Films deconstruct South Asian spirit

Film South Asia (FSA) 2009 opens next week with a peep into Ladakh’s film industry and how it has been growing by leaps and bounds, making 28 films just in the last six years. ‘Out of Thin Air’, [17 Sep | 4 pm] directed by Samreen Farooqui and Shabani Hass Anwalia, tells us how the lives of the locals involved in the films are not spent giving interviews and walking red carpets.

This documentary from India takes viewers into the lives of these figures from local cinema, and provides a look into Ladhak missing from postcards, where everyday people with fulltime jobs as restaurant owners, police officers and even monks double up as producers, directors and actors.[break]

And there’s one more film by Faiza Ahmad Khan which takes us to Malegaon, a small town tucked away near the geographical heart of India, fraught with communal tension and economic depression. ‘Supermen of Malegaon’ [19 Sep | 1:30 pm] then shows how people escape the harsh reality by seeking refuge in the fantastical world of cinema.

In Malegaon, the passion for films has spurred a group of cinema enthusiasts to make their own films – quirk, low-budget, socially aware, and notoriously funny spoofs of Bollywood films like ‘Sholay’. Their ambition then grows and they are ready to take on Hollywood and Superman and as the film begins to take shape, through schemes and approaches that are ingenious, bizarre and hysterical. We also slowly discover Malegaon itself – a microcosm that embodies and reflects the complexities of modern India.

And there’s more in store with one South Asian premiere and another FSA premiere that raises the state vs. images rhetoric. Other films to be screened also document recent phenomena and complexities of the subcontinent. The FSA premiere of the controversial ‘Encountered on Saffron Agenda?’ [20 Sep | 11:30 am] by Shubhradeep Chakravorty is all set to create some noise as an investigative documentation of the encounter killings in Gujarat of four men – Sameer Khan Pathan, Sadik Jamal, Ishrat Jahan-Javed Seikh, and Shorabuddin Seikh – allegedly on a mission to assassinate Chief Minister Narendra Modi.

The Gujarat government has accepted that the police had encountered Sohrabuddin Seikin with Modi even justifying this act during his 2007 election campaign. The documentary is a quest for the truth about other alleged encounters staged by the same team. Encountered on Saffron Agenda? shows that these Gujarat encounters are not only gross violation of the fundamental rights of the victims, but that they were exclusively used to demonize minorities and to strengthen the politics of hate in the state.

Next is the south Asian premiere of ‘Children of God’ [20 Sep | 1:30 pm], directed by Yi Seung-jun, which takes an in-depth look at the children who struggle just to stay alive. The film which brings us images from our own backyard takes us to the Aryaghat by the Bagmati River at the Pashupatinath Temple in Kathmandu, where many livelihoods depend on the ritual of death.

Among these are the children who live off the food and money drifting on the water after being used in the funeral ceremonies. The banks of the Bagmati are holy grounds for Hindus, but for these children it is a playground, a home and a workplace.

In the same line is Director Rajesh S Jala’s compelling self-narrative ‘Children of the Pyre’ [19 Sep | 12:30 pm], the award-winning and yet another controversial documentation about seven extraordinary children making their living out of the dead. Existing in the heat of the pyre, they steal used coffin shrouds, selling them for petty amounts in order to ensure their own livelihoods and that of their families.

Strengthened by the adversities they face and crafted by a volley of abuses, these imps weave through the pyres, struggling through the disdain heaped on them. Laughing, smiling, weeping, fighting and shouting, these Children of the Pyre run the race of survival, winning it again and again, and everyday.

And these ‘everyday’ struggles seem to have raised their stark shadows in the subcontinent as geopolitical situations and 21st century insecurities take people to the frontline.

The shifting populations, the encounters of culture, the oriental dilemma, and the evolution of our society in the onslaught of climate vulnerabilities are putting people at grave risks. Out of the 320 total entries this year in the FSA, filmmakers seem to have pushed these agendas. The resonance is clear even in our hinterlands.

