Book Review: What would human history look like if told through our relationships with animals?

Simon Barnes’s ‘The History of the World in 100 Animals’ is a unique way of looking back – and around.

If you have the slightest curiosity about the millions of species with which we share the planet, Simon Barnes’s delightful new book will satisfy and whet it in equal measure. Picking out a hundred from these millions (a selection that ranges from gorillas to earthworms), Barnes provides a crisp, evocative history of each creature – and even better, of humanity’s relationship to it: real and symbolic.

Lions, for instance, have been part of human life from the dawn of our species, he writes, drawing evocatively on a pair of footprints from Tanzania’s Laetoli Gorge, possibly made by some adult hominid parent escorting a child to safety some 3.6 million years ago.

If the lion is our most ancient enemy, it is also humanity’s most admired symbol of masculine courage. Courageous warriors and kings have long been compared to lions, but have also spent a lot of time killing them. Lion-hunting became a mark of human courage, of our conquest of nature – and as we devised better and better weapons, while also just wiping out their natural habitat, lions began to disappear from more and more parts of the world. “The retreat of lions is the story of the advance of humanity,” writes Barnes, and it doesn’t seem an exaggeration.

If lions exemplify our changing relationship with the wildest part of nature – ie, fear, conquest and now increasingly expiation, then the house cat might be seen as the embodiment of its opposite – the domestication of the natural world. Barnes makes the commonsensical argument that as human societies became settled and agricultural, cats kept rodents from the stores of grain – but having once been a cat owner, he also brings in the ineffable pleasure humans derive from scratching a cat between the ears and having it purr in contentment. Cats were useful, yes, but they were also company. “Thus human civilisation advanced to the sound of the purring cat.”

Occasionally Eurocentric

Some of Barnes’s choices of species are more particular, connected to a specific discovery or episode in human history. For example, an early chapter is devoted to the existence of four different kinds of mockingbirds in the Galapagos Islands, apparently crucial in nudging Charles Darwin towards the world-changing argument about evolution that he eventually published in On the Origin of Species (1859). Another dips into the incredible and tragic history of the American bison, succinctly explaining both how that single species helped sustain Native American civilisation and how its near-total extermination was crucial to the founding of the settler-colonial economy that formed modern USA. Yet another takes on the Oriental rat flea, responsible for several world-historical outbreaks of bubonic plague.

But this is among many instances where Barnes comes across as rather obviously Eurocentric. The Justinian Plague of the sixth century AD, named for the Byzantine emperor Justinian I, and the heavily mythologised Black Death of medieval Europe get vastly greater attention from him than the much more recent Third Plague Pandemic, which he merely describes as having “killed 12 million people in India and China” between the 1850s and 1960. This seems particularly strange for a book published in the midst of Covid-19. 

Even a cursory reading of Wikipedia reveals the Third Plague Pandemic to be a world-historical outbreak in more ways than one – starting in a poor mining community in Yunnan in the 1850s, reaching cities like Canton and Hong Kong in the late 19th century, and travelling from those port cities via the trade routes to India, where British colonial regulations to control the plague – widely seen as repressive and culturally intrusive – became the focus of nationalist agitation and violence.

Barnes’s chapter on cattle, while it does a fine job of pointing out how deeply many human cultures identify beef-eating as the embodiment of plenty, wraps up the Hindu exception in a single sentence about McDonald’s not serving beefburgers in India. His chapter on the pig feels like a cursory dip rather than the immersive essay owed to an animal so painstakingly forbidden and deeply abhorred by several world religions. But for Barnes, even the Revolt of 1857 having been triggered by the use of pig and beef fat on cartridges elicits only wry British understatement: “The strength of feeling about pork is startling”. He mentions the pig toilet in India, but only Goa, not the North-East.

Perhaps it’s only to be expected. The gaps in Barnes’s exposure can sometimes unwittingly reduce vast swathes of humanity into insignificance in his version of “the World”, but he does vastly better than most Western authors might. He plays to his strengths – and as a well-read, well-travelled ex-journalist (he was Chief Sports Writer at The Times until 2014), those are many.

