There are days when we are told that ‘cinema is art but that it is not as simple as the other arts. It cannot be compared to taking a paper and pencil and writing something to communicate. It is a composite art; it is very expensive and only the privileged class can venture into grappling with it.’ There is a general consensus on this. Art, it is said is a product of human creativity and cinema is not an exception. It is the creativity of the director - who directs a collective effort. We become emotionally involved in cinema when it catches human behavior in an intense manner. This is how we have so far enjoyed cinema and that is also the reason why we love it.

But some of the recent developments, particularly after the advent of hi-tech digital technology, suggest that filmmaking is becoming more and more dependent on technological innovation, and that in the process human elements are being sidelined. Many computer terms like ‘cut and paste’, ‘software applications’ etc are being extensively used in cinema in various forms. If we stretch our imagination further and venture to foresee what is in store, it may not be farfetched to anticipate films made without any live performance by the actors. Computers will create actors and performances. As it is happening now in the TV channels, men and women are created by the computers and different heads are fixed on to different shoulders and these composite beings are made to do whatever the operator wishes them to do. ‘What is true and what is not true’ is a thing that has become difficult to categorize. We wonder whether cinema will retain its human face or whether it will slowly move further and further away from being artistic visual expressions. The trend that is beginning to appear is quite disconcerting.

Since criticism as it is practiced today is largely humanist, the issue is how critics would respond to that kind of cinema which is more preoccupied with gadgetry than people.

With best wishes,
Yours truly
H. N Narahari Rao
Editor

Satish Bahadur, who was instrumental in introducing the concept of teaching Film Appreciation in India and retired as professor of Film Appreciation at Film and Television Institute of India,(Pune) passed away on 24th July 2010 at Pune after a brief illness. He was 86.

Born in 1925, Prof.  Satish Bahadur started his career as a lecturer in Social Science at Agra University. Besides teaching he evinced keen interest in the arts and particularly in cinema. His passion for cinema made him a staunch film society activist. In the early 1950s Agra university became the first university in India to have its own campus film club with Satish Bahadur as its Secretary. They had regular film screenings with the help of central film library and other sources. Satish Bahadur made it a regular feature to have discussions on each film after the screening.  He came under the influence of Marie Seton, British author and critic who came to India for the first time in 1955, on an invitation by the Government of India, and from then on became actively associated with the promotion of the film society movement in numerous ways. Marie Seton later wrote a celebrated critical biography of Satyajit Ray. Coming to know about Agra University Film Club and its activities, Marie Seton visited Agra on several occasions and participated in several film screening programmes and discussions. Such prolonged contact with Marie Seton was a privilege enjoyed by Satish Bahadur.

During this period film appreciationwas a subject which was yet to be defined. And even though there was talk of introducing it as an extra-curricular subject in educational institutions in India, there was need for an expert in the field who could provide a proper perspective. Marie Seton was the person who took an initiative in this direction. She found in Satish Bahadur all the credentials required to take the lead in India. Satish Bahadur was in a comfortable university job at Agra with 13 years of post-graduate teaching experience. Initially he was reluctant to go to the Film Institute for the Film Appreciation teaching job. It was Marie Seton who persuaded him to accept the challenge. For, indeed, it was a challenge to teach film making students the art of the cinema, when the dominant culture was popular entertainment. In 1963, Satish Bahadur joined the Film Institute of India as Professor of Film Appreciation.

Marie Seton was demonstrating all the time that the art of the film can be analyzed most conveniently and convincingly through the structure of classic films (Potemkin, Bicycle Thieves, Rashomon, Song of Ceylon, Nightmail, Bert Haanstra’s Glass, Norman McLaren’s Neighbours…... Satyajit Ray films ….and so on).  This was the firm basis of his own teaching at the Film Institute for twenty years, as also in the  extension courses he had taught all over the country,  from Imphal to Rajkot and from Chandigarh to Trivandrum. There was a streak of Marie Seton in all his teaching all along. 

Satish Bahadur’s teaching did not remain limited to the institute campus alone. He took it far beyond its boundaries. In 1967, Satish Bahadur was the Course Director at the first one month long residential course in Film Appreciation for forty participants drawn from all over the country and Marie Seton was invited to be the main teacher.

