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.