The author of fourteen books, Barnes has a great eye and ear for detail, and his understanding of the natural world draws on the best of English literature, from John Donne on the elephant (“The only harmless great thing”) to Coleridge on the albatross, from Kipling on cats to Orwell on pigs. And his book does range far and wide, his choices unaffected by the size of the animal, the extent of its terrain, or the length of time it influenced the course of human history.

Myths and reality

Sometimes a category is supremely general, as in the chapter on cattle. Sometimes it is necessarily specific: he has individual chapters on the house fly, the tstese fly and the fruit fly, as well as on the pigeon/dove, the (extinct) passenger pigeon and the pink pigeon. Either way, Barnes is always good for peeling away the pervasive myths with which humans like to surround the animal species.

He tells us, for instance, that the insatiable flesh-eating piranha is a myth – more remarkably, a myth invented by Amazonian locals in 1913 for the benefit of the then-American President Theodore Roosevelt, who had arrived there on a hunting expedition. The locals apparently filled a netted-off stretch of river with piranhas left unfed for weeks, creating a stressed, hungry, overcrowded population of piranhas that then obligingly devoured a cow lowered into the water, to Roosevelt’s everlasting awe.

A lifelong hunter, Theodore “Teddy” Roosevelt was also responsible for a reverse sort of mythmaking – the fantasy figure of the cuddly, cute, quasi-human bear. In 1902, he refused to shoot a black bear already cornered by dogs and beaten with clubs. The incident became a Washington Post cartoon, with Roosevelt portrayed as a “hunter of mercy”, writes Barnes, and a subsequently smaller and cuter version of the bear then became enshrined in the children’s toy we call a teddy bear.

But what brings the book alive is not Barnes’s ability to cheerily condense reams of information, note the inevitable ironies of our mythical versions of most animals, patiently address persistent factual misconceptions, or sound the alarm, yet again, about the need for humans to recognise how we’re endangering other species and thus potentially destroying the planet. It is the enchantment he clearly experiences in the presence of the natural world, not just in flesh and blood (as when instinctively standing stock-still when confronted by a lion he had woken up by mistake in the African jungle), but also in the mind. 

In the midst of a chapter on the nightingale, for instance, we suddenly hear about him hearing the wind whistle through two hollow bones on a breezy day in Zambia and feeling like he had invented music “or at least recapitulated that moment in human history, quite by chance.” There is clearly much about our relationship to animals that we need to fix pronto – but magic always works better than mourning.

Published in Scroll, 20 Feb 2021. 

Taking the festivities online

With the pandemic raging on, film festival organisers are making the most of the digital space.
 

Gaza Mon Amour, above, is part of the line-up for DIFF 2020. Passes to this year's online film festival: www.online.diff.co.in

Among the many communities barred from assembling by the coronavirus is that of devout Indian film buffs. Movie theatres have been shut for eight months, and even the very occasional new film ‘dropping’ on an OTT platform makes for sad, solitary viewing. Theatres cautiously reopened on October 15, but it might be a while before audiences, and thus filmmakers, risk a Friday release in the cinema. Even worse is the fate of that critical mass of film buffs who eagerly await the annual Indian film festival season, held from October to January, with big and small festivals taking place across the country. Given the new social distancing and hygiene norms, organisers have had to grapple with whether to go digital, cancel, or postpone and hope for the pandemic to reduce in intensity. The bigger festivals, which attract larger crowds and members of an international film fraternity, have almost all chosen the latter two options.

The Jio MAMI Mumbai Film Festival was the first to cancel its 2020 edition, rescheduling to October 2021. Two other highly-awaited festivals, the International Film Festival of India (IFFI) and the International Film Festival of Kerala (IFFK), have postponed. IFFI, organised by the Directorate of Film Festivals and the Entertainment Society of Goa, has been pushed from November to January 16-24, 2021, and IFFK from December to February 12-19, 2021.

