Tag Archives: Review

Jun 11 2009
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Indian Culture & Society, Short Films/Shorts

Hridayatteieykku Oru Madakayathra

(This article first appeared in the Mumbai Mirror)

Hridayatteieykku Oru Madakayathra (directed by Abhinand Kumar) is a simple story of conflict between a father and son on a personal level, and tradition and progress and civilizations on the other. A young man defies his father’s wish to see him don the colours of Kathakali and takes a journey to the west in search of a ‘better’ life.

As the title suggests the film traces his path back home. Given the constraints of time, there is but a couple of lines from his letters that convey the disenchantment that precedes his return. The reasons are predictable and personal- a broken relationship and such, at least on the surface. The lack of incisive detailing is partly compensated for by leaving room for the imagination to take in a range of emotions.

The screenplay of the film is pleasantly clever in places. A journalist is used as a device for the father to deliver a touching monologue on his dying art and the camera pans over various stages of his applying dramatic makeup to create engrossing visuals for the voiceover of the son’s letters home. The brevity of expression of the last shot is emphatic and skilful.

But for all the ways in which the film milks the short film genre, there is a feeling of incompleteness that lingers. The audience is witness to a journey but not a participant in it. It is a relief that the film does not subscribe to the commonplace twist in the tale formula ever so popular in the genre, but perhaps falters in choosing a subject that envisages a not just a great depth but also a formidable width of human issues.

Pragya Tiwari.

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Jun 11 2009
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Documentary Cinema, Indian Culture & Society

City of Photos

Mumbai Mirror, Friday, July 6, 2007

“SNAPSHOTS”

A picture is worth a thousand words. Documentary filmmaker Nishtha Jain demonstrates in her City of Photos

Nishtha Jain in her documentary City Of Photos takes a journey with her viewers to photo studios in Calcutta and Ahmedabad to understand what people seek in their pictures and what the age old tradition of being photographed signifies. Ordinary people in pictures that she explores begin to seem like artists projecting themselves as an idea, experiencing with sensuality the world of their desires which exists ahead of their ability to fully comprehend it. The edgy existence of unmade mental images with crisp memories translates into portraits that become a strong edifice of the cities, and their social history. They are also symbols of the dignity and pathos that harmoniously co exist in the human life, so boundlessly capable of imaginings and so hopelessly bound by shortcomings. The photographs in this film are not high art but when looked into they bear testimony that a good photograph is about depth of feeling, not field. These photographs transcend their reality but do not deny it. They are the one opportunity to outlive even death but might just as well bear witness to how much is lost. In the sudden joy of a lover united with his beloved by photoshop lurks the shadow of a doomed romance. These documents accurately record age, fashion and expression against backdrops which fictionalize the cityscape and ameliorate its harsh realities. Their invaluable role in marriages, travel, evidence and death is duly acknowledged but they achieve their full potential in providing a world, delicious with desirable “sin” for women who indulge in their hobby of being photographed as their only escape from preordained mundane destinies. Jain’s tribute to these still images in motion picture, an irony she consciously emphasizes, is enhanced by humour, nostalgia and surrealism. The film is approached emotionally but does not lack intellectual fervor or study. The psychological and social aspects of photography and the ability of its history to become a commentary on the way we are, surface strongly but quietly.

It is in its ambiguity and subtlety that the film triumphs. The mood captures the romance and morbidity of the subject under consideration and the narrative and soundtrack sift the layers gently. Someone once said, “Every picture has at least two people in it, the subject and the photographer”. The filmmaker is similarly palpable in this documentary. Instead of dishing out a presumptuous treatise on photography, Jain simply captures what fascinates her personally and presents it such that we might be able to see bits of our own selves in it. She respects the ambivalence of the concept at hand and does not bother with sharpness which Henri Cartier-Bresson once called a “bourgeois concept”. Strong tensions between the pleasurable and disturbing pervade the film as they do our lives and aesthetic orders and by allowing them their space and expression, the filmmaker celebrates all three.

Pragya Tiwari

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Jun 11 2009
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Documentary Cinema, Film Festival, Short Films/Shorts

Breakthrough Film Fest

(This article first appeared in the Mumbai Mirror)

A group of independent Latin American filmmakers felt that struggles throughout the Southern Hemisphere have common agendas and could benefit from shared ideas and perspectives. With this in mind they started a tri-continental film festival to showcase documentaries on human rights issues from South Asia, South America and Africa. In India they collaborated with Breakthrough which is a human rights NGO pledged to promote awareness of human rights issues with the use of pop culture and media among the youth and is bringing to us the 3rd edition of Human Rights In Frames over the weekend.