An FSA must-watch is ‘In Search of the Riyal’ [19 Sep | 4:30 pm], the only Nepali film to be screened this year and selected out of the total 27 Nepali submissions. Directed by Kesang Tseten, it explores the recurring lure of going abroad that often captivates the returnee, and finally, the enormity of the journey.

The film offers a glimpse of the unreported lives of the Nepali migrant world: young Nepalis from disadvantaged communities in the hinterland who undergo a minimal skill training to prepare for the Gulf; the disillusioning, sad, but at times empowering, experience of Nepalis in Qatar, rarely captured due to the Gulf’s sensitivity to scrutiny of their labor practices. They are Nepal’s oil—one million Nepalis that work in the Gulf, earning only US$5-7 a day, to keep their families alive.

And earning less than US$2.5 a day, children and men are digging hills across the country which will bridge India and China and introduce to the world a unique road network that will connect the rest of the world to south Asia. One of these roads passes through Nepal’s Rasuwa district and will reconnect an ancient trans-Himalayan trade route with global traffic in 2012.

Directors Ben Campbell and Cosmo Campbell in ‘The Way of the Road’ [20 Sep | 11:00 am] look through Tamang villagers’ eyes at the cultural and economic flows through this borderland, including a dramatic re-enactment of Tibetan and Nepali armies in conflict. But what do the villagers, whose lives it is intended to benefit, think of where the road will run?

Similar tones reverberate even from the deltas with a striking resemblance to the recent news of the El Salvadorian Navy finding a boat with 25 Bangladeshi, 25 Nepali, 21 Eritrean, and five Ecuadorian migrants in the Pacific. ‘Shores Far Away’ [18 Sep | 5:00 pm], directed by Savyasaachi Jain, reflects the true story of the thousands of Indians who attempt to smuggle across borders into Europe every year.

Some disappear without a trace, others face imprisonment and torture at the hands of smugglers and those who do reach their destination bear deep emotional and physical scars. The film juxtaposes their dreams with the reality of their journeys, their lives and their relationships.

Such are the risks south Asians are living with, and the subcontinent with its shared history and culture seem to be boiling in the same pot, or as the filmmakers portray it. ‘The Last Rites’ [19 Sep | 11:15 am] by Director Yasmine Kabir, a silent film, depicts the ship-breaking yards of Chittagong in coastal Bangladesh, which is a final destination for ships too old to ply the oceans.

Every year, hundreds of ships are sent to yards in Bangladesh. And every year, thousands of people come to these yards in search of jobs. Risking their lives to save themselves from hunger, they breathe in asbestos dust and toxic waste. The ship has to die and man has to help it die, as if man and vessel are united in a common bondage. The Last Rites bears testament to the resilience of the human spirit.

Indomitable human spirit then is what FSA celebrates in its seventh edition’s theme: ‘Give me non-fiction’. A biannual documentary festival in Kathmandu, FSA is host to 35 films this year from Pakistan, India, Nepal,

Bhutan, Afghanistan, and Sri Lanka. One of the organizer’s pick which is not to be missed is Joshua Z Weinstein’s ‘Flying on One Engine’ [18 Sep | 3:30 pm], where a wheelchair bound, without a larynx, and diagnosed with a life-threatening aortic aneurysm, Dr Sharadkumar Dicksheet now lives only (and barely) so he can travel to India to perform free operations. In marathon-like surgery sessions, he treats as many as 700 children with cleft lips and other deformities.

Although Dicksheet survives on social security while living in his Brooklyn apartment, his life is drastically different in India, where the eight-time Nobel Prize nominee is treated like a living god. Flying on One Engine shows how this quirky, funny and sometimes difficult character overcomes his own ailments by curing others.

FSA 2009 will open on Thursday, September 17 with a joint inauguration by Minister of Information Shankar Pokharel and Indian actress Shabana Azmi, and will continue till 20 September at Kumari Hall of Kathmandu. Tickets @ Rs 30 are available at: Mandala Book Point, Kanti Path; Thamel Book Shop, Thamel; Saraswati Book Centre, Pulchowk; Dhokaima Café, Patan Dhoka; and Jai Nepal (cinema hall) and Kumari Cinema.