This one month long course has since then become a regular annual feature, conducted jointly by Film and TV Institute and National Film Archive of India. Well known luminary and Magsaysay Awardee K.V.Subbanna of Ninasam Heggodu was one of the participants of this course. He was so inspired by this course that he made this comment: “For me it was not just teaching on cinema, I was virtually introduced to a mission in life.” K. V. Subbanna followed up his Pune experience with a 10 day course in Heggodu for participants in Karnataka during the Dasehra-Diwali vacations. Satish Bahadur taught at this annual course for ten continuous years, 1971 to 1980.  Satish Bahadur took time off from his normal assignments to conduct a number of short term courses organized by film societies and other institutions all over India, from Imphal to Rajkot and from Chandigarh to Trivandrum.

Professor Bahadur had developed his own module for teaching Film Appreciation. He always enjoyed teaching and this is what he used to say:
“I always used my teaching as an invitation to students to join me in a path of discovery In effect, I had to adjust the subject from my level of knowledge to the level of comprehension of students. All this involved three distinct activities. (a) my own preparation as a teacher,  (b) my understanding of students in the classroom, and (c)  organizing the classroom presentation. I highlight some aspects of each of these.”      

Prof. Satish Bahdur was bestowed with the Satyajit Ray memorial award for promoting cinema as art at Third Eye Film Festival Mumbai , 2006.

His death has created a void that is difficult to fill. A large number of his students, including, filmmakers, film society activists, film students, film critics, and many others from all over the country deeply  mourn this loss.

by H.N.Narahari Rao

Reflecting on two films by a major filmmaker often gives us a picture of his or her true importance. Theo Angelopoulos is one of the most celebrated filmmakers of the world and comparing two films may also be useful to understand common tendencies. Landscape in the Mist (1988) tells the story of two children Alexander and Voula who take a train to Germany in search of their father. The children are really illegitimate and the father in Germany is a fictional one hastily invented by their mother to satisfy their doubts, but the children embark upon their journey fully convinced that it will see them reunited with him. The film takes the superficial shape of a road movie and most of it delineates their experiences before they arrive in Germany. The film begins on a deeply melancholy note and this feeling bordering on hopelessness, is heightened by the music and the wintry lighting. The children are inarticulate and hence the philosophical pessimism expressed in the film is articulated by Orestes, a young member of a group of traveling players who have not been able to perform before an audience because the world has lost its taste for their kind of theatre. Orestes is due to join the army within the next three days and he spends his last free days with the children. At one moment Orestes finds a bit of exposed film in a pile of garbage. The film is completely blank but Orestes pretends that it is actually a picture of a mist with a landscape, with a tree gradually emerging from it. At the end of the film, the children arrive in Germany, walking over the border because they have no passports. The find themselves in the middle of a mist but when the mist lifts, what is immediately visible is a tree to which the two children run happily. 

The film has several astonishing sequences: a giant excavator that seems to be embarking upon a voyage into the bowels of the earth; an enormous stone hand coming sluggishly out of the sea, lifted out by a helicopter, the children dwarfed by the enormous yellow chimneys of a thermal power plant. At one point in the film, the driver of the truck in which they ride rapes Voula. The rape takes place in the canvas-covered rear of the vehicle and we are permitted neither to see nor hear the violence but a few moments later, after the driver climbs out, we see Voula hesitantly pulling herself down with thin, bloody hands pressing at her groin. The sequence is disturbing and, like the rest of the film, suggests a deeply felt anguish for the state of the land but the problem is, we are never certain what aspects of contemporary reality actually disenchant Angelopoulos. The filmmaker’s methods bear a superficial resemblance to those of the late Andrei Tarkovsky but this criticism would not be appropriate to most of the latter’s films, which have a distinct metaphysics that Angelopoulos’s films appear to lack. If one were to wonder about the significance of the astonishing images conjured up by Angelopoulos, one would be at a loss to find an explanation.

Another crucial problem with Landscape in the Mist is Angelopoulos’s use of children. Children, by convention, are innocent and cannot be made responsible for the ills of the land. Angelopoulos places them in his terrible world and tries to arouse us by what is done to them. In one sequence close to the end of the film, Voula finds a young soldier and attempts to beg some money from him. The soldier asks her to follow him to a secluded spot and, in the context of what has been done to her earlier, makes us apprehensive. This fear, it turns out, is not well founded because the soldier changes his mind and parts with the money without any demand for compensation. This seems to me to be clearly manipulative. The film also puts us in the vicarious position of seeing everything through the children’s eyes and we tend to see their innocence as our own. The film, thus, tries to circumvent or deny our moral responsibility for the world as we have made it and seen in this light, Angelopoulos’s film is not so admirable after all.

