Dubai International Film Festival

Water (A film by Deepa Mehta)

2006-01-06T17:54:00.000+04:00

A poignant tale of hope

Water
Cast: Seema Biswas, Lisa Ray, Sarala, John Abraham, Raghuveer Yadav, Kulbhushan Karbanda, Waheeda Rahman
Songs: Sukhwinder Singh and AR Rahman
Background score: Mycheal Danna
Cinematography: Giles Nuttgens
Editor: Colin Monie
Script, direction: Deepa Mehta

Director Deepa Mehta had rightly warned before the screening of her film in Dubai: Water is not a film that you enjoy watching. It is one that moves you. And she bares the soul of her story less than five minutes into the film.
A little girl is woken up by her father in the middle of the night and asked: “Do you remember the man you married?”
She replies: “No.”
“He is dead. You have become a widow.”
And the innocent one simply asks: “For how long, father?”
That is a defining moment in Water. It takes you straight into the sincerity that underscores Mehta’s narration. From there on, nothing is easy for Chuyia, the little girl, or for that matter, the viewer. She is shunted into a home for widows, and there she comes face to face with what could be her future — bleak, bitter old age, where you could (and would) die for a piece of laddoo (an Indian sweet).
Mehta loves symbols and she throws them with relish in Water, not as structured takes but with the creative craft of a gifted story-teller. The film opens on to a lotus pond; later the protagonist of the tale, a young widow, Kalyani, who doesn’t remember when she was married or when her husband died, questions the logic of pristine lotus buds in filthy waters. She herself hasn’t been virtuous to the core, but also bear in mind that she lives in 1938, when widows were nothing more than social outcasts, and they learn to obey not to question.
That is precisely where Mehta’s film acquires a feminine dimension. All three protagonists of the film — Kalyani, Chiyui and Shakuntala, the oldest of the three widows — in their own manner seek to question. Shakuntala is the only one who can stand up to the dictates of the self-proclaimed head of the ashram. Kalyani defies the old woman openly when questioned about her decision to re-marry. And little Chiyui, she bites the woman, stamps on her and kills the matriarch’s parrot, whenever she is hurt.
But doesn’t Mehta tend to romanticise what is essentially a vegetating existence of the widows? Doesn’t she tend to narrow the scope of an issue into the rather limited confines of a love affair and try to get away with it? Doesn’t she simply brush through larger issues — including women and child abuse — and simply hope that the magic you blindly associate with Gandhi and the freedom movement will tie-up all loose ends?
Perhaps yes, and she wouldn’t have overlooked it either. Her film ends on a foot-note: India has some 34 million widows according to the 2001 census and many of them live in conditions that aren’t way different from what Water portrays. Gandhi is dead and gone; the widows still wear the white robes and hope to die by the river Ganges.
Water isn’t a “men” film. The only men are either failed or erring fathers, intoxicated losers or drifting idealists. And then, yes, there is Gandhi. Slowly and steadily, the film flows into him, his idealism, and his search for truth… That indeed makes for a poignant moment, when even the thought of idealistic hope brings a lump in your throat.
Mehta plays with water and rains to build her story — there is an element of water that runs through the narrative at all points. But it is the effortless pattern with which she builds human bonding that makes Water a marvel in film-making.
And doesn’t she bring out the best from her actors! Seema Biswas (as Shakuntala) and Sarala (as Chuyia) highlight the film with exceptional performances. Lisa Ray (as Kalyani) and John Abraham (as Narayan, the idealist who seeks to marry Kalyani) haven’t been entirely stripped of their star charisma but the very fire of romance that should kindle between the characters seems to justify the presence of charismatic stars than just talented actors.
Water tries hard to recreate the ambience of Varanasi in remote Sri Lanka; not surprisingly, it succeeds only partly. The shrines, the waters of Ganges, the very language of nature, the people flavour — they are all missing. And doesn’t Mehta err in bringing in essentially south Indian attires to many passers-by on-screen?
Water would have entered another realm, if its shooting hadn’t been disrupted in India. But there are only a fanatical few to blame for that. Mehta opts then for the second best, and what she can’t get from nature, she adds on to her script. That clearly is out of bounds for the fundamentalists to reach. And they should rather watch the film, first.
— Rajeev Nair

Caption:
The cast of the Water (from left): John Abraham, Seema Biswas, director Deepa Mehta, Sarala and Lisa Ray.

Food, love and lasting peace

2005-12-23T18:41:00.000+04:00

Among the plethora of proposed political solutions, how about a simplistic recipe for lasting peace in areas of conflict? Ari Sandel, director of the musical comedy West Bank Story, has one that hinges on two essentials: Food and love

Caption: Ari Sandel, Noureen DeWulf and Ben Newmark.

