Creators of fake forwards and fake news often know that just one out of a thousand would fall for them. That the rest would even laugh at them. But then, their target is always this one or two, who lack exposure. While in the old days, anonymous postcards and pamphlets were the medium for such information, the explosion of online mediums have made the job of such elements easy.
In Shekhar Rankhambe’s Marathi film Pamphlet , screened in the short fiction category at the 12th International Documentary and Short Film Festival of Kerala (IDSFFK), the victim of one such pamphlet is a 12-year-old boy.
He is like any other child, running about the village, flying kites with his best friend.
His life takes a turbulent turn when he receives a religious pamphlet which mandates circulation of its hundreds of copies to avoid misfortune. The notice carries stories of good fortune being experienced by people who have followed the instructions, as well as stories of bad luck that befell those who ignored it.
The fear of misfortune, and the lack of money to take enough copies of the pamphlet, plays on the boy’s mind. It does not help matters that he lives in a village ridden with superstition, and not enough sensible elders to guide him. With his best friend too keeping away from him, he falls into a spiral of irrationality, that changes him forever.
Rankhambe’s short might be set in a far flung village, where technology or development is yet to arrive, but the issues it raise strike home hard at the present.
Pola , another Marathi short film, set in the hinterlands, also has a carefree child at the centre. Here, his family is the victim of an oppressive system of economic exploitation. The wealthy landowners who lend money to the impoverished family charge high interest rates to usurp everything that belongs to them.
Bringing it back
In this case, it is the cattle that they take away, leading to the suicide of the child’s father. The child uses his imagination, to bring back one of the bulls, in time for the harvest festival Pola . In the times of hateful cow politics, Kamal Waghdhare, a known theatre activist, who makes his directorial debut with this film, uses cattle to tell a story of the economy, the agrarian distress and childhood innocence.
The Marathi short film industry also seems to be as alive and kicking as its mainstream industry, which has in the past decade thrown up many a surprise.
