Short of nothing

My Mirror column for Sun 8 Nov:

Among the hundred-odd films screening till tonight in the online edition of the Dharamshala International Film Festival are a variety of accomplished shorts – Indian, foreign, fiction, documentary, animation.

Aditi Bhande's devastating Ghaziabad-set short film Did You Do It? traces one building's waste as it leaches into the surroundings

There are many exceptional films in this year's Dharamshala International Film Festival, but this column focuses on the shorts: films under 30 minutes. Some of the ones I really liked include:

1) Sudhamayee -- Megha Acharya's observational film is composed of family vignettes that may seem artless, but speak volumes. The film starts with a woman describing how she ended up becoming the primary caregiver for her father: her brother declared he was “scared of hospitals” and couldn't “bear to see those things.” “As if, we like seeing those tubes. We don't,” he voice trails off. There is a momentary lull in the conversation, as though the two women are absorbing these facts of life: the ugliness and pain of hospitals, but also the easily declared inability of so many men to perform the labour that surrounds illness and death. Or any domestic labour at all. As if on cue, a man emerges from the bedroom, retreating when he sees the women. The women, in turn, immediately rise with their plates - the man's entry is a sign that time for real conversation is over, and everyday labour must resume now. Again, later, when the couple discuss the woman's promotion sending her elsewhere, she knows she cannot. The man remains, as always, oblivious.

Sudarshan Suresh's brilliant 17-minute fiction is a chilling comment on who loses and who gains from the spectre of "love jihad"

 

2) Mizaru -- A young couple in a Mumbai park become a target for a group of unemployed men, but no-one comes to their aid. It is the sort of incident that is stiflingly familiar to any young person who has ever conducted a romance in India. By zoning in on it in film, Mizaru makes us question what we apparently don't in life: what have the couple done to deserve this treatment? Ah, they have displayed physical affection for each other. And since anything sexual in India is automatically shameful, they can be publicly humiliated by a bunch of louts. As self-appointed guardians of Hindu morality, the men feel entitled to bully them in every possible way. We live in a country in which the villains are confident that their actions will find support from society (the members of a laughter club in the park) and the state (the cops who show up and seem quite happy to have been delivered up some easy victims). Shot in one remarkable fluid take, Sudarshan Suresh's 17 min fiction is a searing indictment of everything that is wrong with India.

3) Did You Do It? -- This disturbing, largely dialogue-less film manages to be somehow programmatic and a mood piece. It begins with a characteristically North Indian dust-storm. The strange menacing half-light, the distant flocks of birds, the persistent slapping sound of the rain may have no diegetic purpose, but the aandhi is dark, slow and harrowing, just like the journey the film sets out to trace: a single day's worth of garbage emerging from an apartment complex in Ghaziabad and leaching inexorably back into our water, earth, air.

Aditi Bhande's Did You Do It? forces us to look at the processes we Indians so expertly turn away from in reality: the unsegregated dumping of garbage, the rising mountains of plastic, the barefoot young workers who do the irreplaceable work of clearing our surroundings, the stinking lorries, the overflowing landfills, and the ridiculous vision of middle class citizens in denial, marching against the municipality. Winner of the Best Editing award for Student Documentary at the Dadasaheb Phalke Film Festival 2020, Bhande is remarkably adept at delivering the facts as a quiet punch to the gut. “The water here has high levels of iron, nitrate, fluoride and aluminium,” reads a subtitle, going on to enumerate the diseases caused by such minerals in water, the depleting ground water levels, the pumping of semi-treated water back into the Hindon river. On screen, water continues to flow down the drain.

Vividly shot, with superb sound, the film constantly unravels our increasingly delusional expectations from nature and the natural. The deceptively attractive rushing sound of water takes us not a river but to the swirling pool of the sewage plant; the green piles of bhindi look poisonously greener in the unearthly tubelit glow of the street market. This film made me restart my lapsed composting bin. It might be the wake-up call you need, too.

Other shorts at DIFF that deserve more than a mention: Stray Dogs Come Out at Night, in which we meet a Pakistani sex worker; Irani Bag, a clever 8-minute essay on the purpose women's bags serve in post-revolutionary Iranian cinema; Anonymous, which movingly maps the stark realities of the Indian construction site; and the stunningly animated dystopia of Wade, in which a group of human scavengers navigate a flooded future Kolkata.

If you think an immersive film necessarily means an hour and half of plotted drama, try these out.

Published in Mumbai Mirror, 8 Nov 2020.

Isolated incidents

My Mirror column (3rd May 2020):

Placebo takes a personal deep dive into one of India's premier medical colleges and comes up with a disturbing, affecting vision of where we’re headed.