Angelopoulos’ more recent film Eternity and a Day (1998) also reflects a deep moral concern and has some properties in common with Tarkovsky’s last and perhaps worst film The Sacrifice. Alexander is a writer who seems deeply disturbed by the state of the land and even his everyday movements suggest the burden of moral responsibility that he seems to carry upon his shoulders. Alexander picks up a kind of friendship with an illegal immigrant – a little boy from Albania who ekes out a living cleaning car windshields at the traffic lights of Salonique. Alexander tries to take the boy back to the border but the latter changes his mind and decides to stay behind in Greece. There is a typically dazzling Angelopoulos sequence at the border: the morning is very misty and the lights at the outpost are lit. We don’t see the fence demarcating the border but we see several men who hang on to it, and it seems from a distance that the men are floating in empty space and their arms are outstretched.  We are enthusiastic about the image until we stop to ask if, normally, the border guards would not prevent the climbing of the fence; when we ask this question Angelopoulos’s visual pyrotechnics come under suspicion. This suspicion is further compounded when we are unable to ascribe any ‘meaning’ to the image of the floating men; it is merely there to impress us.

Like the hero in The Sacrifice (who is, curiously, also named Alexander), Alexander seems to be conceived as the filmmaker’s alter ego. The film is poorly lit because of the perpetual winter that hangs over Angelopoulos’s vision, but some memories having to do with Alexander’s happier moments with his passionate wife and affectionate family appear to pertain to summer in an earlier year.  The film once again begs to be interpreted. It could simply mean that the artist’s burden is now so great that all personal (and, perhaps, trivial) joys are part of a distant past. In The Sacrifice, Tarkovsky had his alter ego save mankind only to have it shut him up ungratefully as a lunatic. Angelopoulos is not such a megalomaniac in this film but there is still enough evidence of a disturbing self-importance in Eternity and a Day. With due deference to all artists, it is becoming more and more difficult to believe that the future of the world is really in their hands. The reader may find this remark too provocative but I imagine that it will make a work of art more ‘contemporary’ if it betrays some skepticism about its ultimate importance in the scheme of the world.  It is this skeptical component that Eternity and a Day singularly lacks and takes away from the significance of Angelopoulos’ cinema regardless of their stunning visual appeal.

by M.K.Raghavendra

Director: Prakash Jha
Raajneeti is a film that takes elements from both the Mahabharata and the other epic to have inspired so many Indian filmmakers – Coppola’s The Godfather (1972). Bhanupratap Singh and his younger brother Chandraprakash Singh head the Rashtravadi Party which has been out of power but is now supporting the government. Elections are due shortly but at this point Bhanupratap Singh has a paralytic stroke and the party needs a leader. Instead of nominating his own son Veerendra Pratap (Manoj Bajpai) as the leader, Bhanupratap names his brother Chandraprakash, thus incensing Veerendra Pratap. Chandraprakash has two sons – Prithviraj Pratap (Arjun Rampal), who is a politician and Samar Pratap (Ranbir Kapoor), who is getting his Ph.D on Victorian poetry in the United States. A senior functionary and strategic advisor in the party is Brij Gopal (Nana Patekar), who is also Chandraprakash’s brother-in-law.  The conflict between the two branches of the family surfaces when a candidate is needed for a dalit dominated constituency. The cocky Sooraj Kumar (Ajay Devgn) is the son of the family chauffeur but is locally popular because of his prowess at kabaddi. When he stakes a claim for candidature here, the aggrieved Veerendra Pratap supports him against the party’s official candidate. This catapults Sooraj to the top rung of the party and he becomes Veerendra Pratap’s trusted lieutenant. Unknown to everyone, Sooraj is actually the step brother of Prithviraj Pratap and Samar Pratap – the result of their mother’s secret liaison with a radical of the 1970s (Naseeruddin Shah). In the early part of the film Samar Pratap returns home from the United States for a visit but is embroiled in the fratricidal war that engulfs the family. 

