India Post News Service
NEW YORK: Essentially a loner and a voracious reader, US-based director-writer Rajan Gangahar, has just finished filming “The First Responder”, a short film, on the life and experiences of EMS workers. EMS workers typically are certified as first responders, basic or intermediate emergency medical technicians (EMTs), or paramedics. Though trained to help others, they themselves might have emotional problems which they generally seek to hide.
Says Rajan, “When the producer of “The First Responder” shared the subject of the film which he had conceived as a documentary on the life of EMS workers, I was clear, it is a universal subject. Most amongst us have dealt with EMS as volunteers or when we sought their service or when one or other member in our family worked with EMS. We all know the essence of the EMS duty. But what interested me was to adapt it for a fiction short film yet depicting the life and trauma of an EMS staffer,” says Gangahar. And a short documentary was transformed into a docu-drama and then to a short film based on fiction, yet close to a real-life story.
“The hero or protagonist of my film has similar trauma. He is suffering every day as his experience haunts him. Days and nights. But he denies and even refuses to take professional help. It reaches an extreme when he can’t even take assignment lest he will fail again. He wants to pretend and show off machoism yet all around him observe his suffering. He even contemplates suicide,” says Gangahar.
“A compassionate boss and a caring wife help him to take professional help. Finally barriers are broken and he hugs his wife in elevator while going back home after he completes the treatment,” he adds.
Rajan has earlier written and made a feature film, “Khushiyan” in Punjabi, one of the most popular languages in India and won the Best Writer award for the film at PIFA in Toronto, a global film award mega event. “The film was about human relations and founded on emotions,” says Rajan.
Gangahar trained as an actor and worked in theater circuit in India for several years. “I have been studying cinema for quite some time. Learning from the West, I believe in doing complete homework. It is not about the scale of the subject or canvass. A detailed and thorough pre-production work helps,” says Gangahar. With about 16 persons in crew and 10 actors, the unit was small. The creative team could focus on meaningful output especially keeping in mind the limited resources.
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