In 2011, a young filmmaker made a visit to his younger brother Sahil, who was studying to be a doctor at India’s premier medical college, the All India Institute of Medical Sciences in Delhi. It was the time of the annual college festival, Pulse, and as happens during ‘fest’ season, enthusiasms and emotions were running high. Before the night was over, Sahil had been admitted to hospital, with his right arm so badly damaged that he would not be able to return to the hostel for three months. The twist, though, is what made the tale possible: Abhay, the filmmaker brother, didn’t go home with Sahil. He decided to stay on his brother’s hostel instead, gradually inserting himself in – and his handycam is – into life on the AIIMS campus. And so began the dark, dark cinematic ride that is Placebo.

Free to stream on YouTube, Placebo is a strange and vivid film, combining special effects, hand-drawn black and white animation, found footage and still photographs with Abhay Kumar's footage. The 96 minutes that we finally see on screen apparently draws on 800 hours of footage, and the filmmaker edited 80 different versions before finalising this one. That process sounds terrifying. The film is a little less so – but not by much.

Placebo is a film about many aspects of the Indian present seen through a sharply angled lens: education, privilege, individualism, community, institutional failure and our failures as a society. Kumar starts by pointing to the competition that these students have dealt with to reach these peeling hostel buildings. According to a statistic cited in the film, MIT has an admittance rate of 9 per cent, and Harvard (the university, I'm assuming, not the medical school) has one of 7 per cent. The rate for AIIMS’s is 0.1 per cent.

Kumar’s voiceover repeatedly emphasises the 'brightness' of these students, and they mirror his framing, telling stories that reveal their sense of achievement in having, as we say in North Indian slang, “cracked” the medical entrance. But watching these nerdy young men talk about girls or play music or collapse in laughter after a doobie or a round of bhang pakoras consumed appropriately on Mahashivratri, what one is struck by is precisely how ordinary their desires are. They seem like any other 23-year-olds, with the same fears and desires and anxieties as young men everywhere – just bearing a heavier weight of academic/professional expectation, without the emotional or therapeutic support structure needed to deal with the pressure. Those who break, the film shows, are not helped to mend themselves. The cracks are papered over, and the fragments swept under a carpet.

All that the Indian educational system seems to have given these young men is the heady sensation of entering an elite. The path from AIIMS could take them on to a well-paying career as a doctor, or a powerful position in the Indian civil services, or to more specialised medical research in India, but more desirably in the USA. There is ambition aplenty – but even among the four or five students that Placebo keeps in fairly tight focus, there is no sense of a vocation.

There's Sethi, a fair North Indian chikna hero type who says his greatest desire is to “look good naked” – “like the guy in American Beauty”. He categorises the species called girls into different colours: “There are orange girls, there are green girls”, and the one who got away, “she was so white”. Sethi wants to be confident enough to ask out girls in America. Getting to America is his second ambition after getting to AIIMS.

There's the tall, bespectacled, pudgy-faced Saumya Chopra, who begins his AIIMS life terrified of ragging but becomes the senior who's suspended for two months in 2008 after a Supreme Court judgement makes the authorities crack down on ragging incidents. There's a tangent here that the film doesn't follow, about how our educational culture is so toxic and so isolating that ragging was the only way to forge intergenerational connections.

There's K, the most meditative of the lot, whose self-reflection does not in fact help him deal with his inner demons. “The respect I have for the word doctor is far more than the respect I have for me as a doctor,” K tells Abhay.

Ostensibly at the other end of that spectrum is someone like Saumya, who's only answer to why he wants to be a doctor is “My parents want me to be a doctor.” “What do you want?” asks the filmmaker. “Whatever my parents want,” comes Saumya's reply. “Our life is a debt to our parents... You can't pay it back ever but one must try at least.”

Saumya's words reminded me of another young Indian captured on camera in a documentary: a Durga Vahini leader-in-the-making called Prachi Trivedi, in Nisha Pahuja's superb 2014 film The World Before Her, who says she would do whatever her father wanted, because she was eternally grateful to him for not having aborted her as a female foetus.

This idea that our earthly existence is essentially beholden to our parents feels chilling to me, and will do to many who see human beings as free-standing individuals. Yet the flip side of that individuation is also a chilling aspect of Placebo, and particularly resonant in these solitary, socially distanced times. As K says to the filmmaker: “Even though we have been talking for so many months, you and me, we're isolated, that is a fact.”

It is a bleak vision of humanity, but perhaps also a self-fulfilling one.

It is a bleak vision of humanity, but also a self-fulfilling

Read more at:
https://mumbaimirror.indiatimes.com/opinion/columnists/trisha-gupta/isolated-incidents/articleshow/75513645.cms??utm_source=contentofinterest&utm_medium=text&utm_campaign=cppst

It is a bleak vision of humanity, but also a self-fulfilling

Read more at:
https://mumbaimirror.indiatimes.com/opinion/columnists/trisha-gupta/isolated-incidents/articleshow/75513645.cms??utm_source=contentofinterest&utm_medium=text&utm_campaign=cppst

Published in Mumbai Mirror, 3 May 2020. You can watch the film for free, here.