The bloodshed in Raajneeti begins on the evening when Samar Pratap is due to return to the US. His father Chandraprakash drops him off at the airport but is liquidated the same evening on Veerendra Pratap’s orders because of the latter’s fear of being sidelined. Samar Pratap therefore cancels his return and remains behind with his family. Another development in the narrative includes the trumped up rape charges against Prithviraj Pratap which force a split in the party with the Prithviraj faction forming the ‘Janashakti Party’. Indu (Katrina Kaif) is the daughter of a tycoon and she loves Samar, although he does not reciprocate her feelings because he has an American girlfriend – named Sarah. In order to raise funds the family contracts Prithviraj Pratap’s marriage with Indu – her father would like her to be the wife of the future CM. Once blood is shed, limits are abandoned and Samar Pratap shows his hand as a strategist in the mould of Michael Corleone. Prithviraj Pratap kills the police officer enlisted by the opposite side and also some others but he and Sarah are also killed by a car bomb. At the climax Samar and Brij Gopal organize an ambush and both Veerendra Pratap and Sooraj Kumar are killed. The film concludes with the Janashakti Party sweeping the polls and Indu being installed as Chief Minister. Samar does not stay on in politics but returns to the US to pursue his studies. 

by M.K.Raghavendra

Among all the talented (and also some not-so-talented) faces on the screen of the competition section of the 45th Karlovy Vary International Film Feastival, Kooky the tiny, old fashioned, perhaps homemade Teddy Bear stood out with its defiant confidence and amazing sensitivity. The competition section of the 45th Karlovy Vary International Film Feastival kickstarted with Kooky and the film, while competing with others retained its rank till the end in the shortlist of the Fiprsci jury and even got honoured by the Grand Jury with a special award.

This Czech film by director Jan Sverak adds a new dimension to the Czech fairy tales as well as to cinema. Some one might ask as to what made Jan Sverak to venture into this theme when there were Toy Stories by Walt Disney already creating waves? Yes, it was indeed an adventure on Sverak`s part to make Kooky at the time when Disney`s `Toy Stories’ are playing havoc among the children and on the box office all over the world. `Toy Story’ ( in 3 parts) hails from Hollywood and none other than Walt Disney Production and has the modern animation technology to enhance the production value. Whereas Kooky does not even use the privilege of computer generated imagery so common these days and still with its old fashioned animation technique it achieves amazing visual impact as well as creates tremendous emotional impact on the viewer.

The beauty of the content here is its double-layered narration, double-layered point of view. The story is narrated from the point of view of the shabby little toy - teddy bear Kooky. Kooky is separated from his little owner and is thrown into a bizarre jungle of good and bad experiences. The homesick teddy bear pines for the sweet home and the protective hug of his little owner. In fact it is Kooky`s first ever experience of the outer world, just like any little human kid would have when suddenly thrown into the outside and hitherto unknown world and among the grownups who are not its parents. The child starts growing up in the process finding out its road to life, safety and assurance. Kooky the teddy very aptly represents such a child. The snappy dialogues, the imaginative situations bring out this child psychology quite powerfully.

But that is not all. This psychology of the child teddy bear is a whole world of the imagination of Ondra, the little human owner friend of Kooky. They are Ondra`s feelings that are thrust upon Kooky by Ondra, who is separated from his favourite toy, the teddy bear. Ondra worries as to how homesick Kooky must be feeling, what type of people he has to encounter and how he would find his way back. Ondra the little boy unknowingly believes that his toy is a living being, which itself becomes a revelation to the grownup audience of their own forgotten past - their believer childhood. What is just a piece of plastic or a shape stuffed with rags for the grownups, is a living being, a little kid for their little ones. They care for it and shower affection on them even when it is out of their sight. This revelation is the core of the story by Sverak himself, based on a small but poignant real life experience that he witnessed.

The child sensitivity is thus brought out quite sensitively by Sverak with powerful visuals- be they the scenes from Kooky`s odyssey or Ondra`s forlorn moods.

After his oscar winner `Kolya’, Sverak has delved into the psych of children as successfully as Kolya but with a totally different form, totally different genre and a totally different impact.

by Rekha Deshpande

The 11th edition of the Dhaka International Film Festival had quite a handful of recent cinematic tales to showcase contemporary history. The 'Australasian Competition' section had offered 16 films where the motif of suffering people and their self-realization, irrespective of race, religion and region takes different forms. The Turkish story of conflicts involving Kurds in I Saw The Sun (Güneşi Gördüm, 2009) directed by Mahsun Kirmizigul is a soul-touching human drama going for a thematic exploration of fratricidal killing.

