Movies and wellbeing: In conversation with Jyoty

Jyoty is a bit of everything, if you ask me, but she specialises in music, radio, DJ-ing and curating and happens to be one of my flatmates; so when I first noticed her film consumption going considerably up in the last couple of months, I obviously got curious. 

We have a weekly appointment in front of the TV when it comes to RuPaul’s Drag Race – in fact, you can probably hear us shout at the screen every time an innocent drag queen gets sent home before their time (I mean, is everyone a bit confused about what’s going on in the UK series or is it just us?), but I’ve never known Jyoty as a movie lover. 

This made me think about how many habits I have myself changed in the last year, or little things I never used to do and suddenly picked up during and after 2020. We sat down and had a conversation about what wellbeing actually means in 2021 and how she finally decided that movies are good and worth watching (despite me saying this for a while).

What are the top five things that have kept you sane in the last year and a half? 

Twitch is number one, I think. Finally using Netflix for the first time since last April, although I probably just watched 0.0001% of all of it. Online workouts, sleeping and going outside for walks if the weather wasn’t too bad. 

Are you more aware of your wellbeing now? Did you change your views about it recently? 

I think I've started thinking very differently about it. Everyone who knows me knows that before the lockdown I was very much accustomed to working seven days a week, 15 hour days and I used to fly every weekend as well, but I thought that was completely normal because I was kind of working out every day and watching what I was eating. 

But I think now, all of a sudden, my body kind of had a taste of what it actually means to relax, to sleep properly, slow down and be nice to myself. So now the things that are good for me have become mandatory in the sense where I don’t just workout when I have time, but I’m specifically making time for the workout. I meditate and do yoga whenever I can and always try to do a facial here and there, stuff like that, and I genuinely think I couldn't go back to how it was before, also probably because I’ve now tipped over the other side of my 30s and I can feel little things in my body that maybe I was ignoring before (pains, hacks, posture). 

I've realised I wasn't necessarily that healthy before, I'm actually just now becoming more healthy. And yeah, now wellbeing has a whole different meaning for me, as in before I thought that you could get away with just exercising and eating healthy, while now I can see the big picture where wellbeing is resting, being happy, not stressing about deadlines and doing things at my own pace. I can see that now I can just do stuff that makes me happy and I sort of want to make the most out of it.

Going back to Netflix and binge watching, when did you actually get into movies? As before, I've only seen you watch sporadic TV series? 

Now I actually find it really hard to finish TV series, despite the fact that there’s not that much else to do around here. But with movies, I just decided point blank one day that I was ready to watch a horror movie (the previous one was probably almost a year ago). I’m not a fan of gore, per se, when it comes to scary movies, I prefer when the horror is psychological rather than physical. So I ended up watching The Call and I thought that was brilliant (even though some scenes didn’t agree with me too much). It was more about emotions than anything else. After that I watched Parasite, which blew my mind and I realised why the whole world was raging about it for ages. Only thing I knew about the movie was that it was Korean (imagine being that good at avoiding spoilers for almost two years!). Even when walking past the Picturehouse cinema next to our house, I’d always seen the poster out, but it never said anything to me, which is weird because as a kid I used to go to the library every week and I’ve never picked a book by its cover. White Tiger is the latest one I’ve watched. 

Would you consider your new passion for movies a form of wellbeing itself?

Definitely! It’s just nice to switch off for a bit and lose the perception of time and just be somewhere else for a while. I consider watching movies as an activity exactly like going for a walk or cooking could be one. It’s just a bit harder to balance it out and stop before watching an entire TV series made up of five seasons in a weekend or three movies in a row on a Sunday afternoon, if you know what i mean.

What are your criteria when you have to pick a movie? 

It has to be about the bigger picture and that’s maybe why I like non-Western-centric movies a bit more. But also, with Shutter Island, for example, everything that’s happening with the small acts is fine, but at the end of the movie the only question left is are you crazy or is the world crazy. Before, I used to think that I didn't like films that didn't look new, visuals and all that. But I changed my mind after watching The Wild Goose Lake, where the aesthetic is quite grainy and dark. I'm now starting to appreciate various visuals and photography styles. It doesn't matter what a movie looks like anymore, the important thing is how it's going to make me feel by the end of it. I need to think about it afterwards and question what I've seen and gathered by the end of it. Mainly, I just read the synopsis first and see what happens, as I'm not very aware of actors and directors just yet. 

Favourite one so far? 

Oldboy, for sure! The way the story is told and most importantly how it is told. I also find it very interesting that a movie like that comes from South Korea, because the dynamics are different and they tend to be darker than Western movies. It’s concepts that can only be expressed and packaged as art or movies, but cannot be expressed the same publicly according to the respective society.