ARI Sandel and the cast of his film West Bank Story arrive in Dubai with no expectations. But they better brace themselves up for some heated discussions what with the distinctive reactions their film has aroused in Dubai.
A musical comedy, West Bank Story has a never-before-attempted thread. It charts the love story of an Israeli soldier, David (Ben Newmark), and a Palestinian restaurant waitress, Fatima (Noureen DeWulf). But there is nothing breezy about the love affair in the face of the sheer hatred that surrounds them all captured in the backdrop of two restaurants, the Hummus Hut and Kosker King. A “wall” comes up between the two, and can love break the barriers? Can the hunger for food unite the warring people?
Sandel’s intention with the film was pretty simple: “I wanted to make people laugh and I wanted to make a film that was pro-peace, one that did not take sides.”
He isn’t aware of the Arab reaction — the Dubai screening is its first to a predominantly Middle Eastern audience — and as for those who thought it was frivolous or simplistic, his answer is: “It is a comedy and it needs to be simple to get where it had to be.”
Sandel says he tried hard to make sure that the film did not offend anybody and was fair to all. “For every joke on the Arabs, we had one on the Jews; for every nice moment of the Jews, we had one for Arabs… we strove to keep it balanced. It was very tricky but there never was any doubt that what we were creating was something pro-peace.”
Sandel made sure of not getting “super-political” with the 21-minute film shot over 14 days just outside of Los Angeles in a ranch. “The whole point of the film was that the moment you step out of the Middle East, Arabs and Jews live together, especially in the US.” He feels West Bank Story could be the first film to come out of America that shows Arabs “as witty and not angry. There are genuinely funny moments and that is what you need in cinema.”
The musical format of the film — an obvious tribute to the classic West Side Story — was the hook to the film, says Sandel. “I thought it would be funny to have the Arabs and Jews dancing together but I did not want the film to be a tragedy like West Side Story. But music indeed opened a door for lot more comedy.”
Sandel says the most difficult part of making the film was to keep it balanced. “Everything about the film has been carefully scrutinised, even the colours.” He therefore has an explanation for why everything in the film is the way it is. “It was especially tough to keep moving forward, not listening to what people were talking about the film and just following it through.”
Though the peace prescribed by cinema, in general, is clichéd, Sandel says he believes “100 per cent in the message of West Bank Story. I take the side of peace and hope, and if you lose hope, life doesn’t work.”
Doing the film was a personal mission fulfilled for its hero, Ben Newmark. “I thought it was important to be part of something that I believed in. You can do some eight million parts in Los Angeles, and half of that will be rubbish. But to do a film that means something to you is incredible.”
Sandel says, by and large, the film has been taken positively. “A lot of people thanked us for making the film. Its message isn’t new but when all you see are tragic films of the situation, there is one that offers a breath of fresh air, one that is positive, not one-sided and sees the situation from a new perspective.”
Sandel, Newmark and Noureen DeWulf chorus “yes” when asked if they believed love is the answer to peace, and then add: “Food too… love and food are very connected,” says Sandel.
And yet if the message of the film seems too simplistic, Sandel has only one more comment to add: “In the end we are human beings, and we have to find a solution. If you can find it (a solution for peace) anywhere else in the world, you can do it in the Middle East too.”
— Rajeev Nair

Deepa Mehta (Interview)

2005-12-23T18:39:00.000+04:00

In full flow

India-born Canadian director Deepa Mehta is in Dubai to present her film Water at the Dubai International Film Festival. Rajeev Nair meets her

Deepa Mehta is mightily pleased that all Diff screenings of her film Water are already on standby. "How come," wonders the film's producer David Hamilton in a jocular vein. "It is a mystery." And then he adds: "I think it is great film."
Deepa arrives here from India, where she had showcased Water at the International Film Festival of Kerala. The film, on Hindu widows in Varanasi, had kicked up a storm during its making five years back. Mehta had to stop shooting and when she commenced it in Sri Lanka last year she changed her cast too, opting for John Abraham, Lisa Ray and Seema Biswas instead of the original cast comprising Akshay Kumar, Nandita Das and Shabana Azmi.
She says the five years of waiting was a crucial learning for the filmmaker. "I learnt that you can't let your personal agenda get into filmmaking." Her next venture, Exclusion, set in 1940, explores racism in Canada. Like her famous trilogy, it is also her journey into the past "to realise where you are going."
Excerpts from an exclusive interview, the first Deepa Mehta gave to the Dubai media after arriving from Thiruvananthapuram:

Last year you came to Diff with a frivolous Bollywood-Hollywood; this year it is Water, which completes your poignant Earth-Fire-Water trilogy. How do you feel?
I feel excellent, and I felt good last year too because Bollywood-Hollywood was done after Water was shut down five years ago. It was the desire to do something light and fun; it is not that fun can't be important but it is not the same thing. I wanted to take a break. And I enjoyed doing Bollywood-Hollywood. Everything has its time and place, and it was the perfect time for me to do something irreverent.

Water had the honour of opening Toronto Film Festival. How was the experience?
It was superb. That was the biggest honour — to have an opening night film. And somehow, it felt right.

Are you bothered that you couldn't shoot the film in India?
Not at all. I was very happy. I did not want to shoot it in India again. There is always a risk of what happened last time. I am sure things would have been okay but why take the tension. I am a filmmaker; I am not trying to prove a point. I was very happy with Sri Lanka.

You also had to alter your cast. Did you get what you looked for in Lisa Ray and John Abraham?
You see, five years had passed. It is a long time. Nandita Das was five years older; Shabana Azmi was busy. Akshay Kumar had become a big star. All of them had been supportive. I too had changed as a director. I looked at the characters slightly differently.

How different is the Water that we see now from what you had originally conceptualised?
The script is exactly the same, the narrative and story are the same. The difference is that between Sri Lanka and Varanasi. The only thing that was changed was the name of a character that Nandita was to play. During the controversy, when we had to ask for re-permission, they asked me to change the name from Janaki to something else. I changed it to Kalyani.

What have you proved with your trilogy?
I haven't tried to prove anything. I just completed my film. If I were to prove something, I would have done the film five years ago. I am a filmmaker, not a politician, and doing Water wasn't a five-year plan. I feel satisfied that the vision and passion for these three films is over. There is a closure to it and that has a lot of dignity.

What did the experience of doing Water teach you?
I think, what doesn't kill you makes you stronger. Some three months after Water was shut down, I could have done the film. But I was very angry and hurt. I said, I will not make this script, which I love, which is gentle and flowing like water, till I stop being angry. That took four years. It was four years of different stages of anger. I wanted even the residual anger to dissipate before starting work on the film. I did not want to approach the script with a baggage from the past. I wanted to approach it fresh without it being an act of vengeance. That is what I learnt: You can't let your personal agenda get into filmmaking.

What next for you?
I am doing a very serious film, Exclusion. It is set in Canada and India in 1940, when a shipload of Indians, some of them dissidents, arrived in Canada to escape the British. The Canadians, heavily influenced by the British, would not let them enter. Some 375 men, two women and two children arrived in a boat and they anchored outside Vancouver. They were out there for two months because the white folks were very scared of a "brown invasion." All the Indians in Vancouver, mostly the working class, pooled money, and hired a lawyer to fight for their cause. But they lost. It is a film about exploring racism in Canada. Unless you know where you are coming from, you do not know where you are going. In many ways, the trilogy is also about that. But this is from the other point of view. I have spoken to Amitabh Bachchan – he wants to do it in principle. I like John Abraham and Seema Biswas too to do it. It will start in September.

