Festival Diary. Day Three-Jan 22, 2023

We kickstarted the third day of the Kolkata People’s Film Festival with “The Riyalists”, directed by Kesang Tseten. “The Riyalists” traces four young Nepali migrant men, the subjects of Tseten’s 2009 film, “In Search of the Riyal”. In 2009, the men were bound for the Gulf and met during a basic training in scaffolding. A decade later, “The Riyalists” follows up on these four youth. As the film reminds us, while the opulence in the middle east is well-known, the labour undertaken off-stage, quite literally in the scaffolding, is invisible. 2-3 million Nepali workers have been doing unskilled work, from maintenance work at airports to construction work, in the Gulf States and Malaysia at abysmally low daily wages.

The film documents the families’ anxieties around their survival and the lack of adequate employment opportunities that push people to pursue precarious work abroad. Simultaneously, the workers also shoulder the family’s and community’s aspirations for prosperity. Thus, they engage in sacrificial work – living in packed dormitories, working under extreme heat, facing delays in pay, physical and verbal abuse, and living for years away from family – to meet these needs and aspirations. Indeed, the orientation sessions they go through in their home countries hint about the dark futures in labour camps, the instruction not to engage in politics and trade unions in the host country, and so on. One worker nonchalantly described the ‘good work’ he had to forsake at the airport – which involved pay for fixed 8 hours of work and 8 hours of overtime. Two workers are from the Dalit community, and we see how caste intersects and circumscribes occupational opportunities across the Indian subcontinent. Overall, the film is an important reminder of the large-scale, invisibilized work performed by already precarious bodies to make global cities like Dubai and Doha shine.

The second screening, “Don’t Worry About India”, directed by Nama Filmcollective, was a tongue-in-cheek film that looks at democracy in India from the lens of an upper-class family. The narrator is an Indian film-maker based in Europe who returns to Modi’s New India and follows the build-up to the 2019 election at multiple sites across the country. The film follows the arc of a period of innocence for the narrator through his childhood in what he believed was a secular India, through a journey of self-discovery and reflection. Turning the camera lens inwards into his family, he tracks the mundane and the eventful as his family refuses to talk politics while maintaining their golf routines. Simultaneously, the domestic service staff working for the family for years speak openly about their lived experiences and wisdom on electoral politics. Ripe with light moments of hilarity and the eye for the absurd in everyday life – such as the Prime Minister’s interest in hats – the film raises profound questions. At one moment, reflecting on the multiple contradictions in the city of Kashi, the narrator asks: “What was the point of a sacred river if not everyone can swim in it?” The film takes us through the mayhem of the world’s biggest democracy’s electoral process, steeped in widening inequalities and Hindutva hatemongering, even as the spirit of democracy is indeed the brandy distributed before elections.

While the film is located from the narrator’s acknowledged privileged position, it gives abundant space to the voice of ordinary lives as they describe how they attend different rallies and vote for whom they like or divide the votes among family members. After the film screening, two subjects featured in the film joined the conversation on stage with Arjun Jr, who was representing Nama Filmcollective. They shared their views on how the bhed-bhaav (differences) between ameer-gareeb (rich-poor) and the badey log-chotey log (big people, small people) appears as a never-ending one. “Don’t Worry About India” is the first film from the Namacollective, a group of filmmakers in India and Europe formed in 2019. Going by this film, we have plenty to look forward to from the Nama Filmcollective.

After a quick break for lunch, we reconvened for “Footprints”, a part of the New Indian Fiction section. As class conscious citizens, we have successfully created barriers and are often proud for it or are happy to live with it, without caring for the consequences it might bring. These barriers are mostly invisible in nature but tangible in terms of the way they affect the minds. Minds which are the most delicate.

In our society, domestic helps find themselves on the other side of the barrier. They are accused of the minutest of errors and treated like low grade citizens. They are not supposed to sit on the couch or eat from the same plates or use the same washrooms. They are often made to change their clothes on entering their workplaces which in turn are our homes.

“Footprints” by Tathagata Ghosh tells the story of a slum-dwelling single mother who works as a domestic help in an upper middle-class home which the director carefully terms as ‘dysfunctional’. The tension which exists in her slum finds a presence in that home in some other form. One fine day, she finds herself in the midst of a difficult situation which is difficult to not pay heed to. Gathering all her courage, she takes a stand and makes her point in a deafening but stern and low voice as her ‘masters’ heads hang in shame.

