FILM SOUTH ASIA 2019

Posted on : February 3, 2020
Author : AGA Admin

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The Yalamaya Kendra at Patan Dhoka, Lalitpur, Kathmandu wore a festive look, decorated with balloons and streamers, from 14 – 17 November 2019 when it hosted Film Southasia 2019. Documentaries from the region were screened in two halls and in the large space in the premises in the evening for the day’s last open-air show. The shows ran to full houses, but it was the films from Nepal that had the largest crowds. It was heartening to see that many school children attended the screenings.

 

At the inauguration of the festival, Kanak Mani Dixit, the founder and Chair, Film Southasia, stressed the fact that South Asia was not SAARC and lamented that there was a deficit of the feeling of oneness in the region. There was no direct flight from Pakistan to Nepal, and many of the delegates to the festival had had to travel to Bangkok or some city in West Asia to take a connecting flight to Kathmandu! The slogan for the festival, ‘Where the Mind is Free’ was inspired by subcontinental poet Tagore’s ‘Where the Mind is Without Fear’. The Chief Guest for the inauguration was the well-known folk singer, Amrit Gurung, who pointed out that while geopolitics seeks to divide us, folk culture resists divisions. Just as birds and fish know no boundaries, culture too flows across borders and unites people.

 

Student Films:

 

The festival began with students’ films. In Memoirs of Saira and Salim (2018) by Eshwarya Grover the abandoned house that the protagonists had lived in in Gulberg society, where the anti-Muslim riots of 2002 had occurred, is shown along with a voice-over which recounts the horror. The timbre of the voices of Salim and Saira make the soundtrack as important as the images. There is no spilling over of emotion in the narration. Time has taught them to restrain emotion, but it has not erased the pain. This soundtrack is interesting for not being a supplement to the images, but the main track, to which the somber images are a complement.

Another student film that used locale evocatively was Hotel Naaz (Yusra Hasan/India/2019). It dealt with the filmmaker’s personal relationship with a hotel and its owners through three generations, detailed through the rooms, architecture and location of the hotel in old Delhi. The famous guests who came there and the changing times all get reflected in this personal history of a hotel, told through a quiet and meditative narration by the granddaughter of the owner.

Scratches on Celluloid (V Buthpitiya, T Cooper, A Bashir/Pakistan, Sri Lanka, UK/2018) sets out to examine the obsolescence of film theatres that gave way to multiplexes and digital technology in Sri Lanka and Pakistan. The longing for celluloid films was, however, still there in the hearts of those who ran theatres: ‘Digital does not get scratched like 35 mm’ or ‘Films in theatres will come back’, they say. The highlight of the film was the co-productions the industries of Pakistan and Sri Lanka made in a soft power tango, which few people are aware of, with actors from Pakistan and heroines from Sri Lanka from the ’70s to the ’90s. These managed to show exotic locations even during the Civil War in Sri Lanka. Others recounted that there were still open theatres with bamboo roofs operating in Sindh (Pakistan) till a few years ago. Unusual though the theme was, the film failed to evoke nostalgia, largely due to the mechanical way it cut back and forth between the two countries.

 

Political Themes

Lynch Nation (Shaheen Ahmad, Ashfaque E/India/2018) examines the cases of lynching of Muslims and Dalits by Hindu fanatics that have become commonplace in India over the last few years. The families’ lonely and uphill fight for elusive justice is documented in detail. The filmmakers visit Pehlu Khan’s family twice and find that their will to fight for justice has not weakened even a bit despite the threats to their family. In another tragic case, Junaid and his brother had gone to Delhi for the first time to shop for Eid, when Junaid he was killed. The film shows the train compartment where Junaid was lynched. No one boarded that compartment for a whole month…. The arrested culprits were released from jail while the brother was still recovering in a hospital from the beating. Junaid’s mother says she used to teach but now her mind is unable to focus anymore.

