Doc Splash at the Hyd Lit Fest 2015

The Docu Circle of Hyderabad, curated and run by Sumanaspati Reddy, has been doing superb work over the last several years, bringing great films to Hyderabad without fuss. Sumanaspati himself is unassuming and works with the kind of dedication and complete lack of interest in self-aggrandisement that is celebrated only when it is part of the Gita or something.

Anyway. Doc Splash has a number of short documetaries at the Hyd Lit Fest today, in association with Films Division and PSBT, and though the schedule is certain to be available on Facebook, I don't know if my readers here are in the same pool there, so I'm putting up the entire list.

Here goes:

​Festival curated by : ​

Sumanaspati Reddy

i​

n association with PSBT and Films D

​i​

vision
C R E A T I V E . E D G E !
Docs on the creative spirit!
at Hyderabad Literary Festival 2015
Today at 11 am [25th January]
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1. THE BROKEN SPINE: ART AS THE WILL TO SURVIVE
Director: EIN LALL .
30 min . 2001 (On painter and installation artist Nalini Malini)

2. MALEGAON KE SHOLAY
Director : NITIN SUKHIJA
30 min . 2003 . (Small town community film-making)

3. AMIR KHAN
Director : S.N.S. SASTRY
19 min . 1970 Classical Hindustani vocalist)

4. YAADEIN - KAIFI AZMI
Director : AMITA TALWAR
57 min . 1999 (Urdu poet)

break : 15 mins

5. MANA KALOJI
Director : S. AMARNATH
55 min . 2013 (Iconic poet- activist of Telangana)

About the films:


THE BROKEN SPINE: ART AS THE WILL TO SURVIVE

Director : EIN LALL
30 min . 2001 . English with sub-titles

The film portrays conflicting yet complementary layers in the work of painter and installation artist Nalini Malini.

Ein trained in video with the Inner London Educational Authority. She has made several films on women’s issues including those on women artists and experiments in video art and video dance. Her films have been screened at several international festivals.
A PSBT production

* * *

YAADEIN - KAIFI AZMI

Director : AMITA TALWAR
57 min . 1999 . Urdu/English with sub-titles

"Yaadein-Kaifi Azmi" is a feature documentary of 58 minutes durationcommissioned and telecast by Doordarshan in 1999. It traces the earlier struggle of this Leftist activist who was an active member of the Progressive Writer's Movement. Fired with idealism, Kaifi Azmi moved to Mumbai from a tiny nondescript village Mijhwan in Azamgarh District in U.P. and eked out an existence doing odd jobs. This is a simple portrayal of an earthy man documenting his initial struggle in the film industry, his ideologies, the highs and lows of his life and career, his contribution to his village and the legacy of work left behind.

Amita Talwar is a postgraduate in English Literature. She was the founder Editor/Publisher of the popular city magazine Channel 6 brought out from Hyderabad since 1990. She has been trained in Filmmaking from the School of Professional and Continuing Studies, New York University. She is a leading art-photgrapher from Hyderabad.
* * *
MALEGAON KE SHOLAY
Director : NITIN SUKHIJA
30 min . 2003 . Hindi with sub-titles
The film traces the progress of a community in a small town in Maharashtra in search of a new identity- that of a parallel film industry.
Nitin has worked in various forms of media from journalism to theatre. He was associate director on Anshuman Rawat’s ‘Art of Dying’ and is currently scripting a feature film titled ‘Dadar’.
A PSBT production
* * *

MANA KALOJI (OUR KALOJI)
Concept : B.NARSING RAO. Director : S. AMARNATH
55 min . 2013 . Telugu with sub-titles
The film explores the relevance of Kaloji Narayana Rao (1914-2002) in the current times, captured through his personal life and ideas of resistance. Popularly known as Kaloji or Kalanna, he was much loved and admired poet, freedom fighter and political activist of Telangana.
Mana Kaloji, was shaped with the archival interviews of his wife – Rukmini Bai, grandson –Santosh and Kaloji himself. Kaloji’s life, narrated as memories by his wife and grandson, has been juxtaposed with his own interview where he counters with his own ideas of life and resistance. This juxtaposition forms a conversation-like intimate encounter with him capturing the human essence beneath the legendary personality.
Eminent filmmaker, poet, painter and photographer, B.Narsing Rao is a cultural icon of Telangana. The film was as part of Kaloji centenary celebrations.

