As the credits started rolling after the première of The Mountains Agonized (Ho Gayi Hai Pir Parvat Si) , an audience member sitting at the back of the dark room shouted, “ Kisan mukti zindabad!”
Even as everyone in the room repeated the rallying cry of the farmers’ struggle, a woman in the front raised a slogan for unity in the struggles of farmers, workers and women: “ Kisan, majdoor, mahila ekta zindabad!”
As the room resounded with loud chants, the filmmaker, Subrat Kumar Sahu, stood up to applause that did not die down for the next few minutes.
The film that took Sahu and team over eight years to complete depicts how farming communities of Himachal Pradesh have been impacted by the State’s hydro-power projects along the Sutlej.
“We are pahaadis (people of the mountains). If you take away our mountains, what will remain of our being,” asks one of the many villagers whose testimonies the director has documented.
Non-mainstream
The Mountains... was one among the films showcased at the Cinema of Resistance Documentary Workshop/ Film Festival held last month at Sambhaavnaa Institute of Public Policy and Politics in Kandbari village, Himachal Pradesh.
With over 35 participants, including social activists, film enthusiasts and students, from across the country, the three-day workshop showcased documentaries on the marginalised sections and various people’s movements.
Started in Gorakhpur, Cinema of Resistance (CoR) conducted its first film festival in 2006, coinciding with the 75th anniversary of Bhagat Singh’s martyrdom. The “pro-people independent cinema initiative” aims to “create cinematic spaces in non-mainstream spaces”.
“We aim to break structures and hierarchies hitherto set by film festivals, making them exclusive and restrictive spaces. We wish to change the very idea of what constitutes cinema — there have even been instances where we’ve shown rough unedited footages of films,” says the initiative’s national convener Sanjay Joshi.
With a deliberate focus on not “teaching filmmaking” but teaching “how to screen films,” the workshop focused on why the way a film was screened was as important as its content.
Gadi Lohardaga Mail (2006), screened on the first day, documents the attachment the locals have to a passenger train, the Lohardaga Mail, whose services were stopped soon after the film was shot.
The Ranchi filmmakers, Biju Toppo and Meghnath, document the significance of the train in the lives of the villagers. Here, the camera does not impose itself on the people; the adivasis are portrayed with respect, and not in flashes, says Joshi. “This is what happens when you take the camera away from the establishment.”
Wing and a prayer
Two feature films — Ektara Collective’s Turup (Checkmate) and Iranian filmmaker Marzieh Meshkini’s The Day I Become a Woman — were also part of the line-up at the workshop. Also screened was the trailer of Lynch Nation , a film by Furqan Faridi, Ashfaque E.J., Shaheen Ahmed and Vishu Sejwal, documenting cases of mob violence in the country.
CoR works solely on members’ contributions and donations from philanthropists, and has local chapters across North India. It has so far conducted film festivals in Nainital, Patna, Lucknow and Udaipur, among others.
During a screening in Barmer, Rajasthan, members of CoR had used sacks to cover windows to darken the only room available for screening in the village.
And in Bhilai, members wanted to bring the women sanitation workers from the area, mostly Dalits, for a screening of Pee ( Shit, 2003), a Tamil documentary directed by Amudhan R.P. In the film, the camera follows Mariammal, a Madurai municipality sanitation worker.
“The film was in Tamil and the subtitles were in English, and the women couldn’t understand a word,” recalls Joshi. So at the last minute, a member from CoR narrated the film in Hindi while it ran muted on screen. All 40 sanitation workers left only after watching the entire film.
kalyani.s@thehindu.co.in