Prateek Shekhar’s debut film Chai Darbari (2019) is an impressionistic collage of conversations of ordinary people over tea on politics in Ayodhya interspersed with recordings widely circulated on the social media of hate speeches by upper-caste Hindus against Dalits and Hindus against Muslims. The sound of the waves in the river and the monkey who seems to be watching the foibles of humans gives a different time frame to the otherwise heated discussions on politics, the present government and the masjid-mandir issue. A fragment of a pop, distorted version of the Hanuman Chalisa plays on the soundtrack to remind us of the monkey-god who was Lord Rama’s companion and aide. The construction of the temple is hardly a priority in the real life of the people of Ayodhya. In one of the conversations, a woman points out that she had to give up the daily wages she earns for two days because she had to get her rations and her fingerprint would not match with the records.  In another conversation a defensive priest is asked how can one pray to a 436 feet statue of Ram and how far would one have to stretch one’s neck to look up to it. The final radio broadcast of the important events that have occurred in history on 6 December lists the publication of the Encyclopedia Britannica, the arrest of Mandela, and other events, but does not mention the destruction of Babri Masjid.

Articulate and fearless youngsters demand justice for a fellow student and mothers do not give up the fight for their dead or lost sons in We Have Not Come Here to Die (Deepa Dhanraj/India/2019) and Ammi (Sunil Kumar/India/2018). One of the most moving sequences in Ammi is of Najeeb’s mother cooking his favourite dishes, hoping he will return home to eat the food she has prepared.

There were films on the plight of minorities in South Asia. Anand Kamalakar’s  Salam – The First Nobel Laureate shows how Pakistan’s Nobel Laureate scientist Abdus Salaam had to choose between his country and Physics because he belonged to the minority Ahmadiya sect. Pradip K P’s Our Gauri from India and Schokofeh Kamiz’s After Shabeen from Pakistan dealt with the killing of progressive activists in the subcontinent.

 Films from Afghanistan

Kabul, City in the Wind (Aboozar Amini/Afghanistan/2019), focuses on the lives of a bus driver, who drives a ramshackle bus that keeps breaking down and of two children whose father has left the city. The driver smokes hashish and sings songs that characterizes his land and country as being one of thieves and bandits and conscienceless people. He has a wife who earns money and runs the house with money earned through the beautiful embroidery she does, and three beautiful children. At the end of the film, the bus driver and owner has had to sell his bus and become a cleaner who solicits passengers for the bus. But his cheerfulness and criticality towards his country has not diminished. The city of Kabul emerges in the film as a city not of modernity. It is not a city that is in ruins, strangely enough, after all the war and conflict, but a city that seems outdated and decrepit. Its buses that are on their last legs and beyond repair are a metaphor for the state the city is in. The playground of the kids is an old abandoned tank. The games they make up are impromptu and the ‘nursery rhyme’ they sing is ‘Yellow Kitty stay at home, if you go to war, you will die’. Kabul is always shown cast in a dull shimmer. The palette of colours the city is seen through from the rooftop of the children’s house is pale and dusty and always seemingly covered in a haze. The people of the city, including the driver, talk of weather intercut with references to bomb blasts and other daily events while having tea and eating food, as if conflict and explosions were part of normal living and nothing unusual. This normalization of violence is one of the things this documentary captures in a forceful but unsensational way.

The telephonic conversation of the children with their absent father is very touching, particularly when the younger one who is being coached by the elder on what to say, tells his father that they are watering the trees, including the sick one and have done community service in his stead. The young kid suddenly puts his head down, probably not wanting to be seen by the camera, and repeatedly insists, ‘You have to come home, papa, you come home’. The next image is of the child sitting with his back to the camera, utterly lonely, framed against the panoramic scape of the city.

Facing the Dragon traces the life-paths of two women in the aftermath of American withdrawal from Afghanistan, one, a television journalist, who flees Afghanistan with her children to freedom, travelling through several countries, from the terror of Taliban’s intervention in everyday life and the other, a politician, who chooses to be active socially even if it means compromising with her family life. One of the interesting sequences in the film is the matter of fact way that money as compensation is given to the surviving family, seated down on a carpet, whose members have died in bomb explosions.