Countries of the Mind

Solitary young immigrant men traverse Parisian streets in Na

Read more at:
https://mumbaimirror.indiatimes.com/opinion/columnists/trisha-gupta/countries-of-the-mind/articleshowprint/72623618.cms?prtpage=1?utm_source=contentofinterest&utm_medium=text&utm_campaign=cppst

My Mirror column:

Solitary young immigrant men traverse Parisian streets in Nadav Lapid's Synonyms and Jérémy Clapin's I Lost My Body, two of 2019's most befuddling, memorable films. 

A still from Synonyms (2019)

The opening sequence of Nadav Lapid's Synonyms bursts with a strange, irrepressible energy. A 20-something man charges through Paris, the camera capturing his long-legged strides and his thumping footsteps. He arrives in a grand old building, finds a key hidden under a corner of carpet, and enters a vast, rather beautiful apartment -- with not a scrap of furniture. Seemingly unsurprised, he is in the bathtub when he hears a sound. He runs out, nude and slippery, onto the polished wooden floors, to discover that his possessions – clothes, sleeping bag, money – have disappeared. He races downstairs looking for the thief, banging on the doors of other apartments. No one answers. He comes back to the apartment, still without his clothes, and settles back into the bathtub, seemingly prepared to freeze to death. The next thing he knows, he is waking up in a large clean bed, having been adopted by the young bourgeois couple downstairs. His rescuers Emile and Caroline – children of rich industrialists who have pretensions to the arts – feed him and clothe him, giving him money and a phone and a particularly memorable mustard yellow coat in return for the pleasure of his amusing, sometimes outlandish company. Stripped quite literally of his past, Yoav – for that is the name of Lapid's Israeli protagonist – resurrected in a new identity.

Synonyms, which won the Golden Bear at the 2019 Berlin Film Festival and was screened in India at both MAMI and IFFI, is a film about a man who wishes to shed his old skin, an Israeli man insistent that he will not speak Hebrew, who walks the streets of his new city with a Larousse dictionary under his arm, reciting synonyms from the language he thinks will grant him entry into a new nation.

Lapid's film, apparently at least partly autobiographical, is filled with anger against in-your-face Israeli militaristic nationalism. But as Yoav gradually realises that France isn't quite the haven of liberty, equality and fraternity that he has imagined, it also indicts nationalism of the French variety – with its insistence on linguistic blending in, its closet anti-Semitism, its citizenship classes that involve learning the words of La Marseillaise: “Let us march! Let us march! So that impure blood irrigates our fields!”.

Still from the award-winning animated film I Lost My Body (2019)

I found myself thinking about Synonyms as I watched another 2019 film about a young immigrant wandering the streets of Paris, this time a Moroccan pizza delivery boy called Naoufel. Jérémy Clapin's stunningly crafted I Lost My Body – the first animated feature film to receive the top prize at the Critics' Week section at Cannes, and now available to stream online -- has even grander ambitions than Lapid's film. It opens with a severed hand coming to life and making its way out of a medical laboratory. Surely this must be horror, you think – and I Lost My Body does have its tense, borderline macabre moments: a body-less hand suddenly wringing a pigeon's neck, or clicking an abandoned cigarette lighter into flame in self-defense against a pack of subway rats. But even as we watch the hand creeping and crawling and dancing its way across rooftops and drains, over pianos and under trains, it takes on a personality of its own. We begin to identify with its search – for its missing body, for itself. We do not tremble when the hand approaches a gurgling baby, placing a fallen pacifier back in the baby's mouth, and then laying itself down to be held in the baby's sleepy grip.

Perhaps our comfort has something to do with what we see in the film's parallel narrative, about the film's human protagonist, Naoufel. Bespectacled, shy and slight of build, Naoufel sometimes seems like the opposite of Yoav in Synonyms. And yet they share many things: an irredeemable homelessness, an emptiness that seems to express itself in a need to attach themselves to something or someone, and a painful preoccupation with the past, with a country of memory. Their responses to trauma are quite different. Yoav is constantly vocalising, telling outrageous stories about his past in Israel, once even presenting them to his writerly friend Emile in an extravagant gesture of generosity. Naoufel is painfully quiet, seeming to relive certain moments of his childhood over and over. If Yoav recites new words from a dictionary, Naoufel listens to old tape recordings of his parents. And the hand – the hand remembers trying to catch a fly.

A hand separated from its owner, a tongue separated from its language – these are strange but powerful metaphors for alienation. We might want desperately to leave our pasts behind, but the body remembers.

Published in Mumbai Mirror, Dec 15, 2019.

Tripping the Light Fantastic

My Mirror column:

An evocative new non-fiction film immerses us in the enchanting world of Chandannagar's light artists.

