Little Cinema Diaries- I

We all watch films. Some of us study them, theorising extensively on frames, actions and dialogue. Some of us watch them simply as a source of entertainment. Films are in fact, deeply polarising as well as unifying. Depending of course, on the kind of film you are watching.

I grew up with films. Of various kinds. Some I was made to watch—like Gone With the Wind. Some I sneaked in to watch—like Qayamat Se Qayamat Tak. Many I learnt from. Free Willy taught me a little about whales. Akira Kurosawa’s films taught me ways of seeing. But I do remember one thing. That as a child, there was never any discussion about the film. What I understood from it, what I remembered of it. At least never as a group.

Little Cinema, an initiative of People’s Film Collective attempts to do that. Take films to young people. Films that work on different levels. After each film, is an all important discussion. What was the film about? Did the audience relate with anything in the film? The initiative uses film to develop critical thinking in young people, more often than not, about issues that are current and relevant in their lives.

One such screening was at Peyarabagan slum, the second largest in Kolkata. It was my first ever open air screening—on the street, in the thick of things. We arrived a couple of hours early to set up and were almost immediately greeted by a group of girls. This group became our self-appointed guardians, volunteering to go house to house, calling for people to come and watch the films. The children were fascinated by the mike (naturally, who wouldn’t be?) and soon, we had some impromptu performances.

As dusk settled in and the light was finally suitable for the screening, we began. Each film elicited reactions from the children. No holds barred uninhibited reactions. Reactions that might have earned them a rebuke in school—honest reactions. They were boisterous, fun and loud. I found myself sitting on the tarpaulin sheet with one child on my lap, the second leaning against me munching biscuits and a third whispering observations into my ear—was the fish really magical, he asked. Did those boys really kill the other for not accepting something that was wrong? He didn’t wait for answers to his questions, clearly making up his own mind about what was going on. I was happy to let go.

I had to shout to make myself heard. But I realised that it wasn’t really necessary. Each child watched each film. They understood, they questioned. They did not like. They liked. And what was very important was that they shared. They expressed their thoughts later on, on sheets of paper, mainly through art. This again, is fascinating.

Film does that—it reaches out. And affects everyone on different levels and intensities. And taking such films to children should have a lasting impact. In one way or the other. Encouraging them to think critically and express themselves. And have a whole lot of fun doing it.

Report: Paroma Sengupta

Little Cinema, as part of its summer-long programme of travel took an assortment of films to Kaikala gram, Hooghly, a village situated a few stations from Singur. We had been invited by the local organisation Kaikala Chetana, which has been working on issues of alternative education in the area for more than twenty years now. The organisation has a reach of about six hundred children scattered over several villages in the area. Last year in April, Little Cinema had travelled to Kaikala for the first time on the invitation of the same organisation. On that occasion, the theatre group Swabhav Kolkata had also travelled with us in order to perform their play “Hath Ghoralei Golpo”, based on two animal fables. The programme had been immensely successful, as we gathered from conversations with the villagers in the later weeks – with children discussing the details of the play, singing its songs and remembering images from the films for weeks to come.

This year again, we took up the invitation from Kaikala Chetana and took some of our films to the village. We took the afternoon train to the village, where we had the good fortune of seeing the small school and travelling library that Kaikala Chetana ran in the place. There was also an open courtyard where children could play, walls on which they had painted, and a small garden with trees that children had decorated. We then travelled to the location where the screening was supposed to take place. Unlike the clearing in the middle of the village, where we had hoisted the screen last year, this one proved to be a more challenging location, technically speaking. More than a hundred children and around the same number of adults had gathered in an open field, where we pitched our screen on two bamboo poles. It was quite difficult to complete the set up, first because of the intense heat and then after sundown, owing to the speed of the wind. The laptop had heated up in the 42 degree sun all through the train journey and took a while to start up. The screen had to be weighed down with bricks. The sound box and board had been forgotten by the organizers, and they appeared later on a van rickshaw. There was the danger of some unpredictability with the electricity and we were worried about surge protectors that could guard the projector. Most of all, everyone was worried that there might be storm, in which case, given the speed of the Nor’wester, it would have been hard to protect the screen from being damaged. However, after some anxiety, the set up was completed and it seemed there would be no mishaps because of the weather.

The field had by now been laid with jute and tarpaulin sheets, and a crowd of about a hundred children had gathered. After one of the organizers from Kaikala Chetana introduced Little Cinema and explained what we do, Subhashish Goon took over on behalf of People’s Film Collective. The first film that was shown was from Brazil. It was called The Boy, the Slum and the Pan’s Lids and was of roughly 5 minutes duration. The film had the children in splits and they clapped along with the music that came at the end. The next film was Neighbours, of around the same duration, from Canada and this too made the children laugh a lot. The next two films were Satyajit Ray’s Two and Jafar Panahi’s Accordion. Most of these films were without dialogues, or had very little conversation. In the case of Panahi’s film, in spite of the fact that the children were neither able to understand the spoken language nor read the subtitles in English, they were able to explain the story perfectly in the discussion that followed.

On the way back on the train, we discuss amongst ourselves of the strange power of the language of cinema, since this is something we have noticed before during our programmes. Language was no barrier. It was the images that spoke. Next, played the music video Gaon Chodab Nahi, to which the children clapped and swayed, and even danced. When asked, they were able to tell us that the song was about protecting villages, forests and lands from the greedy hands of the ‘ingrej’ (‘angrez’/British colonial powers). True enough, we thought, when we consider the neocolonial operations of global capitalism and the force of ‘development’ that functions as its primary weapon. We made sure we simply listened to the children and did not correct them in anyway. There were discussions after every film. The last and longest film was Superman of Malegaon, which the children enjoyed in parts – even though it may have been too long to sustain their attention throughout. When we left, we distributed envelopes with letter papers and stamps so that the children could write/paint their responses to our programme and send them back to us. Over all, we feel it was a productive and enriching experience for Little Cinema, and we hope to be able to go back again.

Report: Trina Banerjee

Pictures: Kunal Chakraborty