How was the response to Water in India at the film festival screening in Kerala?
Wonderful… 5,000 people turned up for the screening. I love what Malayalam films stand for. I am a big admirer of Malayalam cinema — with the likes of Adoor Gopalakrishnan, TV Chandran or even the new directors like Pradeep Nair. It is socially conscious cinema and it is progressive cinema. Also I think Kerala has a very cinema-literate audience. To open Water in Kerala, therefore, seemed right. A big producer came up to me and said: "I belong to the Bharatiya Janatha Party, and I don't know why they did what they did to you. This film celebrates India." I was touched.

What is your expectation from Diff?
I have no expectations. You never know about films. You hope (for the best) but you mustn't expect.

Intimate sketches of human healing

2005-12-23T18:36:00.000+04:00

Healing and hope: These are the watchwords of Stroke, a documentary being screened at Diff. Dreams and reality are juxtaposed in the film about the miraculous recovery of Boris Baberkoff, a cellist, who suffered a stroke in New York. His wife, German filmmaker Katarina Peters, filmed his illness and recovery

Caption: Katarina Peters with Boris Baberkoff.

KATARINA Peters remembers a dream in which she was seated inside her husband’s cello. She was cocooned in there, weaving a strand of her husband’s brain from her own hair. Stroke, the documentary, captures this moment. These dreams are the only components of “fiction” in the documentary — over 85 per cent of the 111 minutes film shows the illness of Boris Baberkoff, a cellist who suffered a near-fatal stroke while the newly wed couple was in New York.
Peters trained her newly bought DV camera on Baberkoff as her way of surviving the ordeal. “I was in shock, total shock and I didn’t know what to do. I took the camera and held on to it for survival. This was my new reality and I had to understand what was going on. To look through the camera was cathartic.”
She filmed for five years as Baberkoff slowly and steadily recovered, started walking and started playing the cello once again. “Later, when I looked at the images, I was surprised how impulsively right I was.” But it wasn’t an easy journey. Locking himself into his own world, the result of his “lock-in syndrome,” Baberkoff would sometimes not share his moments of recovery or pain with Peters. “I feared that we would both be locked up in our homes,” recalls Peters. The illness had indeed taken a toll on their life. They had no money, quit a court battle because they did not have funds, had to move to a smaller house and their friends were drifting…
But Peters was sure about one thing. The journey was not going to be a guilt-trip for either of them. “I had married this young man (Peters was 40 and Baberkoff 33 when they married) and a few months later, he was handicapped. But one thing I learnt from the situation was to not let guilt get into the way. If I wanted to go out and meet friends and I was going to feel guilty about it, both of us would have ended up depressed.”
Instead, the whole chain of events brought them closer. And Peters believes that it is the inner strength of Baberkoff and his child-like joy about life that strengthened their bonding. “He realised that it was his means of survival and he was very scared that I would leave him.”
Today, the two have also addressed the degree of independence, with Baberkoff earning some money of his own, teaching students and working at a youth centre in Berlin with a lot of Arabian children. To get to playing cello he had to practise daily for two years with support from his father, who insisted that Boris must stick to a routine.
Peters says it is “love, music, the love for life to hang in there and lots of discipline” that hastened Baberkoff’s recovery. He limps a little now, his left eye is yet to fully recover and his short-term memory is damaged — yet they travel together and take life one day at a time.
Peters incorporated her own dream sequences into Stroke after she realised how insightful some of her dreams were about her future. “Once I had dreamt of a mute cello,” she adds. Peters integrates her artistic inclinations in the film. To capture the dreams, she had put up installations.
The first few minutes of Stroke have shots of a hale and hearty Baberkoff. “They were accidental shots, taken while I was testing the camera. Suddenly, after his stroke, they became precious. They were the last images of him while he was full of life.”
Stroke was eventually culled from 85 hours of footage shot with the handheld camera. Editing to reach the final cut took one-and-a-half years. The sound design is by Baberkoff.
Peters kept away from all conventional norms of filmmaking, which gives Stroke its uniqueness. “I don’t know of another film of this sort. It was a film that came to us.” But for all practical purposes, Stroke helped the two to survive. “It helped us cope with our destiny,” she says.
Stroke has been the toast of many documentary festivals and has also had a limited theatrical release in Europe. But Peters says the public turnout was disappointing. “I know that with a biographical sketch, people feel it is so intimate and heavy to cope with that they don’t want to see it. But if you see the film, you will realise how it offers an interesting insight into life and a positive outlook.”
She is moving on to two documentaries: One is about a group of women who discover male identity within them; with the other she revisits a trip she made from Turkey through Iran, Afghanistan and Pakistan to Nepal along with a film crew to shoot a temple in the Himalayas.

— Rajeev Nair

A new beginning in old Sana’a

2005-12-23T18:33:00.000+04:00

With A New Day in Old Sana’a, Bader Ben Hirsi goes down in the history of Yemen’s fledgling filmmaking industry. He is Yemen's first feature film director and he braved many an obstacle to finish his film. Rajeev Nair meets him on the sidelines of Diff

Caption: Ahmed Abdali and Bader Ben Hirsi.