Amarnath has been practicing filmmaking in various capacities as director, associate director, line-producer, scriptwriter, editor and cameraman - primarily documentary filmmaking .
* * *
AMIR KHAN
Director : S.N.S. SASTRY
19 min . 1970 . Hindi and Urdu with sub-titles

SNS Sastry’s portrait of the Hindustani classical master Ustad Amir Khan is at once gentle and audacious in the way he sets up images of his world of concerts, disciples, world travel, his adoring and nagging wife and little child. Of course, there is Khan sahab’s beautiful singing, as well as his reflections on music, recognition and remuneration. This film occupies an inspiring and enviable place between documentary and fiction and could as much be a film about the film maker and his place in this world as an artist.

We have heard accounts of people tracking this documentary in theatres and going to watch feature films in order to watch this, in the early 1970s, when documentaries and newsreels were screened before the main feature!

S.N.S. Sastry (1930–1978) was among Films Division's most celebrated cameramen and filmmakers. A diploma holder in cinematography from the Bangalore Polytechnic, Sastry joined Films Division as a cameraman and started directing films in 1956. The four films chosen for screening are among the best of the nearly 45 films he made for FD.
Gentle, audacious and maverick by turns, Sastry’s films never cease to surprise!

The Act of Killing

Watched Joshua Oppemheimer's film The Act of Killing last night. I'd recently read something about it before leaving for Iowa; something about how many people who made the film were identified in the titles as only Anonymous. And this is true.

Image from here

I still feel, as I often do after documentaties that cut deep, unable to write coherently about the film. So associative thoughts, rather than proper review, follows:

*

The film had to have been shot in a linear manner. There is a significant change in the main character(s) over the course of the film that is fundamentally Greek tragedy in its catharsis-seeking structure. There is unspeakable crime (what we'd call war crime, but which terminology one character refuses to acknowledge as applying to him. 'The winners write history,' he says. 'I am a winner. One day we will throw out the Geneva Convention and there will be a Jakarata Convention.'*

So war crimes. And when the filmmakers ask a few of those involved in the hunting down of and killing of communists back in the late 60's, two of the men, Anwar Congo among them, agree to re-enact some of the atrocities they committed. The go looking for actors: women, children. At first the people laugh, as does the audience. But this is massacre, rape, arson and garotting we're talking about. The laughter turns uncomfortable. We feel complicit.

Anwar and his friends are 'gangsters' which the film frequently glosses as meaning 'free men'. Their heroes are other filmic gangsters, heroes of the old Westerns, beacons of machismo. They watch films after selling tickets in black and then go and kill a few commies.

Anwar enacts the garottings. He dances, says he used to dance after. He watches himself in the scene that's just been filmed and remarks, 'I would never have worn white trousers to a killing. I look like I'm going to a picnic.'

As film buffs, Anwar and his friend declare that this film has to be entertaining, otherwise no one will watch. So there are these strange sequences that could have come straight out of a del Toro film or a Herzog. The girls in pink coming out of the mouth of a rusty fish by the seashore, the waterfall - they're pure Fitzcarraldo or Fata Morgana. I felt prescient thinking that, because I found later that Werner Herzog was indeed one of the producers of the film.

There were so many things that made me squirm, remember other films about genocide: Final Solution, Father, Son and Holy War. I thought of Resnais' Night and Fog and the impossibility - the undesirability, even - of re-enactment. I thought of the necessity of remembering while avoiding the pornography of consuming such horror.