The start of the lockdown saw an explosion of energy online with many film archives and commercial sites making selected films free to stream, like Criterion expressing its support for the Black Lives Matter movement by removing its paywall on classic black cinema. In June, when 21 festivals including Berlin, Locarno and Cannes, collaborated on We Are One, a free 10-day digital festival, MAMI contributed three films. Festivals like KASHISH, the Mumbai International Queer Festival and the International Documentary and Short Film Festival of Kerala held successful online editions. The Dharamshala International Film Festival (DIFF) ran an online Viewing Room for months, screening critically-acclaimed Indian and world cinema previously shown at DIFF.

“At that time, many said [the virtual] was the new normal. Online screenings got huge audiences as people were starved,” says Bina Paul, artistic director, IFFK. “But we are busier now, and the distractions are many. It is harder to take time out for an online festival.” There are also piracy concerns, especially for new films, since India has a particularly well-developed network of hackers. “Most crucially, people are realising that films are only part of the festival experience,” adds Paul. “That sense of community is not there online. For filmmakers, the feeling of the film finding its audience cannot come from a scattered, anonymous viewership.” Subasri Krishnan, curator of the Urban Lens festival (Delhi and Bengaluru) for the Indian Institute of Human Settlements (IIHS), agrees that a festival is a space of validation for independent and documentary filmmakers, and 100 people gathering in a dark room is integral to that. But IIHS is moving Urban Lens 2020 online, to be held over six days in December. “One cannot substitute for the other,” says Krishnan, but adds, “Real spaces can sometimes be exclusionary; an online festival may find new audiences. Also, geography becomes irrelevant.”

For DIFF co-founders Ritu Sarin and Tenzing Sonam, too, the prospect of attracting new viewers across South Asia makes their upcoming digital version exciting. “We love the warmth of the physical festival, but we realised that both for indie filmmakers ready with new films this year, and for viewers, there aren’t many options,” says Sarin. DIFF 2020, which will run online from October 29 to November 4 at Online.diff.co.in, is larger than the previous eight editions, with over 100 films screening over a week. Acclaimed international films include Babyteeth (2019), Air Conditioner (2020) and the Wuhan-set documentary 76 Days (2020). There’s an exciting new section of Indian documentaries and an extended programme of shorts, including Ashmita Guha Neogi’s CatDog, the only Indian film selected for Cannes this year. “Without the logistical constraints of time or venue size, we could accommodate more films. And we’re starting an Audience Award for Best First Film, which seems easier to achieve online,” says Sarin. “Next year’s festival may well be a hybrid of online and off.”

For smaller independent or crowd-funded film festivals, going digital can open up exciting possibilities, says Nitya Vasudevan, co-organiser of the Bangalore Queer Film Festival (BQFF). “There’s the prospect of inviting international filmmakers that we would find impossible non-virtually, while freeing up time and money spent on venue hire, brochures and tech. But as a queer festival, the roles it plays are many,” says Vasudevan of BQFF. But she may speak for all film festival regulars when she says, “People look forward to attending because it’s a space of intimacy: you can dress a certain way, have certain conversations you can’t have outside.”In true community spirit, BQFF is currently contemplating an audience poll of the festival’s regulars to decide on whether the festival should be held online in February-March, or wait until it can be held safely offline. Of course, the poll itself would be online.

Published in India Today magazine, 23 Oct 2020.

The world according to women

My Mirror column, the week of Women's Day:

It’s always a good time to celebrate women who make films, but Frances McDormand, Aruna Vasudev and the Asian Women’s Film Festival make this week especially appropriate.