A YOUNG Yemeni who grew up in the West, Bader Ben Hirsi thought he had heard the most unfounded rumour about him when he was billed as an agent of CIA. That, however, was only the beginning. A newspaper had an exclusive, a banner headline that screamed: “The secret about Hirsi: He is German.”
Now, arriving in Dubai with the trophy for the Best Arab Film from the Cairo Festival, he looks back on the bitter experiences in the making of A New Day in Old Sana’a with a relaxed humour — having come out of it alive… and kicking.
With the film, he enters the annals of Yemeni filmmaking industry – if ever the country gets to have one. He will be known as the director of the first Yemeni feature film. But more than the thought of going down in history books, Hirsi is encouraged by the fact that the film has brought out positive vibes amongst young Yemeni filmmakers. “I already know of three youngsters who are looking to direct feature films in Yemen,” he says.
For Hirsi and his childhood friend, Ahmed Abdali, who is also the producer of the film, it is time to sit back and savour the moment — the end of an arduous journey. “Yemen didn’t have a film industry. We had to take in equipment and crew from abroad as well as train local Yemenis,” says Abdali.
They had already made documentaries in Yemen. “It is a photogenic country, incredibly beautiful and for us it was a case of doing a low budget film in the UK or getting all out and doing a feature film in Yemen with the same budget,” recalls Hirsi. “It was a nice challenge to do something that makes history. When Yemen will have a film school, our film will be the first one they will teach.”
The two feel that Yemen is grossly under-represented in the film industry. “The people are nice and it is a beautiful country. For us it was a chance to show the different side of Yemen, unlike the stereotypes spread by the media.”
Yet, they were accused of too many awful misdeeds. “They said we were filming pornography, when we weren’t; they said we were agents of CIA; the parliament interfered and stopped filming a couple of times. We were becoming pawns in a game of political chess only because a small portion of the film’s funding was from the government.”
With the screening of the film, Hirsi says, “all apprehensions were allayed. They simply loved the film, and that was the biggest reward in making it.”
Shot over two-and-a-half years, the film about an Italian photographer observing life in Sana’a, behind its walls, through the perspective of his guide, young Tariq, is more of a love story. Yet, it has many layers that will appeal to Western and Arab audiences, says Hirsi. “Every time you see the film, you get something new from it. It will be a classic in its time, and even ahead of its time, for some markets,” says Hirsi.
Shot on a relatively shoe-string budget of $1.2 million, the film proffers character-sketches of Yemen’s people from all walks of the society. From a poor egg-seller to the pampered daughter of a rich man, from gossiping women to expatriate Indian teachers, it touches too many aspects with humour thrown in for good measure.
Hirsi hopes that the film will get a theatrical release in the Middle East. “We have been approached by some agents and distributors, and we feel the film will be a welcome change as it is a breezy entertainment and that is what is lacking in Arab cinema. We are human and we need entertainment; cinema must also bring relief.”
He says there never was an effort to patronise Yemen with the film. “People expected the film to be patronising. They were shocked to see it wasn’t. The film is like a fairy tale; it could happen anywhere and I believe it is a small film that can go way in touching the hearts of people.”
Hirsi would like to see Arab cinema evolving as one entity as against the fragmented labels of Egyptian, Moroccan or Tunisian cinema. “There is a lot of new talent and they approach cinema differently. They have grown up with international cinema, and if we can stand together, we can indeed revive Arab cinema.”

Cinema as meditation (Ron Fricke interview)

2005-12-23T18:30:00.000+04:00

Ron Fricke, the director of the festival-favourite, Baraka, tries to take out words from his films. He lets the camera talk as he takes viewers on a non-verbal cinematic journey through 24 countries. Rajeev Nair meets him in Dubai

RON Fricke is on to his next film. Samsara, meaning "wheel of life" in Tibetan, is an epic sequel to his seminal production, Baraka, which has been a Diff favourite. He might train his camera on Dubai too, because of the city’s “unique architecture.”
But wherever he goes, he wouldn’t take words on to his film. He prefers to make non-verbal films blended with the language of World Music. That is part of a meditative process of filmmaking by this path-breaking cinematographer-director who has worked with the likes of George Lucas and Francis Ford Coppola.
As an impressionable kid, he saw the cinema as a temple and films as God’s language of truth. Of course, he knows that isn’t so, but to this day, filmmaking is a sort of worship for him, a meditative experience.
Dubai audiences indeed lapped up Baraka. With the film, Fricke took them on a world tour — from Mt Everest to the flaming oil fields of Kuwait and St Peter’s Square in Rome to the Galapagos Islands — supported by a throbbing soundtrack of World Music.
Excerpts from an exclusive interview:

What did you seek to convey with Baraka?
The film’s concept is humanity’s relation to the eternal, and I made it as a guided meditation without actors, words or a story. A series of images and music takes you the inner essence of the concept.

What prompted you to make the film in such an out-of-the-box fashion?
I go way back with non-verbal films. I worked on Koyaanisqatsi (which, presented by Francis Ford Coppola, was to become an underground classic of sorts). I have always been very interested in documentary films from a very spiritual frame of reference. I have been a long-time meditator…

Do you believe one can translate the essence of meditation into films?
I don’t know if you can do so… but there is a different world that you experience when you see a great painting or go to a museum, and that has nothing to do with words. With Baraka, we were on the road for 12 months visiting 24 countries; it was like doing a painting — you just kept working on.

With no story, no preconceived notion of what you will shoot, how do you decide what you want for the film?
Well, you just get what you get. You don’t know who is going to get sick that day, what the weather would be like… You can only plan half the thing, the other half is happy accidents, but yes, you get a lot of interesting things that you hadn’t thought of. Baraka did not have a scripted kind of approach — you simply looked for the essence of things.

Words are also part of everyday reality. So why take them out of films?
Well, words tell you too much about what you are telling and feeling. They tell you to think about certain things in a certain way, and when you stop the words, like when you meditate, you clear the noise out, and it becomes something else.

So you give leeway for the audience to take what they want out of the film?
Yes…

What according to you is generally taken from the film?
I get a lot of everything… as in life. There are a lot of people who don’t like it. A lot of people found it uncomfortable because it wasn’t a structured story; a lot of people found it very liberating and open, and they liked the experience. I would say there are more people who liked the film than didn’t because they sought out that kind of film. They knew what it was. If you are a hardcore dialogue-story person, you are not going to like it.

When making Baraka, did you have an audience in mind?
Yeah, me! I am the audience. I make the film for me. There are a lot of people out there who do art for its experience. There are many writers and directors who do dialogue films. They do beautiful stories. I don’t need to be another one. Maybe I don’t have the talent to do that.

