Festival Diary. Day Two-April 1

After a successful first day, the second day of the 8th Kolkata People’s Film Festival began with an enthusiastic early audience and a selection of new Indian fiction and documentary films. First up, we screened Kohrra (Fog), directed by Ribhu Gosh. The film portrays homosexuality in a village in Haryana, where heteronormative ideas violently shape gender and sexuality. The film is anchored around an emotionally-charged account of a school-going boy who struggles with his father’s aggression. Violating the heteronormativity prevailing in his village, he turns for comfort and love to his best friend, with difficult consequences. 

Bhabo Nadir Paare (On the Edge of Life), directed by Nikhilesh Mattoo, traces Chopol Parmani, a do-tara musician who lives in the Sundarbans delta, along the India-Bangladesh border. Chopol also works as a fisherman and a barber to make ends meet. The film weaves together Chopol, his family, the land, and the river. Rivetingly, the film is replete with music from the region. In particular, the strains of Bhawaiya folklore – common to the Assam-North Bengal-Bangladesh region, run through the film. It was also fascinating to follow how the river and the boat featured prominently as metaphors in the songs from the region.  

Aadya Gudya (The Next Twelve months), directed by Nazir Khan, explores how young men seek a suitable bride in a village in Maharashtra. While a central theme is the inability to find a match for the men, the film also provides insights into contemporary transitions, uncertainties and insecurities that people confront amidst agrarian distress and migration. Men are challenged when there are more uneducated women or women who prefer servicemen over farmers, given the agrarian distress. The film primarily portrays the men’s perspectives, as they try to rationalize why these norms have changed. 

Sridhar Sudhir’s film ‘Moving Upstream: Ganga’ was the fourth film of the day. It is a tale of connecting with people. In a very unique methodology of learning about people’s stories, the director starts walking. He starts walking along the river and while walking he talks with the people he meets. Before this, he had embarked on a journey of cycling but he felt he was unable to talk while cycling. Like the flow of the river the livelihoods of the people are affected by climate conditions, and changing state of environmental negligence and not to mention the anti-people policies of the state. Watching these vast riverscapes on the big screen is not only a visually calming experience but gives a sense of walking together and belonging. 

Rajan Kathet’s Bare Trees in the Mist is a story set in a small village in Nepal. It is a story of single women’s longing and waiting. It is about how single women are raising their children on their own while the men are away in some unknown country for work. Dilemma, desperation,  longing for a brief moment of happiness when the husbands bring small gifts from the faraway lands, loneliness, lack of men, waiting. This is a film about waiting- waiting for something tactile that can assure the presence of men and their homecoming, if at all. It beautifully captures the emotional turmoil of single mothers working alone to bring up their children as the husbands migrate to some unknown Arab countries for work. The lack of information about the place and the condition of work that the men of the village do and the women’s anxiety over it, add a hint of sadness to the beautiful misty landscape of the mountainous terrain of Nepal.

1065 villages in Uttarakhand have been permanently turned into ghost villages due to mass migration. Semla, a small village in the northern Himalayan foothills, which had 50 families once,  is left with only seven residents. Two women struggle with the choice to leave for alienated city life or the choice to stay back in a lonely village. This is the premise of Srishti Lakhera’s Ek The Gaon (Once Upon A Village), the 6th screening of the day. The documentary ends with how the last remaining villagers had to leave for the city despite wishing otherwise. This tale of migration and poverty, and lack of employment opportunities, is a reflection of the failure of the state. 

As the migrant crisis hit the nation in 2020 due to the lockdown, we witnessed the precarity of migrant workers. They suddenly became visible. This visibility compelled many to think about multifaceted issues plaguing the country’s internal migrants like the right to food, ration, vote etc. Prashna (Question), the seventh film of the second day, directed by Santosh Ram, also brings up the issues of migrant workers but from a different angle. It urges us to think about the Right to Education. The short fiction Prashna, on the face of it, is a film about a mother’s struggle to educate her son. Ganga and her husband, both work as seasonal migrants as sugar cane cutters. Their work often takes them away from their village. In the absence of anyone else to take of their son, the 10-year-old has to migrate with his parents for months, missing school. Ganga wants her son to have a formal education. Despite all the challenges of an apathetic school, poverty, and discouraging neighbours, Ganga struggles to keep Ganu in school. That is the film’s premise. But if we dig deep, it is about structural inequalities plaguing the internal seasonal migrants, and how the Indian education system is discriminatory towards informal contractual labour and their children. Through this systemic exclusion, the institutions in power keep the precarious labour and their precarity alive. The neoliberal economy promises a better life if every individual makes a very individualistic effort. But Ganga and her son, despite Ganga’s efforts, are trapped in a systemic vicious cycle that keeps the informal contractual labours and their rightlessness in the same state generation after generation. 

The next film Dhulo (The Scapegoat) is a short fiction directed by Tathagata Ghosh, is a hard-hitting film against patriarchy and the rise of right-wing patriarchy. The film traces the life of Neeta, a domestic violence survivor, in rural Bengal. She is regularly met with violence from her husband, an Islamophobic man with bloodthirst. When her Muslim neighbour, Ali, goes missing, she suspects her husband of murdering Ali. Neeta’s friendship with Ali’s three months pregnant wife Topu leads her to murder her husband in turn. The film shows how women are dealing with and subverting patriarchy in a time of rising right-wing violence. It also gives a glimmer of hope that, maybe, strong female solidarity is what our time needs to stop the rising onslaught against women, minorities, Dalits, and other marginalised sections. The film’s director engaged in a brief conversation after the screening where we discussed the influence of current Indian politics on this film. Events that shook the national conscience like Akhlak’s brutal lynching in 2015, and the subsequent increase of mob lynchings in the country, leading up to the draconian National Register of Citizenship (NRC) and the Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA)- all had a role to play in Tathagata’s decision to create Dhulo. 