But because the filmmakers (and here I credit more than the director, for reasons I will come to soon) chose both a classical approach while undercutting it with the bizarre, the film does not feel at any point like a gratuitous massaging of the conscience. There is remorse and horror at the end, and I briefly wondered if it was necessary. I think it was, it is. It is a genuine loss of self and recovery of conscience to which one possible reponse - I don't know what other there can be - is compassion.

As for the many, many anonymous people who participated in the making of this film - their courage is as remarkable as (I am afraid) it might be futile. The other paramilitary men, those who took part in the filming and then had doubts about how this will look and what it will say about them - they may not know the crew by name, but they know faces and they know how to find out about people and where they live and so on. I wonder what use their witholding of a name is and I wonder what they've had to do to remain under the radar.

Towards the end, after Congo puts himself int he position of the victim and is shattered by the experience, he asks to watch the scene in his home. 'I know what it feels like to be a victim,' he says. 'Did they feel what I felt?' Someone from behind the camera says, 'No. They knew they were being killed. You were just acting in a scene.'

These other filmmakers. The ones whose names stay boldly theirs in the end credits - they can leave. They can watch from elsewhere. They can appear at screenings in other countries. These anonymous people, though, must live where they always have. I wonder what that story is and how it will play out.

__
*These sentences are not continuous in the film, though they happen in the same scene. They're also slight paraphrases.

Screening of Partners in Crime

Paromita Vohra's new feature-length documentary, Partners in Crime will be screened at the Prasad's Preview Theatre and at the Department of Communications, University of Hyderabad. Details:

SCREENING 1
Date: 11th February, Saturday
Time: 3.30pm tea, screening 4pm
Venue: Prasad Preview Theatre, Rd No 2, Banjara Hills, Hyderabad

SCREENING 2
Date: 15th February, Wednesday
Time: 3:45 pm
Venue: Department of Communication, University of Hyderabad, Gachibowli, Hyderabad-500046

About the film:

Is piracy organized crime or class struggle? Are alternative artists who want to hold rights over their art and go it alone in the market, visionaries or nutcases? Is the fine line between plagiarism and inspiration a cop-out or a whole other way of looking at the fluid nature of authorship? Who owns a song – the person who made it or the person who paid for it? When more than three fourths of those with an internet connection download all sorts of material for free, are they living out a brand new cultural freedom – or are they criminals?
Metal heads who market their own music, folklorists who turn tribal aphorisms into short stories, music archivists who hoard and share everything they can get their hands on, anti-piracy fanatics who think piracy funds terrorism, a smooth talking DVD street salesman who outlines the efficiency of the illegal market, media moguls, lobbyists, “monetizers, downloaders, uploaders, the biggest hit song of 2010 and the small time nautanki singer whose song it was inspired by – these places and people throng the world’s bazaar in which the film is set. Partners in Crime takes you througha story about art, crime, love and money to check if the times, they may be a-changing after all.

For some reason, can't embed the Youtube clip, so here it is.

The Beaches of Agnès

Image from

The Beaches of Agnès by Agnès Varda. 2008.

Is probably the best film I've seen this year. Admittedly, I haven't seen too many; on the other hand, the year's almost over.

Toward the end, Varda sits in a room that looks Venetian-blinded. She sits on a rough stool made of film cans. Then you realise that the blinds are really film, celluloid hanging reel by reel. Her house of cinema is literal and, in the moment the instability and transience of material itself is made clear. She lives, as she says, in a house of cinema, but what does that really mean?

There were many, many lovely moments: not least seeing Godard without his dark glasses, Chris Marker's alter-ego, Resnais editing on an old Moviola, Jacques Demy aging before one's eyes. Also the mirrors on the beach, the art installation-nature of Varda's filmmaking, her self-appraisal that, for all its laying bare, slyly suggests that even spilling everything can leave you knowing nothing.