Almost all religious festivals in India, when being celebrated in the public domain, now rely on technology to amplify the experience. The bhajans or kirtans once actually sung live in the sanctum sanctorum have been replaced, or at least supplemented, by recorded T-series versions playable on loop. And in a bald metaphor for the public religiosity that new India foists on and increasingly demands of its citizens, that technologically amplified sound is now blasted from the inner religious precinct into the street, and often into your bedroom.

If that sound technology — the booming loudspeakers, the tinny microphones, the expectant crackling of static — now feels as familiar and integral to the Durga Puja experience as Dhunuchi Naach, so does another technological addition that's only a few decades old: decorative street lighting.

There is, it turns out, a whole industry devoted to decorative lighting, and it is the subject of Supriyo Sen's lovely documentary Let There Be Light. Recently screened in Delhi at Open Frame, the Public Service Broadcasting Trust's yearly film festival, Sen's film is set entirely in Chandannagar in West Bengal.

Indigenous technology and local cultural innovation have made Chandannagar a lighting industry hub. The town's annual Jagaddhatri Puja celebration is a time when new lighting creations are displayed — both for the pleasure of the locals and as a real-life marketplace for buyers who want to replicate these designs in melas or festivals across India.

And what designs they are! From a rotating Manipuri dancer to a forest of gently swaying giraffes, a glittering Taj Mahal on water to an excruciatingly slow ball-game between two children, Chandannagar's alok shilpis, as these light artists are locally referred to, can seemingly marshal their combination of "motion, circuitry and artistry" into creating just about anything.

Among the attractions of the Durga Puja lighting I remember from my '80s Calcutta childhood was the light artist's ability to zero in on the political event of the moment. I'm pretty sure, for instance, that I once saw Indira Gandhi's assassination enshrined in a pujo display of moving light: a shocking but hypnotic loop of her walking down a path, a man aiming a gun at her, the bullet hitting her, and her body crumpling to the ground, only to rise and be felled again.

Chandannagar's alok shilpis do partake of this characteristically Bengali tendency for contemporary comment incorporated into popular culture. We hear, for instance, of the year 1999, when Kargil was the most prominent theme for lighting displays. But we hear of this from Kashinath Neogy, a wiry man with floppy salt-and-pepper hair who is one of Chandannagar's lighting pioneers. He decided to buck that Kargil trend by creating a giant moving frog the same year. The frog apparently did service for the 12 years that followed. It was such a huge hit that younger men in the business can still recount the exact things that it did. Among them was sticking out a long tongue and then flicking it back to ingest a passing fly.

Animation, in fact, has been at the centre of Chandannagar's innovations with lighting. But that animation technology could be put in the service of either laughter, or a sense of wonder, or what someone in the film calls "a message to the nation".

What Sen's rich conversations also manage to elicit, though, is a more philosophical core that underlies efforts in these various registers. At one level, this is about how these spectacular lighting displays — by their fantastic scale and creativity — straddle the boundary between science and magic. The same lighting technicians who work laboriously to produce these circuits clearly remember the enchantment the lights had for them when they were young. And their efforts seem consciously or unconsciously directed at recreating that magic for children now.

The leap from the magical to the divine is easily taken. When Kashi Da of 'Kargil versus Giant Frog' fame describes his lighting circuitry as a way of controlling danger (electricity) to create beauty, he adds a serene comment: "Eta onaari roop [This is a form of Her]," implying the goddess in whose honour the lighting displays are created.

But even without Kashi Da's smiling perception of what his work means in some larger scheme of things, Sen's film is remarkable for the stunning convergence it reveals between religion, popular culture and science.

Looking closely at these self-taught Bengali men doing what they do offers us a glimpse of a milieu that somehow encouraged curiosity and scientific application and persistent innovation on a third-world budget, while also being thoroughly immersed in a deeply felt popular religiosity. It's powerful stuff and yet, wonderfully fun, a little like the lights it's about.

Published in Mumbai Mirror, 25 Sep 2016.

Back to the Jungle

Watching the new Jungle Book movie in Hindi made me think again about its Indianness.

Last week I did something I have never done before (or at least not voluntarily): I watched a Hollywood film dubbed in Hindi. I'd already seen Jon Favreau's new Jungle Book (and written about it in this column). But the Hindi version had a special tug. There seemed a homecoming double bill experience to be had, what with the refurbishing of Gulzar and Vishal Bhardwaj's 'Jangal jangal baat chali hai' song, and the added miracle of Bagheera and Baloo becoming conjoined with Om Puri and Irffan Khan. 

And despite everything I knew about the Hollywood production, my subconscious mind clung to a notion that a Hindi-speaking Mowgli would be coming home - to the Seeonee (Seoni) hills, where the wolves and the tigers still roam the banks of the river Waingunga (Wainganga), in what is now Madhya Pradesh. Because Kipling's original Jungle Books were set in the grand old central Indian forests of Satpura, later immortalised by the Hindi poet Bhavani Prasad Mishra as "Satpuda ke ghaney jangal. Neend mein doobey huye se, Oonghte anmaney jangal". 

