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The
first international festival on social communication cinema
 Social
Communication Cinema is cinema with a special purpose. It goes beyond
the paradigm of escapist entertainment to touch a chord somewhere
in you to lead you to introspection. It is a cinema that is not
aimed at shocking you. Yet, it does shock you with its exposes and
revelations - through documented information, docu-fiction, short
fiction and television soap operas. In one sense, it might fit into
the description of investigative journalism on celluloid, focussing
on the truths of the marginalised and the alienated. As a logical
extension of this focus, it offers a pointer to the massive apathy
of mainstream people to the plight, the struggles and the problems
of these people. Roop Kala Kendo, founded as a registered society
under the Government of West Bengal in 1995 with the objective of
(a) producing social communication cinema on video, and (b) training
aspirants to this kind of cinema, organised the country’s first
ever international festival of social communication cinema. An Indo-Italian
project called COE and Nandan joined in to make the festival possible.
Screenings were held at Nandan from February 15 to February 21.
“The focus in not on information, but on the multi-layered
reality of people’s lives and the output should also have an
input of entertainment for the thinking mind,” says Anita Agnihotri,
IAS, CEO of Roop Kala Kendro and Director of the Festival. Among
participating countries were Nepal, Bangladesh, Pakistan, Iran,
Cameroon, Italy and India. Understandably, Indian films formed a
chunk of the screening programme. Since the festival is non-competitive
and was being held for the first time, there was no specified time
for the films. Thus, one discovered Flaherty’s Nanook of the
North vying with the young Debananda Sengupta’s experimental
film Enough of Silence. Satyajit Ray’s Sadgati was screened
right after Supriyo Sen’s prize-winning documentary The Nest.
Other notable films that made up the retrospective were Makhmalbaf’s
The Cyclist and Truffaut’s 400 Blows. Gautam Ghose’s new
documentary, Kalahandi, was premiered as the closing film.
These famous
films were more or less sidetracked by brash young filmmakers whose
sheer courage and dedication to the cause of cinema became obvious
as one began to watch their creations. Subtly highlighting our total
ignorance of life beyond our thickly insulated and fiercely protected
urban life, these films threw up the criminal inequality in the
distribution of resources. They underscored the gross misuse, abuse
and violation of human rights as well as the apathy of NGOs, the
government and even foreign voluntary agencies to the plight of
the marginalised. How does the Kendro define the marginalised? “In
India, by marginalised we refer to people in the small and unorganised
sector, disadvantaged groups like children and destitutes, under-privileged
working women, and also, groups and agencies who work with and for
these people. We have increasingly felt that the lives and achievements
of these people, their aspirations and struggles have been kept
out of mainstream television on grounds that they do not offer entertainment
value” said Agnihotri.
 She
has a point. Because as one film unfolded after another, the thin
audience, marked by the conspicuous absence of the media, felt almost
tangible shock waves pass through them. Balaka Ghosh’s The
Vehicle with the Soul of a Man is a telling documentary that ‘tells’
nothing, but only shows. Sans commentary or dialogue, the film is
a pictorial documentation on the pithoos - porters who come down
from Nepal to carry pilgrims to Kedarnath on their backs. Thousands
of pilgrims embark on this journey to the heavenly abode of Lord
Shiva located at a height of 12000 feet. The silent question the
film raises is - what meaning does a pilgrimage have when it is
achieved by one human being who violates the rights ofa fellow human
by riding on his back? Supriyo Sen’s Wait Until Death (1995)
is the tragic saga of a young tribal, Shakuntala, who dies when
the film ends.
Hers is the
23rd death caused by Silicosis in the tribal hamlet of Chinchurgheria,
near Jhargram in Midnapore district of West Bengal. Within two years
of working at a stone crushing unit in the area, villagers from
five neighbouring villages fell victim to the deadly disease, imbibed
through inhaling the stone dust in the unit. The film, following
a circular narrative beginning with the dying Shakuntala and closing
with her death, leaves the question of human rights hanging in the
air. Bangladesh stepped in with four touching documentations throwing
up the common ground of the marginalised across the world. Molested
Lives - Mothers and Daughters (2001), jointly directed by Farzana
Rupa, Lutfunnahar Mausumi and Shabnam Firdousi expored, through
interviews and informal discussions among women, the subtle yet
strong facets of sexual oppression and harassment women face in
their day-to-day lives. “You will take pictures, make notes,
go away and never come back,” says the teenaged, emaciated
Rekha to filmmaker Tareque Shahriar in Black House (1999). She has
wisened to the ways of journalists and filmmakers who come to her
for a good story and then disappear, effecting no change to the
status quo of her life. She with her friend Aysha, work in a battery
recycling factory while Jashim, a little boy, works in a moulding
factory. They call these factories ‘Kali Bari’ meaning
Black House because of the constant exposure to carbon and smoke
that will snuff out their lives before they grow into adults. Yet,
no NGO comes to their rescue. The other two films directed by Yasmine
Kabir, namely, My Migrant Soul and Dushomoy, were triggered off
by journalistic reports on two tragic incidents of death that find
neither empathy nor justice from the government or from any NGO.