Independent documentary vs. Video art: Girish Shahane on Amar Kanwar

A strange thing happened to Amar Kanwar around the year 2001. He had already established himself in alternative film circles, when a gentleman named Okwui Enwezor came to Delhi looking for artists. Enwezor, a thirty-something Nigerian who had made the United States his home, had been appointed the artistic director of the most important art exhibition in the world, Kassel's Documenta. He brought a distinctly political, postcolonial perspective to bear on his curatorial choices, and cast his net beyond artists who showed in galleries. He picked Amar Kanwar along with the Raqs Media Collective, leaving people in the art world befuddled. Documenta 11 part-financed Kanwar’s A Night of Prophecy, a film about poets in conflict zones, which was screened through the exhibition’s run in Kassel in 2002.

Kanwar had become a name to be reckoned with in two different worlds with two very different systems of financing. A typical independent documentary is funded by an NGO. The director, who doubles as producer, makes a certain amount up front, with further money coming through DVD sales and telecast rights. To make 5 lakh rupees, a director would have to sell 500 DVDs priced at 1000 rupees each, quite a tall order. The art world, on the other hand, depends on scarcity rather than volume. A video artist will make an edition of, say, ten prints of a video, to be sold for maybe 5 lakh rupees a pop. After the gallery commission, just two sales will provide the video artist the same amount of money that 500 DVDs got the documentary film maker.
It is no wonder that, during the art boom, many experimental film makers reinvented themselves as video artists. The boundaries between the two are blurry enough for the transition to be made without too many eyebrows being raised.

More.

Breaking Boundaries

The Goethe Zentrum is conducting a series of workshops all this week in schools, on the general theme of Breaking Boundaries. In the evenings, however, there will be films that are open to all (and free as well).

For four evenings, from Tuesday to Friday, I will be screening films at the Goethe Zentrum. The films will - broadly speaking - be about music, culture, identity and crossings.

- August 18^th: Buena Vista Social Club (105 min, 1999); Dir. Wim Wenders.

- August 19^th: Crossing the Bridge: The Sound of Istanbul (90 min, 2005); Dir. Fatih Akin.

- August 20^th: Jahaji Music (112min, 2007); Dir. Surabhi Sharma.

- August 21^st: Had Anhad (Bound and Unbound) (100min, 2008) Dir. Shabnam Virmani.

Time: 5.30 pm

Place: Goethe Zentrum, 1st floor, Heritage Complex, Hill Fort Road, Hyderabad.

If you're in Hyderabad, do come.

(Much drama has happened in the acquiring of these films but that is another story and shall be told another time.)

Jahaji Music and These Errors Are Correct

Surabhi Sharma's Jahaji Music in Hyderabad, on Friday, 14th at EFLU, 6pm and Saturday, 15th at HCU, 10 am.

Surabhi Sharma's feature length documentary film Jahaji Music is a record of the evolution of chutney music in the Caribbean.

From the mid-nineteenth century Indian labourers arrived in the Caribbean on boats, bringing a few belongings and their music, the beginnings of a remarkable cultural practice. More than 150 years later musician Remo Fernandes travels to the Islands to explore collaborations and create new work.

Jahaji Music is a record of a difficult, if unusual and complex, musical journey. It is an attempt to make meaning of aspects of contemporary culture in Trinidad and Jamaica, even as we witness the nature and possibilities of artistic collaboration. The film endeavours, through it all, to weave a story of memory, identity and creativity.

Duration: 1 hour 52 minutes

Jeet Thayil's new book of poetry, These Errors Are Correct, on Saturday, 15th at Lodhi - The Garden Restaurant, 7pm.

Tranquebar Press
invites you to celebrate the launch
of These Errors are Correct,
a new collection of poetry by

Jeet Thayil

With a performance by Sridhar/Thayil
Lyrical jazz

Jeet Thayil: Vocals/Arrangement/Guitar
Suman Sridhar: Vocals/Arrangement/Production

Date: 15th March 2008
Time: 7 p.m.
Lodi – The Garden Restaurant
Lodi Road
New Delhi 110 003

How We Celebrate Freedom

The only time I went to Kashmir was when I was six or seven years old. Maybe younger. So I only have the most impressionistic memories of it - a few sounds, smells, flashes of events. Water being heated outside and the resinous smell of pine cones; a wheel stuck in sludge and all of us tense because of the flight we might miss; a road not seen in a sudden fog and the weariness of having to walk on not knowing where we were or how long it would take to get back. And after all this time, the question that one girl asked: 'Where are you from? Are you from India?'