Although of course Mowgli would be 'returning' to a language he never spoke. Kipling's dialogue did not lack for dramatic resonance, but it was the full-bellied English of its time. Here is Mowgli, speaking to his wolf-sibling to plan his revenge against the absent Shere Khan: "So long as he is away do thou or one of the four brothers sit on that rock, so that I can see thee as I come out of the village." 

Yet this was most definitely a text located in an Indian world - Kipling may or may not have acquired it from life, but he conveys a sharp sense of the terrain and the vegetation. The flaming dhak tree, the lush creepers and the steep ravines animate a very particular kind of jungle -- that very word, of course, was acquired by English from the Sanskrit/Hindi word for wilderness. When Kipling describes the Cold Lairs, the lost city where the Monkey-People take Mowgli prisoner, you can practically see the ruins of a Mughal-Rajput palace: all red sandstone reservoirs and milky-white fretwork. Calling the king of the jungle Shere Khan is a stroke of genius, as is having the wolves mock him as Lungri, the lame. 

Jon Favreau's English dialogue, of course, is nothing like Kipling's. And as it turns out, the Hindi version follows closely on the chatty contemporaneity favoured by Favreau. There are a few instances when the ease of the English is belied by a Hindi term that has too much grandeur about it - the Water Truce becomes Sandhi Kaal, the Peace Rock becomes Shanti Shila. The Sanskrit-heavy words achieve heft effortlessly, but they're also slightly impenetrable, I imagine, to many thousands of the Indian children who watched the film this month. Sometimes a translated term is weighed down by clunkiness and connotations the original didn't have - "insani pilla" entirely strips away the clean, unforgettable beauty of "man-cub". 

But on the whole, screenwriter Mayur Puri has done an admirable job, creating not just appropriately translated dialogue, but sometimes whole new characters on the strength of accent and vocabulary. Many of the ordinary jungle folk speak in Bambaiya street-lingo: the rhinos, the comically big-eared rodents, the porcupine. The porcupine is scurrying through the dry forest ticking off stone after stone as "apun ka patthar" when he realizes that the water level in the river has dipped enough that "Shanti Shila dikh rehli hai". 

Bagheera speaks a more proper Khadi Boli, allowing for an occasional thaw into the familial: "Main kanoon jaanta hoon, chhote," he deadpans to the deer at the water's edge, who seem skittish and ready to scatter as the panther comes to drink. There is a slight metallic tang to Om Puri's voice, which I thought worked very well for Bagheera's snappish, no-nonsense air. And he pulls off some most ambitious Hindi wordplay: "Shere Khan ki dhamki koi geedad-bhabhki nahi thhi (Shere Khan's threat was no jackal's bluster)". 

The hypnotic rock snake Kaa has Priyanka Chopra at her sultriest, but the dialogue doesn't give her enough of a persona. "Vishwas karo mera" can't match Disney's "Trusssst in me". The one sentence of Chopra's dialogue that worked for me is "Mehfooz rakhoongi tumhe", with the "mehfooz" emerging as a slow hiss. Perhaps if Kaa kept to this Lucknawi nazaakat register, we might have had a real character. 

Which Baloo gets. Mayur Puri's dialogue turns the happy-go-lucky bear into an amicable, lazy-ass Punjabi, who calls Mowgli "puttar" and "yaara" and is only too happy to let the man-cub lagaao his "jugaad" (one instance where the Hindi is much meaningful than the English "tricks") while he ambles alongside. 

The only thing about Baloo that moves quickly is his tongue, and the Hindi version does wonderfully well with his crackerjack conversational style, such as when Baloo adapts a 1963 melancholy classic song to inform Mowgli that he owes him a favour - "Jo waada nahi kiya woh nibhaana padega..." - or explains the stinging bees with innuendo-laden ease as "Kudiyan dank maarti hain". 

Perhaps the most significant Hindi rewording is that of Kipling's "Red Flower" ["...Bagheera meant fire, only no creature in the jungle will call fire by its proper name."] into the rather more dramatic "Rakt Phool", literally 'blood flower'. And unlike in the original Kipling tale, where he is trampled by a herd of buffaloes, in Favreau's film it is the Rakt Phool by which Shere Khan meets his death: burnt to a cinder, bhasm, like some evil Hindu demon.

Published in Mumbai Mirror, 1st May 2016.

Film Festival: Mise en City

An essay on the Urban Lens festival, published in Open magazine. 

A vibrant new film festival portrays the multiplicity of claims on Indian cities, the freedoms they enable and the burdens that still weigh them down

UNTIL THE MIDDLE of the 20th century, the Indian city was viewed with deep ambivalence by many of our most influential thinkers. If, as Mahatma Gandhi put it, the future of India lay in her villages, urban life was a strange new blip on the horizon, the city a den of new vices in which anything could happen.

