“Challenging the stigma. Changing the narrative” is the motto of the Nomad Film Festival. One of India’s most sharply focused, the festival is dedicated to showcasing films dealing with the de-notified and nomadic tribes of the country.
The idea is to harness cinema in helping focus on their struggles and problems, to change the mindset of people about them and help fight the slurs and blots associated with them; misconceptions like they are criminal tribes, thieves and law-breakers.
“We used to organise conferences and discussions but found that cinema has a far bigger impact [with such issues],” says Mayank Sinha, the secretary of the Nomad Film Trust, the force behind the festival.
However, the acuteness of the festival’s vision and its commitment also makes it disadvantaged in another way. “There are very few films made on the de-notified tribes, nomads or gypsies. It gets difficult to organise the festival every year,” says Sinha.
The last two festivals were held in 2016 and 2018 and the organisers are gearing up again after a two-year gap to hold the third edition on February 15, 2020 in Delhi. The call for entries has begun and four films are already there in the organisers’ kitty.
In the new edition, the big idea is to raise sufficient sponsorship and use it to bring the marginalised tribes into the mainstream by giving them opportunities for cinematic self-expression. So film-making workshops will be organised for young members of the community so that they can tell their own stories themselves, through 10 or 15-minute films.
The films could be about identity politics but the larger aim is to help the tribal people find a strong creative voice. The initiative will also help fill the gap regarding the paucity of films on the subject in India and will aid the festival in becoming self-sustaining in the long run in terms of the programming.
Hundreds of tribes had originally been listed as “criminal tribes” under the Criminal Tribes Act of 1871. The Criminal Tribes Act of 1952 repealed the notification and de-notified these tribal communities. However, that hasn’t entirely changed public opinion about them. Many of them continue to be perceived as born or habitual criminals and live as outcasts, in social isolation and economic penury and at the receiving end of State and police brutality and social repression and humiliation. The historical and systematic injustices have almost invisibilised them.
“We strongly believe that, despite 65 years of constitutional repeal of the Criminal Tribes Act, the voices of these (approximately 10% of India’s population) communities are still muffled and forgotten. They still do not have a separate census enumeration and India is still unaware about the exact population count of the DNT communities. Despite the submissions of two statutory National Commission reports (2008 and 2018), we lack a permanent constitutional body to work towards the concerns of the DNT communities, ” states a festival note.
“Through this film festival, our prime purpose is to ruffle the deliberate silence maintained on the concerns of these communities by the Indian society at large and help bring their fight for constitutional guarantee into sharper focus,” it adds.
According to Sinha, the target audience of the festival is students and youth. “They will be the bureaucrats, academicians and change-makers of the future and can help build a counter-narrative.”
In the first year, the festival was held at the India Islamic Centre in Delhi and travelled to Latur and Tata Institute of Social Sciences in Mumbai. All but two films screened that year had been made by the community itself. The numbers slid in 2018 when it was held only in Delhi with fewer films coming from within the community itself. This year, hopefully, the balance will be struck in the community’s favour.
Meanwhile, the friends and well-wishers of the festival are pitching it big on social media, seeking support from politically aware film-makers like Pa Ranjith and Neeraj Ghaywan.