The films address a host of concerns from public conveniences to terrorism. But human rights in the strict sense of the phrase refer to fundamental rights granted to individuals against the system under major international treaties or national constitutions and not all the films fit into that context. For instance, Say Amen is home video style documentary shot over time by the youngest member of a large clan in Israel. The film documents his coming out to his orthodox parents and siblings and their struggle in understanding and accepting his sexuality. The nature of conflict here is personal, borne out of love and faith rather than oppression and greed and one can hardly expect someone to have a valid suit against their mother for violating their ‘right to family life’ (Article 8 of the ECHR). But the fact that it does not ask burning questions about homosexuality and its place in the world does not take away from the remarkable poignancy of the film in general. For a first person account it is remarkably devoid of self indulgence and honestly draws out the emotional core of the issue.

Similarly in Between The Lines- The Third Gender the rights and issues of hijras against the state and society lurk vaguely on the periphery while the majority of the investigation centers on their lifestyle, rituals and sexuality. The camera follows three hijras from different parts of the city for this investigation and peers curiously into their intriguing inner worlds guided by their outspoken frankness. Unfortunately the voyeuristic approach ends up presenting them like exotica skimming as mentioned earlier only the surface of real issues confronting them.

Leila Khaled Hijacker unlike Third Gender, successfully uses the portrait of an individual to evoke the larger questions of her existence. The film journeys to Lebanon where Palestinian refugees are living out their days in exile hoping against hope that they might return home one day. Leila Khaled, the world’s first woman hijacker and a member of the People’s Front For Liberation Of Palestine lives among them and recounts her reason and experience of the hijackings. The film presents her as an unvanquished hero but goes beyond lionizing her to ask who is a terrorist and what makes her one? At a time when “war against terror” is a blanket explanation for the damnation of thousands in this world the importance of this subversive question cannot be stressed enough.

In a similar way, Shake Hands With The Devil revisits the Rwandan massacre of the Tutsis in the early 1990’s through the memoirs of Canadian Lieutenant Romeo Dallaire who revisits the country ten years after he put up a under-resourced fight against the genocide. The General pulls no punches in his condemnation of top UN officials, expedient Belgian policy makers and senior members of the Clinton administration who chose to do nothing as Dallaire pleaded for reinforcements and revised rules of engagement. Instead of dismissing the genocide as tribal warfare, he critically re examines how the world including himself might have failed Africa. On many an occasion the ‘first world’ has refused economic collaboration or inclusion into the EU to a country which does not uphold human rights adequately. This film turns the table on them spotlighting their own violations of human rights, direct or indirect, which largely go unquestioned.

Also in the line up are other acclaimed films like Venezuela Rising, John And Jane and Q2P. The screenings of these films have the potential to acquaint the small percentage of India which is poised to fly with its larger majority which is still shackled by social, political and economic oppression much like its fellow ‘third world’ citizens from other parts of the world and perhaps even instill a few seeds of change.

-Pragya Tiwari.

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Jun 11 2009
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Film Festival, Short Films/Shorts

Belgian Film Festival

(This article first appeared in the Mumbai Mirror)