The storyline shows the Altun family which symbolizes the pain and agony of millions of Kurds driven from their homes in the mountainous region of Southeast Turkey. Forced to lead a displaced living in Istanbul, they later find their way to Norway in search of peace and better living. But afterward, they again decided to come back to the Turkish countryside, where their roots lie though with immense threat. However the Altun's ordeal was not complete without confronting the enemy inside. When one of the Altun sons, a soldier doing national service, meets his guerrilla brother head-on during an offensive by the army, the former questions as to what will happen when they meet in the battlefront. The guerrilla's shot of reply was that in that case if he dies the State will claim that a terrorist is dead and if if his brother dies then the latter will be declared a martyr. The guerrilla breaths his last in an armed confrontation with the troops. The story of brother against brother takes a dramatic high when another son of the Altun family, a transvecite, gives his life at the hands of his own brother : the tragic incident takes a leaf out of so-called 'honor killing' on the street of Norway. Back in home, in just one of the most bizarre incidents of misfortune, two innocent children put their baby brother in the washing machine to cleanse him leaving the family shattered. The pace of all these unfolding events in the film is sensitively put on the roll and this is the most striking aspect of an otherwise tragic drama.

The Georgian and Kazakhstani co-production The Other Bank (Gagma Napiri, 2009) is the big-screen directorial debut of well-known short film-maker George Ovashrili. This is yet another flamboyant story dealing with uprooted people, solitude and struggle of helpless victims, disjointed family and overall effects on the child - the most vulnerable in the given backdrop of war-ravaged Central Asia.

The entire film is constructed from the viewpoint of a boy of twelve-year, Tedo, who lives with his mother in an abandoned hut in a suburb of Tbilisi. They are refugees from Abkhazia and life is hard for both of them as Tedo works in a car repair shop while his mother has to satisfy an advancing male, apparently a policeman. Disgusted with their mean life, Tedo sets on a journey to find his father across the border. His journey through the central Asian landscapes has all the thick and thin of a bloody conflict often marginalized in cinematic currency. He confronts unfriendly gestures, racial hatred of the common men, blood-thirsty border guards. He has to come to terms with many contours of under-developed economy and infrastructure, and so on. Tedo never comes to meet his father, who is too old to move out and rather is being taken care of by a young lady as his second wife in a place which is yet to rebound to normal life. With very less dialogue, the film scripts visually rich imagery with solid back-up of sound design. Even the squint-eyed boy has something to express in the contrasting world surrounding him which is not viewed by his innocent mind in curved line - though the world may not see him in straight lines. The emotions are underplayed in the film to the deepest level of one’s imagination.

The Indian entry in the competition section Madholal Keep Walking (2009) directed by Jal Tanik delves into the trauma of being victim of bomb blast in a Mumbai railway station. Madholal, a middle-aged office-goer, finds everything in disarray after his day-to-day life was derailed by the unseen forces of terror. The film unravels a story that salutes the undying spirit of man. The victim of the train blast, Madholal, has to regain the spirit of urbanity which has to depend on a constant vigil by the common-folk like him. The government and the State machinery is at its best with picking up the innocents under false suspicion : the victims in this case are the religious minorities in the magnificent city where the local train is the metaphor of life as elsewhere. The film is a direct look at the present day reality infected by the forces of inhumanity which does not take pity on either Madholal or his wife and two daughters. The didactic nature of the last part of the film is meticulously planned so that it does not spoil the earlier part of the narrative.

There are some other films shown in the 11th DIFF where music plays an essential part as in Broken Hill (2009) by Dagen Merrill - another competition film, from Australia. An acclaimed director and writer in him took every care in this musical looking at a young music lover, his experiences and how his efforts made a group of prisoners perform their best ever concert on stage. In the middle of the Australian outback, a youngster Tommy fails to win the heart of his sweetheart and incidentally happens to be a law-breaker that further makes his father dissociate from him. The court orders him to do a community service in the prison. But ultimately he wins the heart of his beloved, his father and the local people who are mesmerized by the innovative music he employed with the inmates of the prison. Aboriginal instruments, vocal sounds, even kitchen and bathroom utensils were used in the scenes. In fact, this is one of the rare films where music plays an inseparable role. The climax sequence in the film could remind one of the sequences in Lars von Trier's much-acclaimed Dogme-95 series movie Dancer in the Dark. It is obviously a film full of polyphonic sounds of great Australian backwater - a feast to the eye as Well as the ear.