 

Bamboo Stories

 

Shaheen Dill-Riaz’s Bamboo Stories (Bangladesh, Germany/2019) documents the life bamboo cutters, contractors and transporters in the dense forests of Sylhet. Dressed lightly with bare feet in open sandals or slippers, they seem ill-equipped to deal with the wild and dangerous forest but do so with quiet and unflinching bravery. They bundle the bamboos together, create ‘rafts’ and float them down the river to Dhaka, because this is a cost-effective way of transportation. They view their lives with humour, speaking of how they pee in and drink the same river water, and how the pirates are third-rate like them, for they only steal old clothes and shoes! Most of these men have brave wives who single-handedly run their modest homes and bring up children on meagre finances. The businessman who runs the show dreams of a different life for his own children and has a separate brick factory. The contractor acknowledges that god did not bestow on him the talent to cut bamboo, but that does not make him pay his workers better wages.

The mighty forests and river beckon these bamboo cutters: it is their calling (Shiraz has driven a rickshaw, a taxi, run a restaurant, but always returned to the bamboo forests), their extraordinary skill set (‘The length of the bamboo is very important’, says one of the cutters), their intimate knowledge, their life and love. Theirs is a way of life. Their bamboo ‘rafts’, made with dedication by the cutters, float majestically in the mist. The makeshift dams, when deliberately breached, cause the bamboos to float in the rushing water in symmetric design all the way down the river. The panoramic shots from above that show the denseness of the forest and the bamboos floating down the river are stunning and moving for the man-made beauty they represent amidst lush nature. This is the act of mighty and humble creativity that sustains the bamboo cutters and transporters.

 

 Cultural Echoes

There were interesting theme and image ‘rhymes’ in films from different countries in South Asia. The song Chalte, Chalte from Kamal Amhrohi’s Pakeezah, for instance, played in the Pakistani film, Abu (Arshad Khan/Canada/2017) as well as in the Indian film Sound Man Mangesh Desai (Subhash Sahoo/India/2017). The mother of the protagonist in Abu dances with abandon to the song from Pakeezah in a home video but becomes very conservative with the changing political climate in Pakistan and the world at large, after they migrate to Canada.

An interesting insight in the film on Desai was that the train whistle that he put into the end of the song ‘Chalte, Chalte’ had initially irritated its music director, Naushad, but had won him over later when he realized it added to the emotional content of the scene. (An aside: It was also due to the technical excellence of the ‘Pope of Sound’ (ad-man Prahlad Kakkar’s title for Mangesh Desai) in Sholay, that it became the first Indian film whose dialogue and soundtrack record was released.)

The actress who plays Janani in Pankaj Rishi Kumar’s film Janani’s Juliet (India/2019) takes out puppets that stand in for Kaushalya and Shankar, the caste politics of whose life the play is depicting, from a trunk. The Kashmiri bhands in Anant Raina’s Badshah Lear (India/2019), too, take out their long-abandoned costumes from a similar looking trunk to play King Lear. Long forgotten or unused cultural objects have to be reclaimed and reinvented to fight the forces of different kinds of religious fundamentalism, coercion and violence. This image, from very different films, spoke of the importance of culture as resistance in times of socio-political crisis.

 

Panel Discussions

Two panel discussions were organized during the festival, one on ‘Liberty and the Spirit of South Asia’ and the other on ‘Social Media’.

Participants from Bangladesh, India, Pakistan and Nepal pointed out that Nepal was the most open society in South Asia today. Nepal was never colonized but was part of the colonial formation in South Asia. Anticolonial struggles in South Asia gave us modern institutions, an independent judiciary, parliament, all of which seemed to be crumbling after seventy years. There is a crisis of representative democracy and liberalism in the subcontinent.  Religion is part not just of everyday life, but also of politics. Majoritarianism has hijacked the belief that minorities matter. There is appeasement of the majority. South Asia is divided today by parochialism. The debate now is democracy vs development. It is either one or the other, as if both cannot exist together. The political-corporate nexus is so strong that people cannot question corporate-led development, which is anti-people.  There are smaller, insidious changes on a large scale, like the rewriting of textbooks, which are more dangerous. History is being rewritten and sufficient attention is not being given to this. People’s movements are being attacked.

Speakers rued the fact that the media is controlled by the government and that freedom of speech was being crushed. The courts have also lost their spine. The mainstream media no longer critiques the government. Social media plays a liberating role, but it is also misused, particularly by fundamentalists.