Pakistan’s The Sun Sets In, directed by Sahid Nadeem (1999),
unfolds through interviews, newspaper clippings, audiotapes and
visuals, the posthumous life sketch of Bishop John Joseph, who committed
suicide in 1999 as his own way of protesting the victimisation of
religious minorities in Pakistan. Two popular soap operas, one from
Bangladesh called Shabuj Chhaya and the other from Pakistan, entitled
Aahat, through rural and urban settings, offered delightfully tongue-in-cheek
pointers on issues like early marriage, family planning and other
areas focussing on the health and education of women and children.
From Cameroon came Fanta Coca, a video on how the Black people there,
in their eagerness to lighten their complexion, resort to cheap
fairness creams and treatment when they cannot afford the costly
ones. The treatment leads to their skin acquiring a Fanta-Coca colour
- black with white patches, a process that is probably irreversible!
“I and my parents were the right colour – we were all
White,” says a Black man with a skin slightly lighter than
the rest, who struts around the place like a hero. Rakesh Sharma’s
Aftershocks - The Rough Guide to Democracy, is a shocking exposure
of two villages in Lakhpat, close to the Gujarat Coast, where villagers
are being persistently exploited, oppressed and displaced either
through false promises or by coercion, by the Gujarat Mineral Development
Corporation (that holds exclusive mining rights for the entire state)
under the plea of post-earthquake rehabilitation because these villages
are rich in lignite!
Arvind Sinha’s
Between the Devil and the Deep River questions the development model
chosen by the powers-that-be for soil conservation in organically
flood-vulnerable pockets of North Bihar, with a severe backlash
on the lives and living means of hundreds of extremely poor people
who live there. Ananya Chatterjee’s Daughter of the 73rd Amendment,
Act I is a strong and positive statement on how being elected as
heads o their respective panchayats empowered three different women,
distanced in terms of geography, age, education and ability, investing
their lives with new meaning. Buddha Weeps in Jaduguda (1999) directed
by Sri Prakash examines the deadly impact of uranium mining on the
tribal people living in Jaduguda, which houses India’s most
productive uranium mine. Colours Black (2001), by Mamta Murthy,
is beautifully structured around four children, now adults in different
stages of life, recounting, mainly off camera, their experience
of child abuse and the silence they were coerced into, which continued
the abuse till they grew up. Murthy counters the voice-overs with
visuals that do not belong to the voices yet evolve into telling
narratives of private pain. The Loom (2001), jointly directed by
Anjali Monteiro and K.P. Jayasankar is the story of a poet, a painter
and a city - Mumbai. The film offers an aesthetically composed insight
into the seamier side of Mumbai, offering multiple perspectives
of the city as viewed by the filmmakers, the poet - Narayan Surve
and the painter - Sudhir Patwardhan, stripping it of the glamour
and the awe it is normally associated with. Jari Mari - Of Cloth
and Other Stories (2001), by Surabhi Sharma weaves its way through
the narrowest of narrow bylanes of the Jari Mari slum in Mumbai,
where men and women eke out a living further weakened by their lack
of power to organise and their supposedly illegal status as residents.
There is a sad postscript to the festival. Screenings of foreign
films and films by the great masters drew all the crowds while the
youngsters who have dedicated their lives to an alternative cinema
attracted only a handful of cinema buffs. At a press conference
for filmmakers like Yasmine Kabir and Arvind Sinha, all questions
were directed at Kabir while Sinha sat quietly because Yasmine is
a ‘foreigner’ and Sinha is not. For the uncensored footage
of RAWA, the organisers had to repeat a screening to accommodate
the serpentine queues waiting for a voyeuristic glimpse of the genocide
by the Taliban in Afghanistan in a badly blown up edition of a video
they had already seen umpteen times on CNN. And this, when it was
an entry-free festival from beginning to end!
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