So do you make a deliberate effort to be different?
I kind of fell into it (making non-verbal documentaries)… after Koyaanisqatsi. My new project is also non-verbal. But now documentaries are good business. So is World Music. It is niche. A lot of people want to see good documentaries; they haven’t been made. Now, it could be a trend and I may have caught up with the trend. It is easier now to talk to people about raising money because I make documentaries and non-verbal ones at that, which means the world market. Some 12 years ago, they might have asked me to get out of their office.

Does that put pressure on you to deliver?
No… making films is a very scary proposition. You have to get over that and once you keep the aim and purpose, you will get there.

What is one thing you learnt from the whole process of filmmaking, not just Baraka?
That it is really a collaborative process. You work with a lot of people, you have to give them room to be creative with the skills and talent that they have. It is not one person making the film, it is the team.

Of the 24 countries that you travelled for Baraka, which ones had the most lasting influence on you?
I don’t know… I find the US and Europe very boring. I am interested in countries like India, China, Thailand and Indonesia; there is some real culture there.

Rhythm of silence

2005-12-23T18:25:00.000+04:00

Debutant director Jahar Kanungo says Nisshabd, a Bengali film that made its Middle East premiere at Diff, is about sound as noise, and sound as rhythm

YOU can sell fertilisers by day, and make award-winning films after-work. That is what debutant Indian director Jahar Kanungo proves with his film Nisshabd (Reaching Silence). The Bengali film set in New Delhi and Kolkata is the culmination of many years of passionate pursuit of hobbies — photography, films and literature — for Kanungo.
The 92-minute film has already won a fair share of laurels. It won the best film and best actress (for Piyali Dasgupta) awards at Osian Cinefan Asian Film Festival. It has gone to the Golden Orange Film Festival, Turkey; was in competition with 11 other films at Pusan; was screened at Kolkata; and from Dubai, will go to Bangkok, Palm Springs and Bangladesh.
That indeed has been a long journey for the first feature of a self-described “seller of fertilisers.”
Nisshabd will make its commercial release in January in Kolkata and Kanungo hopes that the film will get the right marketing support. “It is extremely important that we overcome the barrier that is put on films that do not conform to the commercial format,” he says. “There are so many good films made in India that are allotted 10am screening slots and thus do not reach viewers. My challenge now is to make people aware of the film.”
Nisshabd had its genesis is a brain-wave that sought to blend the possibilities of audio and visuals from the perspective of silence. There is too much sound in Indian cities but sound also sets off two divergent theories: One is exploring sound as bothersome; the other is about sound as a declaration of the fact that “you exist.” From these observations, Kanungo took sound to a level of nostalgia, where he explores how even a passing word or strain of music can transport you into your past.
His protagonist, Sarit (Kaushik Chakraborty), thus, returns to his village in Bengal after being tired of the “blaring loudspeakers, crying children, honking cars and screeching buses” in New Delhi. “I explore why some sounds appeal to me but not to you, and talk about the various rhythms of sound,” says Kanungo.
Funded by Fonds Sud Cinema, a French organisation that had earlier assisted Indian filmmakers like Sudhir Mishra (Hazaaron Khwaishein Aisi) and Adoor Gopalakrishan (Nizhal Kuthu), the film was shot in 42 days in Delhi and West Bengal. “It took a while to get there, though,” says Kanungo. “No one comes forward to support such films.”
Kanungo’s learning from making his first feature film is that though things look difficult, especially for a first-timer, “you eventually get there when you forge a team spirit with the people you work with.”
Kanungo was aware of the difficulties he would face with making the film in its non-linear structure. He therefore brought together the cinematographer (Dilip Varma) and editor (Sameer Jain), much before shooting actually commenced and worked on what frames to shoot and how to go about it all. “The magic had to be in the editing and we needed to know exactly what to capture.”
Kanungo says his films have appealed to the younger generation at private and festival screenings in India. “My film talks a different language — one that the youngsters can identify with and I think they liked what they saw.”
Like Kanungo, Nisshabd was the first feature film experience for its lead cast — Kaushik Chakraborty and Piyali Dasgupta — too. Piyali comes from a family of theatre actors and Kaushik had many years of theatre experience in Delhi. For Piyali, the film happened through sheer chance. Another actress was to play the role and she fell ill. With the entire unit ready and waiting for the shoot to begin, the production manger rushed for a replacement and remembered Piyali. A quick audition and she was in. Piyali, however, is not swayed by the glitter of cinema. She intends to take up only those films that have “an interesting story.”
For Kaushik, the first feature has helped him switch from theatre to films and television. He is now a known face in Bengali television. “The best thing about Nisshabd was the family like unit it had. It was easy for us, as actors, to open up and perform the way the director wanted,” he says.
Kaushik says most of the mainstream films do not have a commendable story-line. “Nisshabd has a unique story, which carries the film single-handedly, and my character is indeed author-backed.”
Kanungo sure intends to continue with his excursions into filmmaking. “But I don’t want to remake what has already been made. I want to make films that are new — in content and approach.”

— Rajeev Nair

A struggle for paradise

2005-12-23T18:22:00.000+04:00

Hany Abu-Assad, writer-director of Diff’s opening gala, Paradise Now, says he would continue his struggle as a filmmaker to keep alive the cause of Palestine, and not surrender his rights as a human being. For him, on cards are three films, one of which will be shot in Dubai

Caption: Ali Suliman, Hany Abu-Assad, Kais Nashef and Masoud Amralla Al Ali at a press conference to announce the opening gala of ‘Paradise Now’ at Dubai International Film Festival.