Film scholar & curator Aruna Vasudev (centre) being felicitated at the IAWRT festival. Delhi, 2018

Even if you’re not one of those people who wake up early in India for the live Oscar telecast from Los Angeles, there’s one acceptance speech this year that’s worth looking up: Frances McDormand, receiving the Academy Award for Best Actress for her performance in the blackly funny thriller Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri. The brilliant McDormand, whose first Oscar win was for Fargo in 1997, over two decades ago, has also been nominated thrice for her performance in a supporting role: for Mississippi Burning (1988), Almost Famous (2001) and North Country (2006). But that’s not why you should watch her acceptance speech.

You should watch it because McDormand did something remarkable with her two minutes on stage – like the consummate performer she is, she turned speech to action. “I’m hyperventilating a little bit so if I fall over pick me up ’cause I’ve got some things to say,” she began, placing a hand on her stomach as if to steady herself. She then thanked her director Martin McDonagh, the film’s team and what she called her “clan” (McDormand has been married since 1984 to Joel Coen, one half of the Coen brothers filmmaking team). “And now I want to get some perspective,” she said, putting her statuette down on the ground. “If I may be so honoured as to have all the female nominees in every category stand with me in this room tonight. The actors (Meryl, if you do it everybody else will, come on), the filmmakers, the producers, the directors, the writers, the cinematographers, the songwriters, the designers, the composers...”.

It was a sight to behold as women stood up across the length and breadth of the Dolby Theatre, to McDormand’s delighted laughter. “Look around, ladies and gentlemen, because we all have stories to tell and projects we want financed,” she said, exhorting Hollywood’s biggies to seek out these women to discuss their ideas for films.

Closer home, in a much smaller auditorium in Delhi, another vibrant celebration of women in film also took place last week. The 14th Asian Women’s Film Festival organised by the India chapter of IAWRT (the International Association of Women in Radio and Television) began by felicitating Aruna Vasudev, the pioneering writer, magazine editor and festival curator who first got Indian film enthusiasts thinking about Asian cinema.

The 1936-born Vasudev’s first claim to fame was launching Cinemaya, a quarterly journal about Asian cinema, in 1988. As a film-obsessed young person who came of age in the Delhi of the 90s, I remember Cinemaya fondly. It was a rare sort of publication then, and would be if it were around now. It was remarkable to be awakened to the fact that Taiwan and Hong Kong and Japan and China had film industries, and to discover through them a host of cinemas potentially closer to ours than the American, British or European work we’d hitherto thought of as world cinema.

Cinemaya was also rare simply because it was a carefully edited Indian film magazine that was actually about films. We’re so thrilled about being the world’s largest film-producing nation, but where is the sharp, informed conversation about the films we make? Much Indian film journalism remains driven either by industry gossip or box office figures. Those have a place. But we need much more writing and discussion of Indian films that is excited yet knowledgeable about the specificities of each film industry, from its fan clubs to lyric writing to cross-language adaptations. Isn’t it a pity that as of 2018, to my knowledge, we don’t have a single publication that does for the multilingual world of Indian cinema even what Cinemaya did for Asian films: to publish thoughtful reviews, each by a critic conversant with that film’s language, and that cinematic tradition?

Vasudev’s second achievement came in 1990, when UNESCO offered Cinemaya the funds for a conference on Asian cinema. Vasudev managed to use the five-day gathering in Delhi to form NETPAC (Network for the Promotion of Asian Cinema), which is still going strong 28 years later. Under Vasudev, NETPAC was responsible, in 1999, for launching Cinefan, the Delhi-based festival of Asian cinema that later became Osian’s-Cinefan, growing in size and popularity as Asian cinema became a global buzzword.

Sadly, Osian’s-Cinefan was last held in 2012. The IAWRT festival, held on a much smaller scale, is currently the only Indian festival focused on our connections with Asia. But what makes IAWRT doubly unique is the fact that all the films – documentaries, animation, shorts or fiction features – are directed or co-directed by women.

