Festival Diary. Day Three-April 2

After a day of films that cast institutional violence in sharp relief, Day Three of the 8th Kolkata People’s Film Festival (KPFF) started with the vigour and energy of the past two days. With the onset of the weekend, we had an early audience presence well before 10 a.m., interacting in small groups, exploring the art installations, books and films. 

The screenings started with Kalam, a short fiction film. Set against the backdrop of the Nepalese civil war, Kalam, name based on the titular character, is a story about a football-loving boy who dreams to participate at the district-level under-14 tournament. The Maoists recruit his friends and peers and Kalam’s family wants him to travel to India with his father, a migrant worker in Bombay. His family needs the money. Kalam resists. The director portrays with a disturbing beauty, Kalam and his friends’ innocence amidst the brewing violence. Soon the army kills a renowned comrade. In a poignant scene, Kalam and his friends re-enact the comrades’ death with haunting innocence and humour. This film makes us re-evaluate the comfort and privilege we enjoy while children of conflict casually pick up a stick and ask their friends to act better while getting fake-shot by the make-believe gun.

Kalam’s innocence is somewhat carried forward in the next film, City Girls, a short documentary by Priya Thuvassery where she follows two young women aspiring to live their dream life in Delhi. Umra and Kulsum, the film’s subjects, are from a small town in Uttar Pradesh. Umra always wanted to go to Delhi and live the “glamorous” life of the urban girls that she would see in films and on social media. After convincing her family for years, Umra finally secured a job and moved to Delhi in 2019. To flee the pressure of marriage, her friend Kulsum soon moves to Delhi to stay with her. Influenced by perceptions of women’s lifestyle in the city, Kulsum and Umra style themselves – straightening their hair, slipping into jeans, even if they were uncomfortable. Their efforts bore fruit when friends back home would compliment them for looking like a “Dilliwali” (Delhite). But life isn’t always glamorous in the city. While navigating an unfriendly city, the friends, also dealt with street harassment. But these trials do not send the women back to their town. They do not want to trade this perceived freedom for anything. Through the documentary, the director shows the trials and tribunals of two young women and how they re-build or reimagine themselves in their new space. 

Anonymous, directed by Mithunchandra Chaudhuri, spotlights the construction industry in India, which employs the largest number of laborers outside agriculture. The film is located in Pune, which builds the highest number of residential apartments, and draws in approximately 4 lakhs construction workers, from Bihar, Orissa, UP, Chattisgarh, Jharkhand, and West Bengal. While not the central theme, the film also gives us glimpses of the agrarian distress that drives people from villages to construction work in urban centers. We also see the chains of slave labor across brick kilns, residential construction sites, and debt burden. Importantly, the film documents how entire families – breastfeeding mothers, children – are conscripted into these slave labor conditions, creating vicious cycles. 

From this site in Pune which foregrounds the unlivability and unviability of the contemporary world, the next film we screened offered possibilities of an alternative future. Jadav Molai Payeng (The forest, The Protector and Harsh Monsoon), directed by Asutosh Kashyap, eponymously follows Jadav Payeng, who has the epithet of the Forest Man of India. Jadav Payeng, also known by his nickname, Molai, is credited with planting and maintaining trees along the sandbar of the Brahmaputra river, turning the region into a forest reserve of over 1,360 acres – home to Bengal tigers, Indian rhinoceros, deer, rabbits, elephants, monkeys, and several varieties of birds, including a large number of vultures. Travelling with Molai, the filmmaker Asutosh Kasyap and his team offer breath-taking imagery of the Brahmaputra river and the highlands that serve as a platform for the animals during floods. Molai shares the challenges of maintaining this ‘community forest’ and asks us to reflect on what knowledge must we create and impart in our education systems to re-think the way we relate with nature and its conservation. 

Akashpradeep (Skylamp), directed by Pavel Paul, is a film that incorporates elements of magic realism, satire, and a segue into stark reality. This is the incredibly harsh reality crafted by the citizens’ registry—a systemic injustice that has led to suicides, panic, ostracization—as a result of a political determination to create a biased and divisive social structure. What begins as a playful ‘ghost story’, a child’s curiosity and a parent’s indulgence, moves seamlessly into a story of migration and a search for identity determined by the all-powerful ‘Papers.’ From the granddaughter folding paper boats, mirroring her grandfather’s past that really isn’t the past, now that his son must at all cost prove his identity, to family dynamics and the feeling of being a refugee in one’s own present, Akashpradeep brings out the desperation of a family in the face of a hostile nation-state. In the conversation with the audience that followed the screening, Paul spoke about the possible fear rooted in the middle class – the fear of being ‘found out’ for not having papers and how he had drawn inspiration from his personal life. 

We resumed post-lunch with a few technical glitches. But with a post-pandemic determination, we forged ahead with Cocoon, a documentary directed by Kshama Padalkar. Kshama crafted this film during the first lockdown when overnight, lives changed. She chronicled her family during a time when people were forced to stay at home and renegotiate relationships and interpersonal dynamics in a stifling, no-end-in-sight situation while enacting bombastic performative gestures as decreed by the powers that be. Apartment buildings lit up with diyas, families banged utensils and cheered from their balconies against the dire realities of isolation and complete disruption of lives. The filmmaker likens the situation to Waiting for Godot, the symbolism bordering on the absurd. 

While Cocoon touched on the loss of connection, Ruuposh, directed by Mohd. Fehmeed and Zeeshan Amir Khan, takes us on a journey where the protagonist attempts to re-establish it. Fehmeed and his mother live in Shaheen Bagh. Parts of their family, separated by the partition, now live on either side of the border. Fehmeed begins the process of reconnecting, fraught with doubt and anxiety—not just about whether his relatives will receive or respond to the letter, but also, given the political situation in the country, what the possible outcomes of this could be. The fear behind a joyous, emotional journey tinges this film. 