HANY Abu-Assad is bemused. His aunt, who was born in Palestine but had moved to Syria, cannot visit her mother in her home-country because she holds a Syrian passport. Had she been holding a US passport, homecoming would have been her reality.
Fazed by the everyday hardships of Palestinians, Hany did what he has always dreamt: The aeroplane engineer took to his passion, and directed Paradise Now, a moving tale of two Palestinian suicide bombers.
In fact, the tag “suicide bombers” is a misnomer when applied to the protagonists – Said (Kais Nashef) and Khaled (Ali Suliman). They work in a garage and are picked to accomplish a mission in Israel after a gap of about two years. Said carries an extra baggage: He has to outgrow the ignominy that has haunted him since he was 10 years old; the bitterness of living as the son of a “collaborator.”
However, unlike Khalid, he is more level-headed, even detached. So when the mission goes awry, and Khalid shies away from pursuing it further, Said has to struggle through his dilemma alone. And apart from the political cause, he has a personal point to make — to wipe away the stigma of the “collaborator” that has haunted his family.
So, are acts of suicide bombing triggered by personal reasons than a firmly held political agenda? Hany does not have a direct answer. He wants to open questions, and that is precisely what Paradise Now accomplishes.
For Diff-goers of last year, who had watched Hamburg Cell, the opening gala this year looks like one that straddles familiar territory. If Hamburg Cell explored the frame of mind of those who carried out the Sept. 11 bombings, Paradise Now is about 24 hours in the lives of the two youngsters, hand-picked, almost out of the blue, to execute a death mission.
Hany likes to emphasise the difference. He does not compare his film with those that address issues of terror as applied in a Western context. “Our land is occupied and Israel is forcibly trying to drive our people out as a plan of ethnic cleansing,” he says. He differentiates it from the “American occupation in Iraq.” “The methods (of resistance) might look the same but the aspirations are different, the cause is different.”
And it is this difference, one that he understands as a Palestinian though not holding a Palestinian passport, which he tries to underscore in Paradise Now. He says that the non-Palestinian passport has helped him move about in relative freedom despite the vague threats that existed against his film. “But there are many other elements that helped me (make the film),” including his mother’s overt influence.
Hany says he is not a politician but a filmmaker who is trying to capture the Palestinian cause as a “cinematic image.” He has no advice for aspiring Palestinian filmmakers because Hany believes that each one must discover his own rhythm in filmmaking.
Produced on a budget of $2 million involving Palestine, France, Germany and the Netherlands, Paradise Now had won the Blue Angel award for Best European Film at the Berlin International Film Festival 2005. It is also the official entry of Palestine to the Academy Award for Best Foreign Film. “We do not have a country yet and we represent a ‘case’ rather than a country at the Oscars,” he says.
Masoud Amralla Al Ali, programmer of Arabian Nights and Emerging Emaratis at Diff, says that the selection of Paradise Now as the opening gala of the festival only asserts how Diff has come to stand for human causes and become a venue for opening up dialogue.
Ali Suliman, more vocal than Kais Nashef in real life too, says he was aware of the sensitive nature of the film. But for one who lives in Palestine, “these are every day realities. The real life is much more complicated and sensitive than the film. I cannot refuse such a role.”
Hany says he had tried to steer away from stereotypical notions of suicide bombers. “Every one of them has a story,” and it is that human side he chose to depict with his film. He is going to continue upholding the Palestinian cause in his three forthcoming ventures. One of the films will be shot entirely in Dubai, and after Diff, he will be scouting for locations in the emirate.
Though the film has been a talking point, and is even being screened in Israel, Hany isn’t sure of its end result. “Will this liberate us? I am still waiting for an answer.”

— Rajeev Nair

Sringaram celebrates the love of dance

2005-12-23T18:15:00.000+04:00

Caption: Aditi Rao Hydari

Why should you as a layman step in to watch the world premiere of Sringaram – Dance of Love, an Indian film showcased at Dubai International Film Festival? Hamsa Moily, accomplished Bharathanatyam dancer and theatre actor, who plays a central role in the film, has a poignant answer: “For dance, for the love of dance.”
Marking its world premiere in Dubai on Tuesday at 9.15 pm at the Mall of the Emirates, Sringaram, directed by socio-cultural activist Sharada Ramanathan, explores dance as a tool for inner freedom viewed from the perspective of a devadasi.
Devadasis, temple-dancers of yore, were patrons of art. But when the devadasi system was abolished, they found themselves in the centre of a dichotomous existence. They were respected for their art but were relegated to the lower strata in the social order.

Caption: Hamsa Moily

Sringaram pursues the mindset of a temple-dancer, Madhura, who refuses to compromise her passion for dancing. The film has a dream crew with accomplished musician Lalgudi Jayaraman composing its music, and Madhu Ambat wielding the camera. Debutante Aditi Rao Hydari plays the protagonist. Moily plays Kamavalli, who is the antithesis to Madhura.
For Moily, the role was a challenge as an actress. As a stage dancer and theatre actor, she was switching media for the first time. “Films were much bigger; it demanded a very different attitude and that you see yourself in the bigger picture,” she said.
Hydari’s challenge was to internalize with Madhura not merely as a dancer. “Dance was one element of the film. It also deals with a lot of emotions; of how Mathura tries to keep alive the purity and honesty of dance. I had to identify with what she is fighting for. She lives from her heart, and the film is the portrayal of her quiet struggle for art.”
That struggle is relevant in today too, she adds. “In today’s media-savvy world, performers are lucky to get the support of their family and friends. But with all the slickness in presentation, I feel, the heart is lost (in art). It is important that you uphold the honesty so that art can reach out to every heart,” explains Hydari, who describes herself as “quarter Telugu, quarter Konkani and half Bohra Muslim.”
Moily sees the film should appeal to all audiences because the language of dance is universal. “It is a celebration; it is a basic wanting of any human being. Any human being can therefore relate to the film.”
She too finds a contemporary relevance to the film. “It is good to know more about devadasis. It is like reading a new book or going on-line and reading about a particular subject.”
- Rajeev Nair

Flash bulbs, celebrities and then some

2005-12-23T18:10:00.000+04:00

Blinding flashbulbs, black bow ties, flashy costumes, welcome smiles and rehearsed poses, the opening gala of the second edition of Dubai International Film Festival had all the props in place for a glitzy affair. Rajeev Nair writes