In fact, cinema's genres are always explored with musical scores and sometimes songs are interwoven into the narrative to advance the plot or develop the film's characters, as in the sub-genre movies of musical comedy, like Tandoori Love (2008) directed by Oliver Paulus. Screened in the 'Cine of the World' section, it has successfully incorporated a strong element of humour as well as the usual music, dancing and storyline associated with Bollywood style. A film unit from Mumbai goes on shooting at a location in Switzerland. Some unexpected incidents occur behind the camera involving the heroine of the film falling for the main cook named Raja, who on the other hand develops an one-sided love for a local girl. The situations follow his romances that resulted in accidents, cover-ups in most unlikely of situations, his homecoming to India and the Swiss girl ultimately abandoning her fiancee, her home and finally meeting Raja on a busy street in a peculiarly Indian city. A romantic comedy in nature, it is a kind of impossible love on the screen told eloquently in pure humor but not without playback singing - enactment is though quite different from Danny Boyle's self-proclaimed comedy called Slumdog Millioaire.

Another film in the same section, Colourful Twilight (Rangeen Godhuli, 2009) is directed by Debanik Kundu. This Indian movie is not experimental as Dagen Merrill's or as Lars Von Trier's. By using static camera, coming back and forth in time while dealing with the protagonist of the film, the director uses the soundtrack to effect the sweetness of Rabindra Sangeet, the songs created by the Nobel-laureate Rabindranath Tagore. It speaks of an aged widowed man Kumaresh who accidentally meets the heartthrob of his youthful days, Labanyaprobha, after 37 long years. Their families were actually got separated in the turmoils of Bangladesh Liberation War and had to settle down on different sides of the border. Now after all these years, they continue to meet in the hustle-bustle of city life in Kolkata and develops a kind of Platonic love towards each other. But ultimately they both have to face social restrictions though Labanyaprobha's husband stands by their side. But unable to stand the repercussions, Kumaresh left his home for an undisclosed destination. It is a story of misfortune created by political unrest and at the same time a story of human bonding in the backdrop of rich tapestry of Bengali life. All throughout music plays an unforgettable part in this family drama.

All these stories, very modern in concept and perception, tell about suffering of the human soul, both in personal level and in wider social context. The depictions also amount to most stranger of dramas in the life of present-day citizens around the globe. It can be termed a ritual of suffering, to borrow from the famous Manipuri dramatist Heisman Kanhailal. Cinema is about elaboration of those stories, as always.

by Manoj Barpujari

Cinema from Across the Border
(A report on Bangladesh Film Festival)
Seven films from Bangladesh can give only a mean glimpse into the status of our neighbour’s cinema. Apart from the odd Bangladeshi film screened at Indian festivals, viewers, at least in Delhi, have never had access to a body of work from across the border. Seven films amount to very little. But they mark a beginning. And not surprisingly, the first of its kind Bangladesh Film Festival, organised in mid-April at Siri Fort by the Directorate of Film Festivals and the Bangladesh High Commission, ran to a near-full house. Cultural and linguistic affinities may explain the presence of a large number of Bengalis in the audience. But there were others too, curious about the cinematic values and concerns of Bangladeshi directors.

The films were an eclectic mix of the serious and the light-hearted, the inventive and the clichéd, the fluid and the stilted. Variously, they spoke of the Liberation War, the meaning of homeland, religious extremism, intolerant social practices, cityscapes and the effects of poverty. Issues we share with them, and often handle in similar ways.

One of the tallest figures in contemporary Bangladeshi cinema is Tareque Masud whose films Matir Moina (The Clay Bird, produced by his wife Catherine Masud) and Ontorjatra (The Inner Journey a.k.a. Home Land, co-directed with his wife) were part of the package. Masud spent much of his childhood in a madrasa. His studies brought to an abrupt end by the 1971 war. Matir Moina, his first feature film which premiered in Cannes and won the International Critics Prize, reflects this part of his childhood. A young boy, who leaves his family for a madrasa education, hears - sans understanding – the rumble of war, sees the orthodoxy of his father and the imperceptibly growing independence of his mother. The war catches up with them, and the family, like so many others, is torn apart. It’s a slow, intimately told story, a splendid piece of filmmaking, with fine, controlled acting and, without overstating it, a hymn to tolerance.