Documentary films have existed through the history of cinema complimenting fictional features. Short films on the other hand can be said to supplement the fictional feature film with cheaper and more accessible filmmaking which is open to experimentation. World over support for independent films is growing and clubs and institutions are mushrooming to encourage shorts, documentaries and experimental cinema. As a result the medium is now widely accessible for individual expression. In India too, documentaries have long existed and thrived but the trend of shorts is just about catching on. In a city teeming with Bollywood aspirants shorts has been nothing short of a discovery and almost everyone is now picking up a DV or HD Cam and setting out to shoot their film. While the opening of the floodgates is a welcome breather from the monopoly of expression Bollywood has had over our cinema, there is also a danger of hype overriding substance. In Mumbai more than anywhere else, shorts are made largely to showcase and sell acting/direction talent to commercial cinema. It is often looked upon as an investment into a future in Bollywood which is understandable given that despite the increasing volumes if indie cinema that emerges from this country, little or none has found a market for itself good enough to even just recover costs. What is essential for this movement to truly prosper is an attempt by filmmakers to use the shorts and documentary genres to fashion new idioms that override the limitations of the mainstream and carve their own unique identity. Exposure to world cinema is crucial for amateurs to develop a sense of rhythm and style as well as question what they really want to say. Also crucial is the building of an audience outside the experimental film fraternity. Vikalp is a collective of filmmakers with chapters active in Mumbai, Delhi, and Bangalore. The Mumbai chapter has been developing screening venues and promoting a screening culture for documentaries, long length films, and occasionally shorts. Currently they screen at four venues every month. Now they come together with another film collective- the Belgian cinema Nova to present a festival of Indian and Belgian shorts and documentaries. The Cinema Nova is a single screen movie theatre in Brussels, which aims to give space to independent cinema. In the fall of 2005 Nova organized a festival dedicated to Indian films. Vikalp is now organizing a reciprocal festival which will highlight the similarities and differences in the concerns of independent film-makers across the two cultures.

Over 25 Belgian films on a range of subjects that deal with personal and political issues, will attempt to look at social reality and question the fundamentals of freedom and identity from a purely subjective point of view. Established filmmakers are going to rub shoulders with first time directors in the line-up. Boris Lehman, a vetran auteur of experimental cinema from Belgium will be presenting his films Muet Comme Une Carpe and Tentatives de se Decrire. The former tracks the journey of the geltite fish, a traditional dish for Ashkenazi Jews, from the pond to the plate. The journey confronts rituals, traditions and the mass extermination issue. The latter is a unique experiment about representation exploring if it is possible to describe oneself and others using the camera as a third eye and mirror. The film takes the shape of a docu-fictional portrait of the filmmaker from 1989 to 1995. While Lehman’s films are rooted in personal memory, Lienard, who belongs to the current generation of filmmakers, finds her subjects in young people institutionalized in asylum seeker’s centres, prisons and delinquent homes and forges a relationship with them in order to depict their confinement and confusions. The various different films showcase a variety of interesting experimental techniques as well. While Govartes’s camera creates an obsessive and dreamlike picture of natural elements in a post-industrial area, Baes’s film follows people on the streets of Prague with a Super 8 camera using the experimental process of pixilation to guide our eyes. Pazienza’s Espirit de Biere X-Rays a glass of beer and the man drinking it, to study the changes on Barley through fermentation and compare it with the small ways in which this man changes in the course of his meetings with people and Kika’s Roma Rushes presents Rome in sharp lights and rough images without a single edit. There is also a selection of films by young migrants from a filmmaking workshop. They present heart-rending portraits of the lives of immigrants from strife torn regions like Palestine and Iran in Europe. In addition forums have been organized to facilitate exchanges and debates between Indian and Belgian filmmakers and members of the two film collectives.

In the end the true worth of a festival like this is greater than line-up of events- for it has in it the power to consolidate and strengthen the spirit of filmmakers who are trying in small and large ways to subvert the system. Like Oliver Stone once said, “Forget the grand plan. Forget the master scheme. Forget control. That is the bleak but true basis of independent cinema. Inch by motherfuking inch we must, because we have no other choice.”

-Pragya Tiwari.

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Jun 11 2009
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Documentary Cinema, Indian Culture & Society

Ayodhya Gatha

Mumbai Mirror, Friday, December 14, 2007

“Ayodhya Revisited”

Vani Subramanium’s documentary , Ayodhya Gatha portyays what happened on December 6, that changed everything for some people