But the breakdown of pre-existing social norms—the very thing that made the city potentially anarchic—was also what made it potentially revolutionary. The city became a true home to the accoutrements of industrial modernity: factory labour, public transport, urban forms of mass entertainment—ensuring that people who had been kept apart by centuries of socially-enforced codes were now forced to jostle against each other.

As new classes and communities laid claim to the shared spaces of the city, they looked to the promise of modernity and democracy made by the new nation. As more women came out to work—and sometimes play—they slowly but surely challenged the assumed male control of the public sphere. An urban working class acquired a consciousness of its identity. Castes that had been deprived of most rights in the village made a concerted effort to get justice in the city. And yet none of these claims, or identities, was formed without a struggle.

In more recent times, the city has become the site of new movements for recognition and freedom—fighting for the liberty of sexual orientation, or against new forms of late capitalist ‘development’—as well as the locus of powerful attempts to polarise and/or crush them.

This glorious multiplicity of claims to the city—and via the city, to fuller citizenship—were put on view in cinematic form at the recent Urban Lens Film Festival. Organised by the Bengaluru-based Indian Institute for Human Settlements (IIHS), the festival’s third edition this year followed up its annual Bengaluru screenings with a packed weekend in Delhi. A refreshing mix of films by established names and upcoming directors, the fare was largely non-fiction (although a couple of animated films and a semi-fiction one made it in). And while some well- known filmmakers—Harun Farocki and Fatih Akin—represented the rest of the world, the festival kept its focus on the Indian city.

Caste made its appearance early on, with two student films. Not Caste in Stone (2014), directed by a group of students from the Tata Institute of Social Sciences (TISS) is a thoughtful encounter with how the city can simultaneously reduce the stifling grip of caste, as well as create new avenues for it to express itself. The 31-minute film is structured around an anecdotal history of Mumbai’s Tamil- speaking communities, mapped onto the city’s geography. While most upper- caste Tamil migrants settled in Matunga, at least 25,000 families from Tirunelveli district arrived in Dharavi and went to work in tanneries run by Muslim traders. Matunga, despite being the best known site of Mumbai’s Tamilian cultural presence, remained off-limits to Dharavi’s Tamil population, especially in terms of access to temples. Despite this reinforcing of caste divisions, the city is seen by many Dharavi residents as offering a degree of freedom unavailable in rural areas. “Apun Schedule hai... Indiaaazaad ho gaya, hamara samaj toh aazaad nahin hua (We are ‘Scheduled’… India got freedom, but our society didn’t gain freedom),” says Kanakraj. “Bambai mein aazaad hai... Lad ke bhi dikhaya idhar (In Mumbai we’re free... Here we fought and showed them).”

The carving out of a caste identity in the city, the film suggests, initially involved the establishment of civic associations like the Adi-Dravida Sangh. But also crucial was an actual space that could mark the community’s location in Mumbai—and this, inevitably, was a temple. Battles over temple entry were waged and won in Matunga, too, but the creation of ‘their own temple’ in Dharavi seems to offer a more permanent, visible articulation of collective identity.

Meanwhile, with B-22 (2014), set and shot in Delhi’s Budh Vihar locality, student filmmakers Shilpi Saluja and Akshika Chandna of Sri Aurobindo College of Arts and Communication (SACAC) offer us a gentle slice-of-life that addresses caste more indirectly. The film’s protagonist, Manju, who literally guides us through her neighbourhood, brings home the intersections of caste with class and gender: the violence of one is tied to the violence of the other.

If B-22 is poker-faced about the depressing water situation in a Delhi slum, the brilliantly designed film Good Morning Mumbai (2011) uses animation and humour to draw attention to Mumbai’s sanitation issues. Remarkably, this too is a student film. With their charming, funny little fiction about a poor jhuggi- dweller’s tortuous quest for a peaceful place to take a shit, National Institute of Design students Rajesh Thakare and Troy Vasanth C flag the issue of Mumbai’s abysmal lack of toilets. The beauty of the drawings partially leavens the squalor of the world being evoked, while the superb soundtrack—juxtaposing a DJ on the radio with an oily minister, toilet sounds and the local bhai—roots us back in an unfortunate reality.

Civic worries are also at the heart of Usha Rao and Gautam Sonti’s Our Metropolis (2014), which takes the construction of the Metro in Bengaluru as the central thread of a lament about the future of Indian urbanity. Shot between 2008 and 2013, the film tracks a rather vast swathe of ominous developments in the creation of a ‘global city’ that seems to care little about most of those who live in it.