Junkiri, directed by Prince Prasad, also dealt with the pain of separation and loss of identity—through a moment in the lives of a Nepali migrant family and an elderly man (the father). The elder person suffers from Alzheimer’s and clings onto hazy memories of his life in Nepal. The feeling of home, not being home. Of being called names in school. Being stripped of identity and then being told to leave. Indignities that remove any sense of belonging. On a day when the old man leaves the house, both the dynamics and the desperation that the family feels are played out. His son and grandson go out to look for him while a small mob chases a man, screaming at him to go back to Pakistan. When the old man is found, the police tell his son to go back to Nepal. Junkiri interweaves memories with indignities and hurt, politics, and biases. 

Each of these three films gives the viewers an intimate look at isolation, disorientation, and the sheer loss of belonging (if there ever was any) that is faced by those who—in the first case —have their lives changed with no end in sight and for those who carry a history of loss and are bogged down by the state machinery in the second two instances. 

Ruuposh and Junkiri speak of memories—through photographs, places and people once close and now, with receding coherence. While both deal with memories of the older generation, they also give a sense of how the next generation copes with the memories—through different lenses—some poignant and some pragmatic. This conversation around memory continues in the subsequent films. 

Holy Rights, directed by Farha Khatun, follows Safia, a deeply religious Muslim woman from Bhopal. Safia believes that women are denied equality and justice in the community because of the discriminatory interpretation of Sharia, the Muslim personal law. The film documents her journey as she fights and challenges the status quo. 

Farha Khatun believes that with the closing walls around the world with rising Islamophobia, growing violence against women, and a fascist government that increasingly curbs basic human rights against citizens, any attempt to talk about discrimination within religion is often dismissed even by liberals as providing ammunition to the right-wing or becomes pushed to a later agenda in the call for unity against fascism. In the post-screening conversations, Farha criticized the appropriation of Muslim women’s struggle by the ruling party and emphasized the need to strengthen the fight against discrimination, patriarchy, and fascism.

After a short break, we resumed our evening screenings with Taangh (longing), directed by Bani Singh. Bani asks: What does it feel to give up one’s ‘watan’ for the nation? How much does it bleed, and for how long when a living body is hammered repeatedly and chopped into pieces? Taangh weaves together the loss of a parent with a nation’s violent colonial and post-colonial histories, friendships, love, and sports. Against the backdrop of partition, newly independent India’s first hockey team defeats England, the erstwhile coloniser, to win the Gold at the 1948 London Olympics. Bani’s father, Grahanandan Singh, was part of the iconic team. Six decades later when he suffers a stroke at the age of 84, his tenacious will to recover inspires his daughter to go on a journey to discover the champion he was before she was born. Bani doesn’t shy away from sharing a personal story. As she emphasized in the post-screening discussions, “it is very important to capture the personal stories. We are giving away our identities to others, who then narrate and recreates a different version of the story.” And through these personal stories, she examines what partition entailed, what lies beneath hyper-nationalism and blatant Pakistan phobia. Bani also highlighted the politics of archives, which distort access for postcolonial writers, academics and filmmakers. She reflected that she made the film for 50 years later, anticipating a generation that has encountered revisions and erasures of history. Bani works as a space designer and a teacher, and this is her first film. 

Our exciting Day 3 at KPFF2022 drew to a close with the screening of Shankar Arjun Dhotre’s Potra, a poignant tale of gender inequality depicted through the chronicle of a young girl caught in the malicious web of ritualistic oppression and a culture of widespread gender-based violence. Through its impressive cinematography, the film speaks eloquently on how the onset of adolescence puts the kibosh on Geeta’s hopes and aspirations to make something of her life. Puberty is the harbinger of repression and confinement for the girl child. ‘Potra’, Marathi for ‘raw sorghum’, carefully makes an analogy between the ripening of the sorghum and the girl child attaining pubescence.

Dhotre’s use of lyrical and visual metaphors accentuated the film’s tone, highlighting the coercive, semi-invisible treatment the girl child experiences. Music plays an important role in the movie’s narration and takes the story forward. Verses such as “her in-laws will take the lead now” and “the gardener will soon follow” tragically underscore the journey of the girl child from foetus to adolescence while amplifying her complete lack of autonomy and the prevailing patriarchal hegemony. The director’s nuanced detailing of an Indian family’s quirks and superstitions when a girl gets her period is remarkable. Overnight, Geeta’s life turns upside down; from being one of the brightest kids in school to not being allowed to go to school, she struggles to navigate her family’s newly imposed rules that restrict her access to the world outside. We see the sharp contrast between what is taught in her class (gender parity and equity) versus what she experiences outside her classroom. The interplay of scenes between Geeta’s constricted life inside the house versus her brother’s unhindered wayfaring outdoors distinctly emphasizes the gender inequalities and discrimination. Potra is a dangerous and painful reminder of the gender-based crimes transcending class and economy that are used as instruments of oppression to subjugate the growth of millions of girls and women like Geeta. 

We concluded Day Three with a committed audience, photographs with filmmakers, and excited conversations. We look forward to the final day of the Kolkata People’s Film Festival with anticipation and enthusiasm. Join us! Bring your friends and support us generously. 

Report: Utsa, Devi, Mayurakshi, Koel, Paroma

Photo: Sayan, Nivedita 

Kolkata People’s Film Festival 

31 March-3 April

Uttam Manch (Hazra)

Entry Free