One of Tathagata’s signature styles is the use of melodrama and he doesn’t shy away from using it here as well. Extreme close ups, exchange of glances in tensed situations, high pitched dialogue exchange, exaggerated use of sound effects all find their way into this film. In his words, he has seen the actions enacted in the film in close quarters all throughout his life and this film is his way of undoing the injustice meted out to the working class. The last dialogue in the film is bound to leave the audience in a kind
of shock. “And I don’t want to live in a state of utopia’, says the Director

“Hridoy Bosot” is an intensely provocative film that follows Suvana Sudeb, a transgender person, as she embarks on a journey to ‘womanhood’ through a gender affirmation surgery. The film, directed by Sankhajit Biswas (Sankha), gains rare access to this transformative process and the family’s anxieties and dilemmas as their ‘son’ grapples with her gender identity. Suvana sharply articulates her discomfort with the category of ‘womanhood,’ given all the unviable, loaded patriarchal expectations of marriage, childbirth, rape, and abuse women are subjected to in contemporary society. During the conversation that followed the screening, Sankha shared that he built on the learnings, mistakes, and reflections from making his first film, “Dui Dhuranir Golpo” (‘In-between Days’), also on the transgender community in Kolkata. He noted that particularly when a filmmaker is portraying a community to which he does not belong, it demands deeper ethical commitments and openness to the community’s atmosphere. As much as the film shows Suvana’s personal and social vulnerabilities as she navigates a suffocating heteronormative society, it also surfaces the possibilities of queer kinship, collective, and love.

“Aalam” directed by Deependra Kumar Yadav revolves around the story of a widowed man living with the trauma of his painful past. His everyday life has been completely transformed after the CAA-NRC riots. We see him living alone in the house where once a family of three resided. We witness his everyday life comprising of mundane activities in which each day looks alike. Life for him has come to a standstill, but the world around him moves unaffected. The noise erupting from the machines at his workplace and the sounds from cooking and cleaning at his house pierces through the silence that has engulfed his life. We see drawings on the walls of his house, and toys lying on the table around the corner, all of which are an agonizing reminder of his horrifying past. All of which makes the loss salient. For him, the alikeness of his days, and the silence of his once-buzzing household is an inescapable and hard-hitting reality of his present-day life.

In his attempt to make peace and move on, he tries selling off his property but there too struggles to await him. Memories of his past haunt him as we see him going from one office to the other only to hear the same thing. Toward the end we watch him steal a glance at his house after which he leaves with his belongings. An audience member shared- ‘The sound beats during Aalam’s sleep seemed very powerful; one could feel the jitters of his traumatic past. Although his past isn’t shown in the movie, the toys on the floor and the scattered things in the house give a strong image that he has lost a lot of himself all along’.

Yadav brings to us glimpses of the aftermath of the CAA-NRC protests and riots. The film makes us ponder over the implications and harsh reality of protests under the current fascist regime. The ongoing suppression of political dissent and protests sheds light on contemporary India where even disagreements and political satire are labelled as acts of terror. Where newly formed laws that are often pushed through are weaponized to dismantle fundamental constitutional rights. In this new India, we feel compelled to ask- What happens after slogans and chants erupting from the protest site fade into silence? What happens to those who returned to homes that may never be the same? Who will protest for them?

“Clouds of Monsoon” directed by Ketan Kuril, brings to light the precarity of migrant workers during the COVID-19 lockdown. The sudden announcement of a nationwide lockdown amidst the pandemic greatly increased the scope of human misery, especially for the poor and migrants. Starvation alongside the COVID-19 virus was responsible for countless undocumented deaths.

Mahesh a migrant worker from Uttar Pradesh staying in Mumbai, is struggling to make ends meet. Rendered jobless during the pandemic, Mahesh is now in a desperate search for a job to support his family back at home. When he does finally receive a call for a job, he finds himself grappling with a new issue. His new workplace is 30-40 km away and to cut his travel expenses he must get a fake government employee ID so that he can travel on the Mumbai local train. The struggles for Mahesh seem to never end as he is caught by an officer and jailed for impersonating a government employee. After a month he finally gets bailed out by paying a hefty amount to a lawyer who is unsympathetic to his situation and refuses to lower his fees. It’s almost ironic when we see the lawyer defending him citing Mahesh’s plight and helplessness which pushed him to get a fake ID.

Towards the end we see Mahesh running on the streets after a thief. This run seems somewhat symbolic of the endless and tiring attempts made by the migrant workers to escape from the web of poverty that has engulfed them ever since the government arbitrarily and suddenly announced a nationwide lockdown.

