Subrat Kumar Sahu is looking forward to his first visit to Gorakhpur where he will screen his documentary Flames of Freedom . It is scheduled to play at the Cinema of Resistance Film Festival—a highpoint in the town’s cultural calender—which Sahu excitedly calls “a revolution for people’s films”.
Set in the small village of Ichchapur in Kalahandi district of Odisha, the film is about the struggle of the tribal community to reclaim its unique identity, culture, and agricultural land, all of which have been usurped over the years by Brahmins. “There are just 20 Brahmins to 250 tribal households but they own 95% of the land and have reduced the tribals to domestic help and agricultural labourers,” says Sahu. Things took a turn two years ago when the Brahmins appropriated one of the last symbols of tribal identity: the tiny Adivasi shrine of the deity Dokri was turned into a huge Kanakdurga temple. What began as a fight to reclaim that small space is now a full blown war with tribals refusing to work in Brahmin houses and land. “The land has been lying untended, there is total collapse of the agrarian economy, and Brahmin dominance,” says Sahu. The film captures this unique, spirited movement in which the Dalits and OBCs are fighting along with the tribal people.
The struggle and defiance captured in the film is in tune with the spirit of Cinema of Resistance (COR); the 12th edition of the festival is scheduled for this weekend.
Started by the Jan Sanskriti Manch, it is an autonomous festival run in association with the Gorakhpur Film Society. It aims to take non-mainstream, political, issue-based cinema to places and people who haven’t had access to it and also provides a platform for “constructive, creative dissent” through films. “There have been film society movements in the South and in Bengal, but the Hindi belt has never seen an alternative cinema initiative of such magnitude before,” says Pankaj Srivastava of Media Vigil. With its roots in Gorakhpur, COR has spread its wings to other states and cities. There are 15 chapters across Uttar Pradesh (U.P.), Rajasthan, Bihar, Uttarakhand, Maharashtra, Andhra Pradesh and Delhi, and 59 annual festivals have been organised in the last 11 years, including many small screenings. Important names in cinema have participated: M.S. Sathyu, Shaji N. Karun, Girish Kasaravalli, Saeed Mirza, Kundan Shah, Saba Dewan, Anand Patwardhan, and Sanjay Kak among others.
Optimistic note
With the U.P. elections just over, this could turn out to be a unique and crucial year for the festival. COR has been a liberal, secular, syncretic and progressive cultural island in the Hindutva laboratory that Gorakhpur has become under the stewardship of Yogi Adityanath, the mahant of Gorakhnath temple, the founder of the militant Hindu Yuva Vahini, five-time MP from Gorakhpur, the man behind the Ghar Wapsi movement, and U.P’s new chief minister. Will the festival keep scoring liberal points through cinema as it did when it screened Garam Hawa in Gorakhpur just a month after the 2007 riots?
Sanjay Joshi, cinema activist and national convenor of COR, is confident. “There has been no change in the curation,” he says. The programming (decided a month ago) has focused this year on Dalit and tribal representation. At the time of going to press, the festival was slated to open with Meghnath and Biju Toppo’s Naachi Se Baanchi on the famous tribal intellectual, artist and activist Ram Dayal Munda, often referred to as the Rabindranath Tagore of Jharkhand, and his efforts to preserve and reawaken tribal society, traditions and culture.
An interesting inclusion has been the late C.V. Sathyan’s Holy Cow on the contentious issue of cow slaughter. The film looks at all aspects of the practice—social, political, economic, religious and cultural—and the arguments and counter-arguments around it.
COR pays tribute this year to the late Om Puri with a screening of Aakrosh . It will also show the 1986 John Abraham classic Amma Ariyan to bring Odessa Collective into focus. Abraham’s initiative, set up in 1984, aimed at empowering cinema and building a cine-literate audience by making common people stakeholders in film production, distribution and exhibition, an ideal that COR is following in its own way. It runs without governmental, institutional, corporate or NGO sponsorship, but with the active support and cooperation of civil society—donations are collected through boxes kept outside the venue and through the sale of books and films.
Just cinema, no glamour
I had visited the festival in 2015 in its 10th edition. The eastern U.P. town is known for poet Raghupati Sahay aka Firaq Gorakhpuri, for the smuggling trade on the Indo-Nepal border, the infamous Chauri Chaura incident, and for Gita Press. There were posters everywhere of the latest Bhojpuri hits starring Ravi Kishan, Manoj Tiwari, Dinesh Lal Yadav aka Nirahua, et al.
There were no such stars or glamour at the COR venue. It was basic and unadorned, with the films projected on a makeshift screen at Gokul Atithi Bhawan marriage hall, often interrupted by UP’s notorious power cuts. Every screening was followed by passionate, involved discussions with the audience.
Joshi is convinced that as Chief Minister, Yogi won’t allow any disruptions to an event that many people look forward to. Neither has there been any direct political pressure in the last 12 years. Indirectly, the university hall (the original venue) has been denied for screenings.
“It [COR] represents alternate politics, it’s against communalism. There is opposition to it in social media. The middle-class might find it difficult to associate with it,” says Manoj Singh, the convenor of Gorakhpur Film Society cautiously, but adds, “It only means our role has increased.”
According to cinema activist and filmmaker Nakul Singh Sahni it’s not just about the festival but the larger ideological shift in the country. “We [as artistes] don’t just need to work but do so in more effective ways,” he says. Even if there is a throttling of creative voices, of the freedom of expression, there is the concomitant boom in digital technology. “The idea is not to get scared to submission,” he says.
This year, COR has introduced music: Ginni Mahi, whose Chamar Pop has taken Punjab by storm, is on. Media Vigil, an initiative of Pankaj Srivastava, former IBN associate editor (reportedly fired from the channel for questioning the lack of coverage for AAP during the Delhi election) will do a session on media monopoly. Then there’s Sahni’s Chalchitra Abhiyan, a movement that trains local people in audio-visual media. The festival has also become a shorter two-day affair.
“We are focusing more on local screenings in small towns nearby,” says Joshi, and schedules are up for Maharajganj, Deoria and Salempur.
COR is all set to launch in Jharkhand too, kicking off with a two-day workshop in Khoonti (Ranchi) on March 29 and 30. Clearly the way forward is smaller, further, wider.
