Sanju sebastian

sanju sebastian is a sanju and sebastian all at the same time.

= Division III =

This article is part of a Climax Div III Issue. By Keith Putnam, Staff Writer.

Alright, so just start telling about your Div III.

My dad died almost two years ago. I made a film about the relationship my father and I had. This film has been a way for me to grieve over my dad’s death.

So how did you get the idea for your project? Oh, wait…

Well, Subhash Sebastian died February 6, 2007. That kinda sucked.

All right, all right. My bad. Okay, tell me about India.

I went to India to make the film. Well, the film was really an excuse to go back to India. My dad left me a lot of money when he died, so the money was there, and I knew it wouldn’t be a problem. So yes, I wanted to make the film, but I really wanted to go back to India and reconnect with the place, you know? “Discover your roots”—type shit. And it just wasn’t that… it wasn’t that at all. I got there and, well, India kind of kicked me in the face. It was just glaring how out of place I was over there. Yup, so that was India.

Tell me about the film.

I got back, and I had all this footage, so I just started cutting it together. I hadn’t thought out how the film was going to be made at all. At first, I was really lost. Eventually I just picked a clip I thought was kind of interesting and just played it over and over again. Then, at one point, I just started talking at the screen. Shit just started like coming out. This was at three in the morning. Then I was like, “Oh, shit, that’s kinda interesting.” So I turned on my tape recorder, and that’s where the film began. And that’s basically the style of the film. It’s me analyzing my relationship with my father interspersed with interviews from family members and friends. Oh yeah, I didn’t talk about this at all: there are no people in the film. That’s kind of important actually.

Except for the baby footage.

Yeah, except for the home video footage. So that was intentional. Without faces for the voices, it forces people to take what they’re hearing—the information and the ideas—at face value, without any prejudice about how the person looks or whatever, and so that’s the first thing they engage with. And on top of that, these places are important because this is the only thing left of my dad: the places where he lived and the places he visited.

Tell me about doing the music.

Well, I could have used more time to get the music together. I got my final edit done kind of late in the process, so the time I should have been spending with the music was time in which I was still finishing my edit. So the music was kind of rushed. But that being said, I am pretty happy with the music. It was all in the style that I had been intending to use, but I just wish that after recording all the music I could have gone back and edited the film to the music instead of me editing the music to the film.

And after graduation?

Tahoe, bitches.