WITH celebrity galas and red carpet walks, there is no middle-path. You are either awed or you simply do not care. So it is with fame. They are either famous or they aren’t.
With its phenomenal reach, fame naturally rests best on Hollywood. And there was no better testimony to it than the cheers that filled the red carpet gala of Dubai International Film Festival’s second inaugural ceremony, announcing the arrival of Oscar winning actor and director Morgan Freeman, dressed in black, golden ear-rings sparkling under the arc lights.
Freeman, despite his earthy attitude and easy camaraderie, easily stole the thunder from dainty damsels and dandy dudes, most of them ill at ease in front of the blinking flash bulbs. Cameras, indeed, have a way with the famous; the more they are in the spotlight the easier it is to endure their strain.
Photographers played a game of spotting the celebrity from the projected 800 guests who walked the red carpet to watch the inaugural movie at Diff, the award-winning Palestinian co-production, Paradise Now.
It wasn’t easy for them. After all, Mumbai’s showman would hardly gain a second glance in Egypt. And Cairo’s breathtaking beauty might be deemed a trifle too old for Bollywood tastes.
Yet, for Dubai, which wakes up to celebrity airs and tantrums almost every week at the entertainment spectacles, the red carpet gala at Diff had an exceptional difference. It wore an element of dignity, almost solemnity, if you may.
That might have been the mood-effect — resulting from a sweeping expanse of black-clad men and women, readying to welcome celebrities who stepped out of swanky black or white BMWs and limousines.
The run-up to the gala had the usual ingredients — a customary police check of the premises complete with sniffer-dogs; organisers who were earlier in the day spotted in work-clothes moving into black ties and jackets; ‘we-run-the-world’ security corps flaunting attitude; a jostling camera crew; the mad rush for press badges; barricades; the works…
The gala premises at Madinat Jumeirah came to life by 6pm; the photographers and television crew had found their berths by the red carpet, which was spread out to run almost one semi-circle of the Madinat Jumeirah Conference Centre. Diff’s festival director and his PR brigade readied for the action, and the flow of celebrities started.
Now, now, all who walk the red carpet aren’t celebrities. Yet they try. A quick wave of hands, a hasty smile, and self-conscious gait — you can sift the true ones from the seasoned performers, who stop confidently on their tracks, face the cameras, smile at them, strike a pose and then continue their walk with the ease of a winter breeze. It takes years of practice to get there.

Celebrities at Diff came in all sorts — diplomats, entrepreneurs, professionals, actors, technicians, producers, the festival’s programmers… If the ushers — girls in outrageously cut gowns and well-toned men in tight-fitting white t-shirts and black trousers — were tired of their rehearsed smiles, they weren’t showing it. They stood the ground patiently — and here, let us pass on a round of applause for their endurance.
Black, indeed, seemed to be the colour of glamour at Diff. Women tried hard to offset the shimmer of black with glowing reds and pinks and fiery greens. They complemented the effect with dazzling diamond wear, ethnic necklaces, furs and feathers and sparkling sequins-studded shawls.
If feature film producers found it hard to win over attention, a documentary crew truly fetched countless shutter-clicks. The cast and crew of the Kiran Over Mangolia presented themselves with the key cast-members dressed in their traditional attire and also bringing along eagles, which are the central subject matter of the documentary.
Also grabbing attention was Deepa Mehta, the director of Water. Egyptian actor Adel Imam, who is being honoured at Diff, fetched an awed response from the crowd. Controversial director Costa Gravas, French actor Faudel Belloua, Indian actress Urmila Matondkar, directors Subhash Ghai, Janu Baruah and Sarada Ranganathan, Egyptian star Hannan Turk, British actor Hugh Dancy, South African film producer Anant Singh, were among the guests.
And in less than two hours, the flow had ceased. The photographers started milling to get to the venue of the gala, so tough luck for those guests who arrived late. They would have to do without the cameras smiling on their well-kempt looks.
Inside, the media pressed on as one organic block to move closer to the celebrity guests. Crisis-handlers rattled out instructions — “no tripods, no journalists, no interviews…” — that were not to be heeded, and, at last, the speeches were made, the organisers profusely thanked every one down to the last sponsor, and lights dimmed.
The silver screen has come to life. A car slides to a stop. Suha steps out, walks towards a checkpoint, is frisked and she walks into Palestine. Gun shots fill the air. She ducks for cover.
Paradise Now had begun rolling.
And Diff 2005 had made its official beginning. Ninety-seven more films to go…

Nine ‘tired’ lives

2005-12-23T18:07:00.000+04:00

Cast: Kathy Baker, Amy Brenneman, Elpidia Carrillo, Glenn Close, Lisa Gay Hamilton, Holly Hunter, Sissy Spacek, Amanda Seyfried, Robin Wright Penn, Dakota Fanning,
Cinematography: Xavier Perez Grobet
Editing: Amy Lippens
Written and directed by Rodrigo Garcia

