why is she always pampered? He associates her with every little problem in his life, and has a love-hate relationship with her. He genuinely likes and loves her, but also does not hesitate to give her pain. And once he learns she has been adopted, he realises that while both of them lost their parents, he’s an orphan, and she’s not. She has come back to her birth parents. That seems unfair in his eyes.

For me, as a writer, I am looking at Mithya with total empathy, partly because of his age. If he had been three-four years older, you would have felt disgusted, but at this age, he’s still evolving, and you are hoping he does not tip over. And, Mithya too dips into his past feelings, takes a step back and realises what he genuinely feels for Vandana.

Also, you know the context of Mithya’s loss, and you see the cruelty, but you see it through the lens of his immense sadness.

Surya’s character is one that confuses the viewer at first, even scares you wondering what his intentions are, but eventually, his character moors the film.

Even while writing the character I knew people would understand him only in hindsight. I knew people might wonder about his kindness, but I think the fear of his hurting Mithya comes from what we see around us now. It is our understanding of how the world functions.

From Surya’s point of view, he is blinded by his love for the boy, who he sees as a way of compensating his lost childhood, and to prove a boy can be raised sensitively. That’s why when he has a fight or steals money from home, Surya is gentle with him.

Athish Shetty walks straight into the audience’s heart with his nuanced performance, that’s filled with a lot of silence… How did you work with him on the character, and how was it to shoot, because he’s part of many close-ups?

Early on, I realised it was easy to write Mithya’s character, because there were no boundaries. I had auditioned many children, but they were either super expressive, because that’s what we have come to expect of child actors, or did not react at all. I’d seen Athish in my Ekam Kannada anthology (co-directed by Sandeep PS) and during his three auditions, he kept evolving and growing into the character. My gut feeling told me he is special. The two months of prep before shooting helped him get comfortable with the close-ups. We rarely spoke about the character to him, we just wanted him to take in the surroundings.

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My concern was: How does one speak of dark things to children? I could not tell him to visualise the last time he saw his mother, because that would traumatise him. What helped us were the backstories we had for Mithya. We discussed that with Athish. So: ‘Mithya had this, but now does not. How will he react? How was Mithya in school, where did his parents take him on weekends? How much did he love Vandana?’ We gave him an understanding of the before, so he will know what it is to feel its loss in the now. The first day, he took some time to get into the zone. The first shot took 19 takes. From the second day, he was so good.

We had an interesting problem on hand. We just could not get someone to play Vandana, because some of the scenes involving the siblings call for both past familiarity and casualness, and a new dynamic in the relationship. If a scene in the audition involved getting pushed, the child would not return the next day. And then, one day, Athish’s brother Avish turned up for rehearsals during pre-production, and we auditioned him. He got up after being pushed, hit Athish and went back crying. We knew we had our Vandana. But I was worried Athish would carry fragments of the character back home and so we were very careful while speaking to him about what he should do and why. You have to be very mindful when working with children.

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