This year’s highlights for me included Gali, Shabani Hassanwalia and Samreen Farooqui’s spirited documentary on the subculture of hiphop in Delhi’s poorer neighbourhoods; Turup (Checkmate), remarkable both for its thought-provoking fictional take on a Bhopal mohalla and for the workings of the Ektara Collective that made it; Clair Obscur, Yesim Ustaoglu’s often harrowing fictional exploration of the domestic/sexual lives of two Turkish women, one a rural teenager and the other her psychiatrist; and the stunningly evocative Up, Down and Sideways, which transports you to the musical world of community farming in Phek, Nagaland.

As should be apparent even from this minuscule list, women making films does not necessarily mean films about women. It just seems that when it’s women producing and directing and filming, the world looks a little bit different from the way we’ve been shown it by the so-called mainstream. Just as ‘women’s issues’ are things that matter to half the world – and therefore should concern the other half, too.

Published in Mumbai Mirror, 11 Mar 2018.

Things I learned at the Asian Women’s Festival

Why should gender be a factor in our viewing any form of art? My report on the IAWRT's Asian Women's Film Festival, for Yahoo Originals. 

(Click on the hyperlink for images.)

A week before this year's edition, the 11^th edition, of their Asian Women's Festival, the International Association of Women in Radio and Television (IAWRT) showed three short films at the South Asian University, whose campus in New Delhi's Chanakyapuri houses a mix of students and faculty from the various South Asian Association for Regional Cooperation (SAARC) countries. One was an observational film about an Afghan family of carpet weavers, another an exquisite Indian animation called Journey to Nagaland. The third was called Two Women and a Camera, a documentary shot by a pair of radio jockeys in the Pakistani town of Mardan, in Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa province. The two young women, Madiha and Nazish, are the first female presenters on their FM radio channel, Radio Burraq.

The film offers a conversational, perhaps deceptively sunny take on their lives: they chat, they go to work, they cut birthday cakes, they laugh about a man calling to demand a Pashto song in the middle of an Urdu program. But things are not quite as rosy as they seem. We meet a video shop owner who describes how the Taliban first threatened them with anonymous letters, and then burst a bomb near their row of shops. We visit the Gajju Khan Bazar, where “shopkeepers consider it their duty to call out to every woman who walks through”. (SAU's female students laughed in recognition, and then watched gravely as not one of the women in the market agreed to come on camera.) Several times, we see Madiha dress with great care, her long open hair flowing down her back as she puts on her lipstick and eyeshadow, before covering up with the white chadar she must drape over her head and upper body when outside the house. “Take a thick one,” advises her mother on one such occasion. “You know what kind of people they are where we're going.”

The film's last scene shows the girls walking with the video camera when they encounter a large crowd on the street. They pause, but for barely an instant. Then they gather their wits and their courage, and walk right through the mass of men. It is a dare, of sorts, but also a kind of strategy. The camera turns into a weapon, one that allows these young women to shed the defensive strategy for an aggressive one. The crowd parts for them, like the Red Sea for Moses. The camera captures not the women walking, but the men's gazes on them, transfixed but somewhat baffled.

* * *

It is now a truism that the camera changes our relationship with the world, with each other. But I came away from the Pakistani film with the distinct feeling that wielding a camera is somehow a more primal experience for women. It can change our relationship with the spaces in which we live and work, making us somehow more sure-footed in the everyday. If you have a camera, you have a reason to loiter. If you've grown used to being the object of the gaze, film-making offers a way to reflect the world back at itself.