A much more specific tack on the ‘global city’—specifically its bulldozing of rights in the service of big business— is taken by Rahul Roy’s The Factory (2015), which traces the Maruti Suzuki case, in which 147 workers of India’s largest automobile manufacturing unit were jailed for years, without bail, on charges of destroying company property and murdering a senior manager. Roy’s engrossing film combines his observational style with an investigative element, providing chilling details that make apparent how baldly fabricated the case is.

The prosecution’s four star witnesses for instance, ‘saw’ the accused workers engaging in violence—in perfect alphabetical order. As against the Maruti establishment’s horror story of worker violence, the workers have a completely different narrative: the entire incident, they say, was a conspiracy by the company management aimed at eliminating the lone manager who had helped get the Maruti Union registered (Awanish Kumar Dev) and simultaneously ridding the company of actively unionised workers. Bouncers in Maruti workers’ uniforms were the ones who started the rioting and set fire to the room in which they had locked Dev.

Roy also goes beyond the case, tracing the history of Maruti in India, and allows us to enter the increasingly constricted world of the industrial worker. His unpacking of life on the factory floor makes for depressing viewing. Worker after worker, from among the 2,500 men dismissed by Maruti Suzuki, provides Roy with details of the organised fashion in which the company had begun to squeeze those labouring at its lowest echelons: reducing the number of ‘relievers’ assigned to each group of workers, doing away with toilet breaks, firing men after they had served their apprenticeship period so that they could hire new ones at lower rates. When Maruti workers—faced with impossible time pressure, humiliating punishments and harsh pay cuts (a single day of absence cost a worker Rs 2,000: a fourth of his monthly variable pay, and a full eighth of his total salary) —sought to unionise and strike work for their demands, the management came down even more heavily on them.

Roy’s film captures the terrible sense of attrition a long-drawn court case can produce, especially under conditions of poverty and political corruption. When he draws the viewer’s eye to the guns and lathis in the hands of security guards and policemen, it is hard not to see these men—likely from similar backgrounds as the workers they’re escorting—as hired guns acting on behalf of a state that is acting on behalf of the corporation. Hope is in short supply.

A comparable sense of the city as a stultifying space which has belied its promises of equality and liberty emerges in Ruchir Joshi’s much more amorphous My Rio, My Tokio. Although as different in style and intent from The Factory as perhaps possible, My Rio... shares with it and Our Metropolis a dull, throbbing anger about the state of things in our cities. Joshi’s series of what he calls ‘video-poems’ about Kolkata takes in a disparate set of things that sometimes seem like events (the death of CPM leader Jyoti Basu, the horrendous Stephen Court fire) and sometimes not (women dancing during Durga Puja, a conversation about Fashion Week).

AT TIMES, THE particular quality of a city emerges unbidden, unplanned from the kind of films made about it. If the Mumbai films at Urban Lens—from Paromita Vohra’s joyful dissection of a stereotype in Where’s Sandra? to Mira Nair’s portrait of cabaret dancers in India Cabaret—displayed a quirky indefatigability, the Kolkata films had an air of melancholy, an insistence on poetry in the midst of death and decay.

A memorable Bangla poem called Nishir Dak (‘Night’s Call’) by the historian Sumanta Banerjee threads together Ruchir Joshi’s ramblings across the city in time and space. The poem itself makes reference to other cultural pasts: the playwright Bijon Bhattacharya’s work on the Bengal famine, Ritwik Ghatak’s cinematic masterpiece Subarnarekha and its brilliant leitmotif phrase ‘Bibhotso moja’: ‘horrific fun’. My Rio also cites Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities, a Mohiner Ghoraguli song and other poems. Poetry is writ large across a film by another non-Bengali Kolkatan resident, Joshy Joseph, which offers a lyrical tribute to the city’s indomitable spirit via portraits of two men—a retired footballer and coach called PK Banerjee and a poet-filmmaker called Goutam Sen, who was making a film about Banerjee when he succumbed to cancer. The third Kolkata film at Urban Lens, Debalina Majumder’s Taar Cheye Se Anek Aaro is very different from these—a tender fictional portrait of two young women in love, interspersed with real footage of people discussing homosexuality— but it, too, relies more on songs and lyrics than almost all the rest of the films shown. “You can’t run away from text if you’re dealing with Calcutta,” said Joshi during the discussion.

Sometimes, rarely, a filmmaker might want to run not from words but from images. With a city like Delhi, whose iconic monumentality lends itself to having its ‘sights’ ticked off by so many Bollywood films, this fear is all too real. Humaira Bilkis’ Maine Dilli Nahi Dekha (another student film from SACAC) steers clear of this repetitive Delhi: visiting the Adhchini Dargah of Mai Sahiba instead of that of her more famous son Nizamuddin Auliya, bantering with shopkeepers in Chittaranjan Park rather than Chandni Chowk. In one lovely little scene, Bilkis’ camera lingers on a child’s drawing book. “The Taj Mahal,” says the young artist. “Have you seen it?” she asks. “No.” “Then?” “I copied it from my brother’s drawing.”