Ontorjatra is a return-to-the-homeland story of a divorced mother (her former husband has just died) and her adolescent son, and their rediscovery of their country and family. For the mother who has been living in England, this is a nostalgic trip, a revisiting of places she knew in Dhaka; for the son, it’s almost a first-time visit since he had left Dhaka as a child. New relationships are built with other family members, and old ones renewed. More importantly, the mother and son reach a mature level of understanding towards the end of the film, as she admits to the bitter feelings she nurtured towards her husband and as the son understands why and how she cloaked  her resentment in stony silence. Partly set in the sylvan landscape of Sylhet, this contemplative film touches gently upon issues of diasporic identity, homeland, memory, personal desires and family solidarity, as the young boy realises has something to come back to.

The lush green of the countryside and the abundant water and waterways is a classic feature of many Bangladeshi films. Tauquir Ahmed’s Joyjatra is the story of a boat journey of a motley group of poor people who flee their ancestral homes and villages to escape the Pakistani army’s carnage in 1971. The tiny boat is a world in microcosm: an expectant mother, a nursing mother and her baby, parents whose baby is missing, a grandfather, a callous Hindu clinging to a suitcase full of money and so on; and, as it moves towards the Indian shore without knowing where the shore is, it becomes  a metaphor for a stranded, drifting, battered country. Some of the travellers die – massacred, or out of exhaustion and starvation – but love blossoms on the boat between people of different communities and social barriers fall. It’s a twice-told, somewhat insistent tale, but meaningful to us in India. A bit of tighter editing would have given it greater coherence.

The most striking feature of Enamul Karim Nirjhar’s Aha is the splendid camera work. The old, feudal heritage building in which the story is set, provides just the surfaces needed for an enraptured camera to pan over worn-out facades, carvings, steps and grills and an unweeded garden, moving up and down, in and out, above and under. Around this lost splendour in the heart of Dhaka, in a true architectural clash, are a host of new faceless buildings. Maintaining the ruined beauty is n o longer feasible. It must go as others have. Into this history-versus-urban-sprawl conflict is woven a novel tale of many strands and textures, and for a while you wonder where it is all leading. Yet, Aha is a commendable debut work by a director, himself an architect, who returns to the memories of war-time Dhaka when the house he grew up in was burnt down.

Tauquir Ahmed’s other film, Rupkothar Golpo (A Fairy Tale) is flooded with every trick of commercial cinema – the good cop and the stupid cop, cops chasing the good, hapless guy, lusty truckers, a poor woman and a poor man, both wronged, a baby miraculously on screen throughout the film, plenty of inexplicable episodes, and two story lines that meet at the end. The story had enough in it to be turned into a pastiche of a fairy tale. What it needed was a certain ironical distance from its subject matter, though this is partly provided by a deliberately garish use of colours and partly by an ending that is not quite so fairy-tale-like.

The opening film Ayna (Mirror) by Sarah Kabori – she is also a Member of Parliament - was about a village girl who spurns the advances of a young man. Fate catches up with her in the city. The man throws acid on her face, lacerating and burning it. While the film itself had some stilted acting and dialogue, it did throw light on the terrifying problem of acid violence on women in Bangladesh, where many of the assaults remain unreported for fear of reprisals. It recalled an earlier documentary by Aminul Islam, benignly entitled Facing the Future which had shots so horrifying of such attacks, you could have frozen in your seat. Bachelor by Mostafa Sarwar Farooki was a light-hearted film on a bunch of bachelors – some in love, some not, some out of it.

The festival was a worthy curtain-raiser on a film industry we need to know better. These were films of humanism and compassion. Their makers saw bitter truths around them, asked questions and searched for answers. In that sense, each film has been a personal journey. And Delhi’s response was most encouraging. That Sarah Kabori, Tauquir Ahmed, actors Aupee and Shahidul Alam and the MD of Impress Telefilm Faridue Reza Sagar were present, spoke of the serious intention of the organisers.
 
by Latika Padgaonkar

It has become somewhat of a cliché to say that the 1950s was the golden age of Indian cinema. But it is true. We had fabulous stars in those days and we had some fabulous directors. Mehboob Khan made his films in the grand style, Raj Kapoor was flamboyant, Guru Dutt was moody. Bimal Roy’s films, on the other hand, were low-keyed and subtle. His characters never raised their voices. If they suffered, they did it quietly, male as well as female. He was a woman’s director. The leading ladies of that time gave their best performances in Bimal Roy films, Nutan in Sujata, Meena Kumari in Parineeta, Kamini Kaushal in Biraj Bahu, Sadhna in Parakh and Vyjayantimala in Devdas.

