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Feast on globalisation

The 13 documentary films at the film festival had the stamp of quality

Tenacious film-maker Hubert Sauper

Your heart — gosh! — may swell with pride to learn that the corporation really developed its contours here in (Akhand Bharat) when the British came with the East India Company and reaped through rape too much beyond his wildest expectations. So was crystallised a sterling methodology of growth and a strategy for creation of wealth - MNC style. To be part of it, you need an irresistible passion for selling and some globally long arms to handle it slickly! Forget about all the local level loot that troubles you so much as a concerned citizen. That's peanuts! To see it whole, however, you need more eyes than the general run and rut of media can ever equip you with. Go to Lake Victoria in Tanzania, for instance. Or better still, grab from somewhere a DVD of the film called Darwin's Nightmare made by that remarkably tenacious film-maker, Hubert Sauper. The film was certainly the most shocking of the five selected documentaries screened at a festival on Globalisations organised by the Alliance Française of Hyderabad in collaboration with the French Embassy in India and Hyderabad Film Club last month. Sitting through the films was an excellent education on the extent and mind-boggling complexity and effects of globalisation. How crucial it is to make the extra effort to fathom and make some sense of it.

Island of Flowers (1989) by Jorge Furtado which runs like a cheeky, caustically satiric school lesson with lots of animation and graphics on the journey of a humble tomato is a fine rip-up act on the mechanisms of globalisation. The meek are here to provide the raw materials for the big guns to lift them and make profits through the stratagems of processing, value addition,promotion, packaging, pricing and taking it out as far as they can.

Globalisation, Violence or Dialogue( 2002), by the French director, Patrice Barrat traces out, using footage shot over many years, how the very process of the discussion on globalisation has become extremely vitiated since 9/11. The opponents - spirited individuals and NGOs - have to be extremely cautious and clever in how they articulate their opinions and organise their peaceful protests. Else you could be easily labelled an enemy of civil society and a partisan of the devil!

Philip Brooks' film 6000 A day: Account of a Catastrophe Foretold (2001) offers a very incisive mid-term account of the global fight against AIDS since its discovery in the early '90s. The chief credit for fighting against numerous misconceptions and cynical complacencies and bringing the right awareness about AIDS should go to a few individual members of the NGO, ACTUP in the United States.

The last film screened called Mondovino was an aggressively stylised film. Throughout the film, the camera keeps moving restlessly, often zooming in irreverently close to the speakers' faces and as suddenly shifting to anything else apposite in the vicinity. From Europe to the Amazon through the US, the celebrated American docu-film maker Jonathan Nossiter meets dozens of people involved in the `soap opera' of wine business, only to tap the context to dissect the core problem with globalisation

They were all demanding and accomplished films. But that's in the nature of a good documentary: providing a deeper insight into the times we live in. Raising to the fore alternate, suppressed, subversive views of reality. And warn! The full package has 13 films on globalisation and are available for viewing with the Alliance Française of Hyderabad located in West Marredpally (ph: 27700734-6)

SUMASPATI

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