Other panelists were more optimistic and stated that resistance has always existed, and people in South Asia have lived through martial law, military dictators and laws that took away the rights of the people. Speakers pointed out that Bangladesh and Pakistan have much in common. Secularism has been taken off the agenda. Bangladesh had become an Islamic country. It was pointed out that Pakistan had had military rule for a long time but they have also had three democratic elections in recent years. In Bangladesh, the independent film movement on 16mm had defied censorship. …. The discussions ended on a positive note, with participants suggesting that the crises in South Asian countries will probably bring its peoples together.

Wide Spectrum

 

 

 

The 64 films that were screened in the four-day festival packed in a wide variety of themes and styles.  Anupama Srinivasan’s Are You Going to School Today interviews children and their families in a village in Rajasthan who do not go to school for reasons that are compelling for them (usually lack of financial and familial support). Making it to school everyday is a bigger challenge than the process of learning! It drives home the fact that the basic right to education is still a distant dream in rural India, especially for the girl child. On the other side of the spectrum of problems in the Indian education system is Hemant Gaba’s An Engineered Dream on teaching shops in Kota that train thousands of young adults every year to make it to IIT and other institutions of higher education in the sciences. The students in these coaching dens are egged on by ambitious parents and teachers; every point is assiduously counted and the only thing that matters is making it to the top – the second or third place is not good enough. The film captures the depression the students suffer from, their real or imagined failures and the blinkered vision of the world born of a narrow imbibing of knowledge without a broader contextual understanding of life in general.

 

 

The festival showcased films that focused on the love for animals: Meena Longjam’s Achoubi in Love on a woman in Manipur who breeds and looks after horses that are used for playing polo; The Last Hop(e) on a man who protects frogs and stops traffic on roads so that frogs may cross them safely and the closing film of the festival, Jesse Alk’s Pariah Dog, on maverick dog lovers in Kolkata.

Anamika Haksar’s debut film Ghode ko Jalebi Khilane Le Ja Riya Hoon (India, 2018) pushes the boundaries of the documentary form. Based on dreams and memories of the residents of Old Delhi, culled from questionnaires and interviews with about sixty people, the film uses actors and non-actors, animation, painting and filmed sequences, non-linear storytelling, realism and fantasy to capture the dreams, desires, memories and aspirations of vendors, workers and pickpockets living in the locality. It is a roller coaster ride, unsettling but exhilarating.

 

Mitu Varma, the Director of the festival, at the inauguration said that the festival had put together films that showed there was hope despite all the doom and gloom in South Asia. Supriyo Sen’s Swimming Through the Darkness documents the tenacity of a blind man who does not give up on his passion for swimming. Particularly moving was the way he learns to orient himself in everybody of water he swims in. Akash Chopra’s Walking With M documents Mumtaz Ali’s (M’s) Walk of Hope in which ten million Indians walked 7500 kms from Kerala to Kashmir for peace. This was the longest peace march in world history. The desire for peace is so strong in the hearts and minds of ordinary people on the streets that they gave away their daily wages and even food items like watermelons to the walkers!

 

 

AWARDS

• Bamboo Stories directed by Shaheen Delhi-Riyaz: Best Documentary Award (Cash prize of USD 2,000 along with the Ram Bahadur Trophy)
• Scratches on Stone directed by Amit Mahanti (India): Second Prize (Cash award of USD 1,000)
• After Prayer by Simone Mastroni (Italy): Tarek Masoud Award for Debut Director (Cash prize of USD 1,000).
• Supriyo Sen’s Swimming Through the Darkness, Jesse Alk’s Pariha Dog and Hemant Kumar Gaba’s An Engineered Dream (all from India): Special Mentions
• Kabul, City in the Wind directed by Aboozar Amini (Afghanistan): Best Documentary based on Children UNICEF Award (Cash prize of USD 1,000)
• Aashish Limbu and Debin Rai’s The Winter Tap (Nepal) along with Eshwarya Grover’s Memories of Saira and Salim (India): Best Documentaries by Students (USD 500 each)

 

 

Rashmi Doraiswamy

Professor, Academy of International Studies, Jamia Millia Islamia