While introducing his film Jashn-e-Azadi, Sanjay Kak said, "In 2003 I went to Kashmir after 14 years. I was disturbed by what I saw and also by how much I did not know. Kashmir is not invisible but it is totally hidden."

This sense of a place that is elusive is one that strikes you most as the film begins, with shots of the water reflecting denuded trees in winter, a tall pole on which a raven sits, and the illusion of inversion and the world turned on its head. Boats come in and out of focus and nothing is clear. We remember this sequence not only because of the unsettling images but because in all the poetry that punctuates the film, mirrors, reflection and the act of seeing play an important part.

Days away as we are from the 60th year of India's independence, asking questions about what freedom means or whose freedom we are talking about seems almost redundant. We are loud in our glee, although if we were to be questioned closely we would be hard put to it to remember the narrative of our independence.

Watching this film reminds us that not everyone feels a part of this triumphant parade of India's freedom. The Independence Day 'celebrations' of 2005 shown in the film are of a bleakly empty square, with only a few army officers and plenty of flags. If there are people, they have stayed firmly indoors and want no part of the ceremony of raising flags and releasing doves. As the film begins, we are immediately disturbed by how much we cannot see.

But soon enough many things become clear. We know in a very short time that the presence of the army, of violence and of sudden eruptions of conflict is pervasive. Everywhere there are guns, everywhere people are stopped, checked and can be arrested or taken away.

Indeed the whole film is a litany of grief, fear and suspicion: every story is one of disappearance, loss, trauma, nightmares, sudden arrests and torture. In every small town and village, as the film follows the Jammu and Kashmir Coalition of Civil Society, which is conducting a first-of-its- kind survey of lives lost, stories are told of young men who have given up their livelihood to join the insurgency; who have continued with their lives but have been taken away for questioning and have never appeared; of bodies that have been found in forests, unidentified and unclaimed. One village had more than 400 orphans. A psychiatric clinic had hundreds of people waiting outside - most of them suffered from Post Traumatic Stress Disorder.

The film makes no historical points: very briefly, through titles, it outlines the position of Kashmir before and after India's Independence - touching significantly on the land reforms that followed, where every peasant and every landless person was given lan - and the disenchantment in the late '80s that led to the armed insurgency. No reasons are given for why the insurgency turned militant; instead the film examines the idea of martyrdom as one meaning not only 'sacrifice' but also an 'act of witnessing'.

At every funeral of militant leaders, or of young men, hoards of people chant and demand freedom. These cries for freedom are so insistent through the film that the irony of an election where only 9% of the population in one constituency come to cast their votes is not only stark, but bitter. In contrast, an important sequence shows Yasin Malik, who is collecting signatures, speak eloquently about the right of the Kashmiri people to self-determination. The arguments he makes sound like the ones leaders might have made during the 1940s, when the struggle was against the British.

But hidden at the edges of this narrative is the one of the Kashmiri Pundits who fled the valley from the late 80's onward. In this 2 1/2 hour film, the issue comes up just before the intermission. Kak calls up a Kashmiri pundit, a poet, who has chosen to remain. He wants to hear a poem the poet has written, and in the midst of the recitation, the call is cut off. The intermission begins and by the time it is over, there's a discomfort, a feeling of a narrative interrupted; it can't but be deliberate. When the film resumes, we don't immediately return to the question fo the Kashmiri pundits, but when we do, Kak calls the poet again, who recites the entire poem and says that though his family has left for Delhi, he has chosen to remian, though he remians in strict retirement, seeing nobody and having nothing to do with the world and all its violence.