Bimal Roy was born in a zamindari family in East Bengal. He started as a cameraman in New Theatres in Calcutta. Later, he turned to direction and made several films for that production house. He came to Bombay in 1950 when Bengali cinema was heading towards the abyss following the creation of East Pakistan. He did not shake off his Bengali roots. Many of his Bombay films were based on Bengali novels, their music had strong Bengali influence and his characters dressed in Bengali manner. And, by all accounts, he spoke Hindi badly. 
This is the year of his hundredth birthday. Bimal Roy; The Man Who Spoke in Pictures, edited by his daughter, Rinky Roy Bhattacharya, is an eulogy as well as an insight into the great man and his films. She has put it together with great deal of love but, as one would expect in a publication of this sort, a number of essays are sentimental tosh. These are mostly from our Bengali friends. 

However, if you separate the chaff from the wheat, you will be rewarded with some fine critique and appreciation of the man’s films. The best pieces are from contributors who did not know Bimal Roy.

There is healthy disagreement on the films. Naseeruddin Shah is of the view that Sujata (1959) and Parakh (1960) are the high points of his career. Meghnad Desai carries the torch for Do Bigha Zamin (1953) and Devdas (1955). Biraj Bahu (1954) too has its staunch supporters. I tend to agree with Shyam Benegal that Parineeta, based on a Saratchandra Chattopadhyay novel, was his best film. It is quite exquisite. This difference of opinion goes to show that Bimal Roy has left behind a formidable body of work.

Towards the end, he made some bad films. Blame it on lung cancer; Roy was a heavy smoker. Sujata (1959) was his last great film. Prem Patra (1962) and Benazir (1964), as Naseeruddin Shah points out, were mediocre. Both starred Shashi Kapoor who, according to Bollywood lore, has acted in more flops that any other hero in the history of Hindi cinema!

Bimal Roy died in 1966. Meghnad Desai sums up the man best: “Bimal Roy made modern cinema possible. He brought Sarat to the screen more than anyone else. His legacy as a serious, pioneering filmmaker is safe with films like Do Bigha Zamin, Devdas, Parineeta and Biraj Bahu.There are also other films such as Sujata, Bandini, Parakh. Bimal Roy has us all in his debt for what he has left behind for us to see and see again and again.”

(Appeared: OUTLOOK Weekly Magazine/ September 14 2009)

by Bhaichand Patel

Unlikely Hero: Om Puri
By Nandita C. Puri
Roli Books/208 pages / Rs. 395
Om Puri as the Dustin Hoffman of India; he is incapable of giving a bad performance even in films that, otherwise, are terrible. He is one of our finest actors and can play serious roles and comedy with equal ease.

The best part in Unlikely Hero: Om Puri by Nandita C. Puri is on his early years. He comes from a poor family. His father, a clerk in railways, served time in prison while the family lived on handouts from strangers. As a child, Om Puri caught smallpox. That was perhaps fortunate. It left scars and gave Indian cinema its most interesting face! He struggled for years as an actor until he got the break in Govind Nihalani’s Ardh Satya. It is a moving story that calls for a better writer. The author, who is also his wife, is star-struck when it comes to luminaries but is disturbingly patronizing when she writes on people who are less unfortunate. Some of them are smelly; others cannot speak English properly. She tells us that Om Puri pronounces ‘October’ as ‘ak-too-ber’. I take it she pronounces it the way the Queen of England does!

The media has concentrated, inevitably, on the juicer bits from the book – Puri losing his virginity at the age of fourteen to a fifty-five year old woman, his affair with his maid. This has upset the author. Methinks the lady doth protest too much. The leaks have boosted sales.

I met Om Puri twice, in Montreal and again in Locarno. He is genuinely a nice, unassuming person. The book succeeds in bringing that across.

(Appeared: OUTLOOK Weekly Magazine/ December 21 20009)

by Bhaichand Patel