The movie ‘Hurdang’ directed by Alok Kumar Dwivedi captures the horrors faced by a Muslim family caught amidst a communal riot in their area. It is a critical commentary on the state of communal violence in the nation. The film begins with mobs running around on a killing spree chanting ‘Jai Shree Ram’. The chant which is otherwise believed to bring peace and prosperity has now become the sound of death for Sajid and his family. An audience member who watched the film shared – ‘Although the chant of Jai Sri Ram was once regarded to be associated with something auspicious, it now conjures up images of something dreadful and scary. The moment the chants started, it gave me chills’.

The movie also portrays the harsh reality of how fear affects food politics in India, and how fear is generated around meat consumption by igniting violence and lynching its consumers, particularly when they are Muslims, regardless of whether it is goat or beef meat. As the family is hiding, they hear screams from next door where another family is being massacred. Their cries for help from a police officer remain unanswered who is least bothered. By refusing to provide any assistance the police come across as complicit in perpetuating communal violence. The tension in the house intensifies when Sajid’s family finds a Hindu boy hiding in their daughters’ room. The denouement of the film is bone chilling, with the violence real and present, taking us to what is the reality in India now.

After a break for tea, “Fatima” directed by Sourabh Kanti Dutta was screened.

A criminal by virtue of birth. Looked at with suspicion, spoken to with derision and disrespect—because of a colonial law (Criminal Tribes Act) enforced in the late 1800s. Denotified Nomadic Tribes (DNTs) continue to face systemic injustice from the communities and spaces that they live in. In fact, Kiran Bedi—then the Lieutenant Governor of Puducherry called them ‘cruel’ and ‘professionals in committing crimes’. In the rush to escape our colonial past, spending crores in a mission to eradicate this, our collective consciousness seems to never have a place for these individuals, families and indeed, generations. Of course, collective consciousness works on the basis of convenience.

Fatima is born into this life of disrespect, insult, violence and dehumanization. She appears to be caught in an endless cycle of exploitation by the men she trusts, having, incredibly bravely sought to save the women from the community she lives in. Her life goes through incredible lows—yet, her absolute dogged determination to get bail for her sister, continue to fight for the women and the stigma of the red-light district in Forbesganj and the steel in her eyes, gave me pause.

Dutta spoke of his work in documenting intergenerational prostitution and abuse, starting this project in 2017. He had initially wanted to work in Delhi and was unable to, because of the inherent patriarchy and the dictat of the men in the communities. The NGO Apne Aap then guided him towards Forbesganj, where he met Fatima.

One of the opening scenes of “A Place of Our Own” (Ek Jagah Apni) shows a man knocking at Laila’s door—asking for sexual favors. The next day, their landlord insinuates that they encourage sexual favors. Laila and Roshni-two transwomen, then begin a search that weaves together the city and their own lives-the minutiae, the struggle and the seeming regularity of it all.

Looking for a place to call their own, Laila and Roshni traverse Bhopal. Facing intense discrimination, looks, catcalls. . . yet, also going about their own lives. A counsellor with a non-profit and a cook in an affluent, so-called educated home. A cook, having to hide her own identity—having to wear clothes that typify male, being called bhaiyya, a falseness. On their journey, looking for a house, they meet a conniving journalist who lies to get a ‘salacious’ interview and kindred spirits who become the family and the support that they need.
‘Shall we make our home on that island?’ A beautifully poignant moment, many of which are peppered through the film, lending brevity to an otherwise deeply difficult premise. The film also creates a space for joy and solidarity—a common thread in all of Ektara Collective’s films-be it “Turup” or “Chanda ke Jootey”, added to this is the very effective use of the locations in which the film is shot and the use of non-actors.

I don’t know where to begin’, says Laila when she is asked to speak about the issues that trans people face. Indeed, towards the end of the film, when Roshni is brutalized by her employer and his wife comes to Roshni begging her to take back her charges, pleading womanhood I wondered about the self-serving solidarity that one sees in the so-called educated, the ones who view their class and caste, and gender above all else.

A Place of Our Own was the final film screened on day three of the ninth Kolkata People’s Film Festival. The last few days have seen Uttam Mancha transformed into a space for discussion, a hive of activity, comradeship and solidarity.

Report: Devi, Kunal, Paroma, Shalini
Photos: Animesh, Arkoprovo, Aniruddha and Nivedita