The Asian Women's Film Festival, held at the India International Centre (IIC) in Delhi every March, is a celebration of women with cameras. Organized by the Indian chapter of the IAWRT, the festival began in 2005 under the IIC-Asia project, envisioned by two cultural doyennes, Kapila Vatsyayan and the late Jai Chandiram. Why did an organization named for radio and television get involved in starting a film festival? “Jai herself and some of the other Indian IAWRT members were greatly interested in films, and felt it was a great idea to celebrate Women's Day with a film festival,” explained filmmaker Anupama Srinivasan, who has been festival director for the last three years, along with Uma Tanuku as co-director. What began as a two-day festival of mostly Indian documentaries is now a vibrant three-day affair which shows films of any duration, any genre, any theme: animation, documentary, short fiction, feature fiction and what was, in this year's edition, dubbed 'experimental'. In 2010, there was a focus on films from Japan, in 2013, from Iran, and in 2014, from Sri Lanka. Though India still has the largest number of entries, countries represented this year included China, Bangladesh, Hong Kong, Israel, Myanmar, and Afghanistan, apart from Japan and Iran. “There is no other Asian Women's Film Festival in the world as far as I know. The idea is that there is much in common between experiences in Asian countries, and [this offers] a platform where these can be shared. And now we 'show' sound works as well, thereby questioning what a film is,” says Srinivasan, speaking of the 'Soundphiles' package initiated in 2014. 

But while the camera might alter women's experience of the world, the question remains: do women alter our experience of the camera? Is there anything specific about films made by women? Why should gender be a factor in our thinking about/viewing any form of art? Anupama Chandra, film editor and IAWRT member, argues for a simple reason. “Because gender does exist – just like the caste system. To say that it doesn't is to deny its realities. If thousands of women had not become artists, political writers or philosophers, a massive part of human experience would be still underground – neither expressed, nor acknowledged.” 

Couldn't the films at this festival have been made by men? “Of course,” says Chandra, “If the men were feminists.” As Chandra points out, the films shown are not necessarily polemical or radically political, but they represent a wide range of feminist philosophy and a recognition of feminist political issues. “So there might be deeply thoughtful films about the problems of old age, or a first person account of bringing up three small children while trying to survive as a filmmaker (Ryu Mi-rye’s My Sweet Baby, at IAWRT two years ago), or natural outrage at the suicides of cotton farmers in India (Kavita Bahl's Cotton For My Shroud, also shown two years ago).”
I might add to Chandra's list: a children's film marvellously sensitive to the frailties of adults and the enchantments of place (Batul Mukhtiar's Kaphal, shown this year to a rapt audience of schoolchildren), a stunning rhythmic envisioning of the life of the saltmakers of Kutch, from the dancerly unison in which the whole family shuffles their feet through the salt pans, to the steady chug-chug-chug of the pump (Farida Pacha's My Name is Salt, shown this year), a 'long take' in which one ranting, distraught doctor reveals the faultlines between state institutions and the poor (Priya Sen's Noon Day Dispensary), or a quietly brilliant film set in a school for the blind, using deliberate blurriness, bright lights and the power of sound to evoke the children's world (Koi Dekhne Wala Hai? by Shilpi Saluja).

“We are not aiming to show films about so-called women's issues. There are no thematic restrictions in the festival,” says Srinivasan. “I found that liberating.” Rather than the predictability that might have crept in if the festival were “about women”, the free choice of subjects makes for a wonderful variety and opennness. Apart from the multiple genres, lengths and languages, I was struck by the number of student films and first films that were included – a package of five films from the Yangon Film School, Myanmar, two Israeli diploma films, one film by a graduate from the Satyajit Ray Film and Television Institute (SRFTI) in Kolkata, and at least three by alumni of the recently initiated documentary filmmaking course at the Sri Aurobindo Centre for Arts and Communication (SACAC). What is perhaps even more remarkable is that none of these were segregated into a section for students or first-time work. In fact one of the Israeli student films – Good Stuff by Neta Braun, an exceptionally well-acted, harrowing piece of short fiction which begins with a woman coming to in the toilet of a nightclub – opened the festival. Another, Maine Dilli Nahi Dekha – a gently humorous 19-minute documentary by Humaira Bilkis, a SACAC diploma student from Bangladesh – was part of the closing program.