On the 6th of December each year, certain rituals are habitually played out to mark the demolition of a structure in a small town that cannot hope to plea its own identity after the entire nation’s history took a sharp turn around its quaint corners. Part of a minority mourns or seethes, a section of the majority celebrates an uncertain victory, politicians make more hay and the cross-bearers of intellect and culture hold exhibitions, screenings and seminars to mark the presence of sanity in the eclectic register of our times. One such screening in the city will showcase two shorts and a documentary on the 14th of this month. Tea-Break (by Srinivas Sunderrajan) uses the popular twist in the tale formula to spotlight the mind of a terrorist, disturbing in its familiarity. The Connection (by Rajashree) pours the syrup of humanity over thorny communal discords. But towering over fiction is Vani Subramanium’s documentary Ayodhya Gatha. She revisits the ill-fated town to understand what happened that day and thereafter, that changed everything for its 40000-odd residents. She carefully selects the people who will tell her chosen story and ensures they come across to us with more than simply their words. The pace of her film allows one to soak in the complete impact of the testimonies. A lot has been said on Ayodhya, but like the leaders who claimed the town, the commentators who criticized them, forgot to include in the high strung debate the voices of those who for centuries thought the town was nothing but their home town. The importance of Subramanium’s film lies in channeling that crucial neglected perspective. Both communities seem baffled at the furor over the structure. What bites is the betrayal and loss of life, dignity, peace, identity and property.  Even while confessing unwitting complicity or complaining of their losses they seem strangely detached from the process that entrenched a bloody legacy. Subramanium’s visuals are carefully framed and rich with a kind of aesthetic that does not offend the subject but graces the medium. She makes her points like gentle observations that are happy to run in more than one direction at a time. The commentary is narrated and written well, smoothly sliding beneath the visuals, emerging strongly only in places where the camera cannot go.

Even though her quest through the film ends at a point where there is little hope for the disfigured town, the personal histories she records are narrated with a kind of common sense that is obviously inherent in us even if susceptible to political correctness or propaganda. One is left hoping that if only the sense that she brings forth could be preserved and assimilated, it might one day silence the disgrace of faith turned against humanity. Until that day films like these might do their bit to placate the faith of a minority who refused to leave this country believing it was home; and relieve the shame of the majority whose faith has been usurped and used as a tool for terror by members of their own community.

PRAGYA TIWARI.

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Jun 11 2009
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Documentary Cinema

An Inconvenient Truth

(This article first appeared in the Mumbai Mirror)

Davis Guggenheim’s documentary on global warming takes us through a power-point lecture-demonstration that Al-Gore, (America’s ex-presidential candidate), has been presenting world over. This is interspersed with stark, arresting images of the effects of the phenomenon worldwide and occasionally a glimpse from Gore’s personal journey. With the lec-dem taking the lion’s share of the 96 minutes, the film comes across more as an educational tool than a cinema-verite feature. But it is this no-nonsense realism that makes the film an ideal vehicle for its very pressing issues.

Contrary to misconception the film is not about Al-Gore. Although it is as enriched as compromised by his association. He is the known face of the film and perhaps its main draw. But it cannot be overlooked that some very urgent facts stand to be dismissed as politically motivated simply because he is presenting them.

However, Gore comes prepared for the potential attack. He presents his arguments without being patronizing, boring or dry.

Gore never cosily assumes that we’re with him in accepting the theory, and instead lays out the evidence piece by comprehensible piece to build to a conclusion that is hard to dispute.

He has all the graphs and charts and time-lapsed photographs and peer-reviewed scientific studies he needs to underscore his message about where the planet is heading. He debunks the theory that these changes are “cyclical” and confronts head-on the “doubts” skeptics may have about the issue.

In the course of Gore’s lecture tour comes the unsurprising news that Bush aide Philip Cooney routinely red-penciled the conclusions of impartial government scientists; when exposed, he resigned and took a job with ExxonMobil. But despite his clear agenda, Gore is careful not to turn this film into a party-political broadcast for Al Gore or the US Democratic party. He presents saving the planet as a moral, cross-party, worldwide issue rather than casting stones at the current US administration (despite the fact that he has good reason to). Facts and observations that could point a direct finger are few, far-between and presented objectively. The closest he gets to political commentary is to rhetorically ask, “Is it possible we should prepare for any threats other than terrorism?”

That’s not to say that the film is flawless. It is conveniently soft on its examination of the Clinton-Gore administration’s less than glowing record on the environment. And it does put Gore on a pedestal, with interludes about his personal history that feel less than relevant and carefully designed to elicit sympathy for the man. That said, his spiritual journey is indeed transparent and compelling in its own right.

The film is by no means all you need to know about global warming, but like all good pedagogy, whets the appetite for further study, which is a very desirable achievement in this case.

Besides, is ultimately hard to fault a film that for all its dismal urgency does not leave you devastated by its implications. Gore ends the film with a series of practical solutions for the problem, convincing you that you can do something about it.

It is surprisingly absorbing for its format and even entertaining in bits, no less thanks to Gore’s disarming sprinklings of humour. He introduces himself saying, “I used to be the next president of the USofA.” One can only hope he gets the vote on this one.

Pragya Tiwari

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