Those who work with images, like those who work with words, can never cease from quotation. But whatever else our cities may or may not provide, they are an inexhaustible stream of words and images for filmmakers to dip into and bring their nets out gleaming with fresh catch.

The Strength of the Pack

Today's Mumbai Mirror column: 

A sparkling new adaptation of The Jungle Book is a chance to take a fresh look at Kipling.

The latest version of The Jungle Book hit Indian screens on April 8, a week ahead of the US. The fact that we get first dibs on the film, however, is about the only concession to 'Indian-ness' here. (I'm not counting the fact that the only actor on screen is a 12-year-old Indian-origin New Yorker called Neel Sethi.) 

Perhaps my brain has been permanently warped by The Jungle Book I grew up on (a lovely hardback with Disney images), but it seems to me a bit absurd to expect Indian-ness from something originally written by a white man in 1895, filmed in English as early as 1942 (by Alexander Korda), and successfully Disney-fied in 1967. 

What we think of when we think of The Jungle Book is Mowgli, a thin brown boy making the forest his own, accompanied by Baloo the bear and Bagheera the panther. But Kipling's Jungle Book was actually several tales, first published serially in newspapers, and only some featured Mowgli. And even those didn't necessarily follow from each other: they had to be stitched into a single narrative. 

In some ways, it was the films that did this work. Korda spent most of his dramatic energy on Mowgli's ambivalent relationship to human society - in Kipling's memorable phrase, the "man-village". It was Walt Disney who created The Jungle Book most of the world now knows: the tale of Mowgli's battle with Shere Khan the tiger, encounters with the Bandar-log and Kaa the snake providing adventurous sidelights. 

Jon Favreau's version, in glorious live action 3D, remains largely faithful to the 1967 Disney film, though it darkens the tone and ups the pace considerably. It is Shere Khan who bookends this version, snarling and sneering to terrifying effect in the voice of Idris Elba, and asking the question that is at some level, at the moral centre of the Jungle Book: "How many lives is a man-cub worth?" Favreau gives the angry, embittered man-eater of the previous film a sharper identity as a tyrant, a power-hungry creature who wraps his unlawful activities in a cloak of hypocrisy and violence: "You did not respond to reason, so now you will know fear." 

On the other hand— not driving Mowgli out of the jungle but trapping him into self-doubt—is Kaa the snake: "Don't you know what you are?" 

And what is Mowgli - this creature who cannot ever be a wolf, no matter how much he tries, but who is too free, too wild to inhabit the world of men?
The idea of a feral child has long fascinated us. Romulus and Remus, mythical founders of Rome, were raised by a she-wolf, and famous cases of wolf-men have been the subject of films by European auteurs like Truffaut and Herzog. 

The appeal of Kipling's tale is that it reverses the perspective to that of the jungle: so not wolf-child, but man-cub. Instead of a return to human society, Kipling imagines what it would be like to be taught the ways of the wilderness. And what has made his text persuasive for generations of children is the richness of his conviction that the wilderness has ways. The Law of the Jungle seems, if anything, more clear, more just, and infinitely more navigable than the changeable codes of human societies. The idea of a Water Truce that would allow all animals to access the river in dry season, or the resounding call to togetherness in "The strength of the pack is the wolf, and the strength of the wolf is the pack": these explain why The Jungle Book's evocation of loyalty, honesty and codes of honour were a huge influence on Robert Baden-Powell, who founded the Boy Scouts. 

Sure, Kipling was a British imperialist in whose eyes there was no possible equivalence between brown people and white ones. But our response to that doesn't have to be a bar on reading him. It's much more profitable to read him critically but carefully, to read him and marvel at his ear for language, and his eye for the Indian world he grew up in. For one thing, he could often be funny. Here he is talking about small boys in Indian villages being sent out to graze the herds: "The very cattle that would trample a white man to death allow themselves to be banged and bullied and shouted at by children that hardly come up to their noses." And here he is making a snarky comparison between human dispute settlement and the jungle version: "One of the beauties of Jungle Law is that punishment settles all scores. There is no nagging afterward." 

If we are to insist on mapping the Jungle Book onto Kipling's real-life surroundings, then the "man-village" would have to be the British, and the jungle representative of Indians. But then we would need to account for the fact that Kipling's man-village, although armed with the ultimate weapon ("the red flower", i.e. fire), is prone to fear and exaggeration. It is the jungle folk who are heroes - not just because they live simply and keep their word, but because they are able to take a man-cub in.

Regardless of whether it challenges or confirms colonial stereotypes, much of the power of the Jungle Book lies in Mowgli's learning how he can belong to the jungle, yet not fear the things that come naturally to him as a man. What Mowgli offers, eventually, is a model of accepting the different parts of oneself.

Published in Mumbai Mirror, 10 April 2016.

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.