That absence of hierarchy is central to the festival's relaxed vibe. Screenings are non-competitive, and almost every film is followed by a great deal of conversation and questioning from an engaged audience that consists of students, filmmakers, journalists and members of the general public. “As all the organizers are filmmakers, we keep the films and the filmmakers at the centre of it; so no dignitaries, politicians, corporates, event managers. We are also a very small core team, so end up doing multiple tasks; no time or scope for hierarchies. When I went to pick up [Iranian filmmaker] Sahar Salahshoor from the airport, she was amazed!” says Srinivasan.

There is certainly something different about the perspective women bring, a comfort with the personal, familial and intimate that alters even 'masculine' subjects. Mithila Hegde's SRFTI film on the 105-year-old classical musician Rashid Khan, for instance, approaches the matter of his deformed hands quietly, by showing his daughter feeding him. We laugh as she tricks him into a final mouthful, the way one might with a child. And we are forced to think again about the reversals of age when Khan Saheb talks about how he “cooked and cleaned and washed dishes” for fifteen years, after his wife died early. Mya Darli Aung's Share, a student film about the monks of Chaung Daung Monastery in Myanmar, tracks their daily routine, placing at the film's center not their prayers or studies, but the slow cooking in a single pot of whatever food items they received as alms. “Very often the topics that women choose are ones dismissed as being tuchcha (low-level) by male filmmakers, yet they are the stuff of life, the life that women work very hard to sustain,” says Chandra.


The festival also offers a clear sense that women filmmakers, being at the margins, get to the marginal stories first. “It would be so boring if everything was like a lead essay in a famous international journal. Where would the fun of it all be without irreverent bloggers, tweeters and so on?” Chandra laughs. Srinivasan offers another example. “I used to run the Iranian Film Club in Delhi in the early 2000s. Based on that I had an idea of Iran and Iranian cinema. In 2013, I curated the IAWRT section on Iranian films and got to see works only by women: many documentaries, animation, short fiction and some feature fiction. The films were very different in form and content from the ones I had seen before, which were mostly made by male filmmakers, and all feature fiction. For me this was fascinating. Even within alternative cinema, I had been exposed to only one part of it before, the 'mainstream' part.”

Both this year's Iranian films were documentaries, and both were magnificent, astutely crafted pieces of filmmaking. Paris-based Sanaz Azari's I for Iran uses her learning of the Persian alphabet as a device through which to enter Iran's contemporary history. The history of Iran's present is also interwoven with the lives of filmmakers in the much more autobiographical Profession: Documentarist. Using old family photos, grainy home videos, and footage that ranges from video games to concert recordings of once hugely popular women singers like Gougoush and Sousan, the film's seven directors shape their childhood memories and contemporary working lives into a thoroughly arresting vision of what it is like to produce cinema in a country where women can no longer sing. As RJ Madiha said, in a different film, in a different country, “Yahan par aisa kaha jaata hai ki aavaaz par bhi parda hona chahiye.”    

“It's the way women look at things. There's very little grandiose posturing – at least none that I've noticed, not too much obsession with auteur-ism, and no fear or mistrust of interiority, while being rigorously intellectual at the same time, as artists and thinkers,” argues Chandra. Certainly it was striking how often films at IAWRT exhibit a comfort with speaking in one's own voice, rather than feeling compelled to speak from what might be considered a 'neutral', up-high position. This tendency showed itself most strongly in this year's many self-reflexive documentaries – Maine Dilli Nahin Dekha, Profession: Documentarist, Kyoko Miyake's Beyond the Wave, Zhang Mengqui's moving meditation on local memory in her village in Self Portrait: Building a Bridge at 47Km, Shabnam Sukhdev's The Last Adieu, about her legendary filmmaker father S Sukhdev and her relationship with his memory, and Radhika Fatania's funny but entirely serious account of her family's reaction to her filmmaking in her SACAC diploma film, Raah.

“Why is self-reflexivity much more common in women's work than men's?” asks Srinivasan. Why, indeed? I don't know, but the question seems worth asking. What I do know is that self-questioning always makes for affecting cinema.

Published by Yahoo Originals.