A few minutes more in the sum total of the engagement with the issue of Kashmiri pundits. If one is inclined to be charitable, this could be interpreted as a narrative of the valley and those who live in it. But it is impossible to talk about choice, or volition with any sincerity, because the reasons why one entire religious community felt it had to leave is never examined. This is important, because though it is not an omission, it has caused every screening to be either interrupted, disrupted or disallowed on the strength of its supposed bias against the Kashmiri pundits.

When Kak was asked about this, he said that he wanted to talk about Kashmir beyond the three issues of Pakistan/India, Islamic militancy and the exodus of the pundits. To the extent that he limits himself to the narratives of those who remain, it is an eloquent narrative. But the film raises the inevitable question about the power that the majority necessarily arrogates to itself.

Everywhere in the film, is the question of majority: the large number of insurgents in the '80s against the larger might of the Indian army; the majority Muslim population versus the minority Hindu population that left; the 700-800 odd (invisible) insurgents against the overpowering presence of the Army now.

But it would be a mistake to range yourself on any one side of these binaries because how you experience majority depends on where you are. This becomes obvious when you consider that historically Kashmir was ruled for centuries by a Hindu minority. And when you consider the presence in the valley in the last few years, of the tourists.

Some of the most shocking images in the films are of the tourists, as they pose with vile plastic flowers, in a Republic Day imitation of an 'ethnic costume'. Kashmiri photographers dress these tourists up and photograph them, take them on sled rides in the snow and listen as the men rave about this 'paradise on earth' that 'these stupid people have ruined'. With every shot - as a person belonging to the majority, smug India, where you have never had to question the term 'Indian' or 'freedom' - you cringe as you watch.

And then, near the end of the film, tourists pose with flowers until some army men arrive. Then, taking advantage of their presence, some young ladies start to pose with guns. One girl wears a camouflage scarf over her head and brandishes a gun. This is a shocking image, more deeply shocking, even, than the men on the sled who throw their hands out in ownership of the valley. This is shocking because this indicates not only a sense of entitlement that the average Indian feels, but the ease with which s/he feels an opposite perspective can be contained or silenced with a legitimised military presence. Insurgency born out of a call for freedom by the Kashmiri is unacceptable, but an Army presence enforcing India's right to Kashmir is.

In these circumstances, the idea of majority needs to be redefined not by the parameters of location, but by entitlement. Tourists see what they want to see and the Kashmiris aid them in their distorted vision for either reasons of economic necessity or because generating a pleasant fiction is safer or makes them less visible. But such an experience of ownership is suspect and deeply discomforting.

The other disturbing issue is of the Army on its PR campaigns: when they distribute radios to villagers, who accept them and the snacks provided afterwards in silence and with their heads down; or the children in an orphange who sing 'Sare Jahaan Se Achcha' while officers smile and pat them on their heads.

Kak highlights the irony of these events by having on the soundtrack the song from the film, Leader, playing over images of flag hoistings and trucks moving in city squares and mountainous road: 'Apni azadi ko hum hargiz mita sakte nahin. Sar kata sakte hain lekin sar jhuka sakte nahin' Whose voice are we hearing? India's? The people of Kashmir? When we ask for peace, why do we remember bloodthirsty songs that celebrate martyrdom?

The use of this song would be heavy-handed irony were it not that it forces these questions on us. We have to ask, as 60 years of India's Independence approaches, how people experience freedom. Who speaks and on whose behalf? What is the cost of that Independence won 60 years ago and who will pay and for how long?

PS: This was the screening I couldn't talk about until after it was over for security reasons. Talima Nasreen had been attacked just the day before and the police would have been glad of any excuse to stop the screening of any film they were told was controversial. This was why I did not announce it on the blog, the reason why it was an invitation only event, and why only about 20 people saw the film.

The irony is not lost on me. We ought to have publicised it widely and used the opportunity to bring up the issue of freedom of expression and censorship. Sometimes the censorship we practise on ourselves is more pernicious because of its self-serving logic (I'd rather that 20 people saw it than that 50 came and couldn't.) Mea culpa.