Starting with shocking footage of a rape scene, the next film Cycle, a short fiction by Devashish Makhija, tells the story of a young tribal girl Bela who joined the rebels in an undisclosed forest land after being brutalised by security forces. The film, through a series of footages, tried to tell the audience how violence produces violence. And, when the violence is institutional-in this case at the hands of armed forces- women like Bela had no other recourse but to join the rebels in search of justice. The hard-hitting film was followed up by a conversation with Dibakar Saha, the sound recordist of Cycle. The audience and Dibakar engaged in a spirited conversation about the making and techniques of the film. Post the screening, during the break, the audience continued the conversation over cups of tea. 

Filmmakers have hitherto tried to reconstruct and narrate the great events of the past, the point however is to deconstruct the telling of history as we know it. The 2nd day of the 8th Kolkata People’s Film Festival came to an end with a film that in a way redefines what a film is and what it is supposed to mean. 

The filmmaker and historian Uma Chakravati needs no elaborate introduction, especially at KPFF. Three of her films have been screened at the festival and several other screenings at Kolkata People’s Film Festival. 

Yeh Lo Bayaan Humaare (And We Were There) is a film about the idealism, passion and jail time of young women coming of age in the late 1960s, seeking to change the world, and throwing themselves into movements sweeping parts of India. Hounded for their activities, tortured by the police and incarcerated in jails, these women found a camaraderie that went beyond the revolutionary ideology that had inspired them. As the late sixties gave way to the seventies, the Emergency was imposed across India, and the number of women who went to jail for their political idealism expanded to many cities, small towns, and villages across the country.

The decade is remembered. As the filmmaker herself mentioned this was the decade of revolution. The youth, the ‘the children of independence’ didn’t like the world as they found it. This was exactly 20 years after the Indian Independence and the politics of the national movement never came into breathing reality. The Nation had failed Its people. The leaders, politicians, philosophers and social activists of the independence era had failed the children. Fuming with anger and a zeal to topple all that’s dated and rotting, people wanted to build a different world. Since there’s no one known way to the different world, people took different ways. 

Bengal saw the Naxalbari uprising in 1967. Only a few years later, on 5th June 1974, Jay Prakash Narayan addressed a large crowd in Gandhi Maidan Patna and declared “This is a revolution, friends! We are not here merely to see the Vidhan Sabha dissolved. That is only one milestone on our journey. But we have a long way to go… After 27 years of freedom, people of this country are wracked by hunger, rising prices, corruption… oppressed by every kind of injustice… it is a Total Revolution we want, nothing less!” 

In a way, the breaking and reshaping of Indian politics began in the late sixties. 

However, history has been terribly unkind to women who burnt, suffered and hardened in the same fire. 

Uma Chakravarti has set out to put this right. 

And in this journey to alter the face of history, Chakravarti has also redefined that the moving image is perfectly suited to present a researched telling of political history. 

It is often said that those who don’t know history are condemned to repeat it. The reality of this film is a haunting-throbbing presence in current times. 

As Uma herself mentions in the post-screening discussions, we are living in never-ending dark times. The shroud of stability of the post-emergency period has proven to be completely false. The shrinking of democratic spaces and the rise of fascist forces that had shaken the sixties are in fact back again with sharper claws and teeth. Countless activists and intellectuals have been imprisoned under the current regime. Student activists like Debangana Kalita and Natasha Narwal, Socio-political activists like Soma Sen, Sudha Bharadwaj are arrested under UAPA and left without court proceedings for months and years. Chakravarti says, “I am obsessed with prison. This is far beyond anything we saw in 1967-77”. She says she believes that we have a very weak civil society that doesn’t learn from history. That has become even weaker in the days that have passed. 

The jail is the worst place for the right to be human. The repression faced by these women in those days further reminds the abysmal conditions of the jails even today. 

The film includes valuable archives from the 1970s in the form of film clips, documents, fact-finding Reports, news stories, diaries, and assorted personal archives. 

However, the director has somehow managed to bring out the passionately emotional side of things. The film rests on facts and rigorous investigation. Yet the emotional, the human side of things never go amiss. The director duo doesn’t shy away from using haunting melancholic cries from Bimal Roy’s Bandini and Do Beegha Zameen. 

The fifteen women from Bengal, Bihar, Delhi, Bombay, Hyderabad and Bangalore are never reduced to a mere teller of facts. They become living memoirs and bearers of haunting reality. 

It is the story of their resistance and refusal to be broken by the repression unleashed by the state. It is also a poignant story of reflection, loss and death in those troubled times.

Uma Chakravarti joined in the post-screening discussions with the editor and co-director Priyanka Chhabra.

Report by: Devi, Utsa, Shreyatama, Mayurakshi

Photos: Nivedita 

Kolkata People’s Film Festival

31 March-3 April 

Uttam Manch (Hazra)

Entry Free