Caption: Rodrigo Garcia

DIRECTOR Rodrigo Garcia steps outside the parameters of mainstream cinema with Nine Lives, which follows the defining moments in the lives of nine women as nine unbroken takes. Set in everyday realities, the detached episodes from nine lives, with an odd character from one running into another, bear the stamp of intellectual honesty — obviously expected from the son of literary giant Gabriel Garcia Marquez.
There is little you can draw in common from the lives of the nine women, except their pangs of existential dilemma. They manifest differently — as marital discords, sheer mismatch of personalities or even the trauma before a breast cancer surgery.
Despite the episodic nature of the film, with nine segments of more or less equal duration, Garcia still finds a common narrative chord. That could be in the ‘I am tired’ outlook of the women, virtually all of them — tired of life and the people around them.
But they are fiercely individualistic: Camille (Kathy Baker), waiting for the surgeon to turn up blurts out: “It is hard to be at the mercy of others.” Holly (Lisa Gay Hamilton) knows exactly how her marriage was wrecked; she is caught between emotions of self-defeat and vengeance and yet she survives the moment. Diana (Robin Wright Penn) has run into Damien (Jason Issacs), her one-time lover — not entirely by accident, and despite being swept away by the nostalgia of yesteryear romance, she manages to break away — fleetingly or not. Ruth (Sissy Spacek) is fighting to tame her nerves wrecked by the illness of her husband and yet walks out of a philandering moment with Henry (Aidan Quinn), when she is reminded of her daughter who breaks college to be with her father.
One of Garcia’s protagonists, Henry (Aidan Quinn) observes about an animal life documentary he watches on television: “They put pieces together to tell a story.” Indeed, Garcia resorts to pieces alright, each piece capable of being built into a conventional full-grown film. The episodes aren’t necessarily complete — they are organic and open-ended leaving all inferences to the viewers. Garcia simply seems to pan his camera on his protagonists — bring out their emotional turmoil, and relegate to the back.
But it is the concluding episode involving Glenn Close and Dakota Fanning that lingers on; the mother and child are shown nurturing their deep camaraderie in a cemetery. There, by the tombstones and shade of trees, they play games and exchange little anecdotes. Yet when the episode ends, what you feel is a stab of shocking pain.
Garcia extracts seamless performances from his cast, and builds his scenes with the amazing control that comes only to a keen observer of life.
Indeed, Nine Lives is a distinct showcase of life’s myriad dilemmas. Garcia offers no answers. He presents them and stands aside for you to draw your inferences.

— Rajeev Nair

Morgan Freeman: Up close and personal

2005-12-23T18:01:00.000+04:00

What does Morgan Freeman like about the Arab World? Why does he keep coming back to the region? The answer, he says, is that he can get up close and personal with the people here. Rajeev Nair met him on the sidelines of Diff

MORGAN Freeman would like to own a place in Dubai… but only if he can get into his own plane and fly down in one day. He hates commercial flights though he loves to sail. From Dubai, he goes straight to the sea for four days of sailing. No, he isn’t saying where his boat is; just that it is named Afrodesia.
Sailing or flying, he likes to return to Dubai, to the Arab World. One of three eminent film personalities being honoured at the Dubai International Film Festival, Freeman comes to the city from Cairo, where he got a standing ovation at the Cairo International Film Festival. But he rests his fame easily. Such adulation, he says “presents a challenge to not start rating yourself too highly because people like you so much. That is very nice, that is what you want, that is the actor’s premier accolade… that audiences admire you for what you do. But then you have an obligation to try and continue to please that body. That is my obligation.”
The Academy Award winning actor’s latest film, Edison, directed by David J. Burke, will make its international premiere at Diff. But no, Freeman hasn’t seen it. He doesn’t particularly care to watch himself.

Excerpts from an interview:

Post-Oscars (Freeman won the best supporting actor award for Million Dollar Baby), how has life changed for you as an actor, a person?
Everybody asks me how life has changed. That is the biggest change.

But what did the Oscar award give you?
Nothing… but the statuette. It gives you nothing… The whole tradition of the Academy Award is more about money than prestige. If you are in a film that is nominated for the Academy Awards, it is like pumping more energy into the box office with that film. That is the main part of the Awards. The handing out of the statuette is just a ritual. Once you have it in your hand and everybody takes your picture, you put it down and you move on.

But with people like you, Denzel Washington and Jamie Foxx winning the Oscars, there is this talk about Hollywood entering a new age…
Yes it is. When Hattie McDaniel won an Oscar in 1939 (for Gone With the Wind), it was a “first.” The next “first” was Sydney Poitier. So yes, there is a whole new day in Hollywood… and now we are waiting for an Asian or some other ethnic group to get it (the Awards).

But isn’t it ironical that despite all we talk about humanity as one, there are still these distinctions, Afro-American, Asian….
Yes, yes….

Does that bother you?
It doesn’t bother me any more than it bothers you. It doesn’t bother me any less than it bothers you. That is the way we have evolved, and I think we are moving past… You see, I was in Paris on Thursday morning and in San Francisco the same evening having dinner. Meaning, the world is getting really small. You get to know each other. So nobody can say to me that the Emiratis are this or that because I know… and when you get to know, you are not listening to someone else’s agenda, someone else’s interpretation to the response of somebody else’s emotional baggage. I think we are evolving past because of the growing ease with which we communicate.

How do you rate Edison?
I haven’t seen it. I enjoy the process of making films. I enjoy the work, I like other actors, crews, directors, people who know and want what they are doing. I had a great time doing Edison with David J. Burke.

Are you a self-critic?
I don’t particularly care to watch myself. The reason is that for the first half of my life, until I was about 50 years old, I was on stage. When you work on stage, you don’t get to watch yourself except through the eyes of the audience. When they love what you do, they tell you that with their claps and standing ovation. But when you watch yourself (on screen), you see (only) yourself… not Julius Ceasar, not Cornelius (the many characters).

So do you miss theatre now?
No.

Why?
Because all my life, I wanted to be in the movies.

You have been there, done that… so what next for you in films? Where do you see yourself five years, ten years down the line?
Let’s call it ten years down the line. I expect to be a very successful, “well-known” producer-director…

But since Bopha! (which was screened at Diff 2004), you haven’t been much into directing…
Oh, I am basically a lazy person. I really like acting. I can spend time and effort doing that. Other than that I don’t have a lot of work ethic. Directing takes a lot of your effort; you have to stick with something for about a year. That is long time in an actor’s life.

What do you like about this region?
Since the age of eight, I have been reading, I have got to see and read about a lot of cultures. And thus you develop a kind of idea and attitude about people… and then you get a chance to go and see them. I went to China this year, I was in Sri Lanka, I have been in the Middle East last year… To me, it is a great thing to be able to touch and hug people, hold them and say "how are you," and be up close and personal.

So, would you like to own a place here?
Only, if I could get into my own plane and fly in here in one day. I don’t like travelling in commercial airlines.

Michael Caton-Jones (Interview)

2005-12-23T17:58:00.000+04:00

Message from the past

Michael Caton-Jones, the director of The Jackal and the forthcoming Basic Instinct 2: Risk Addiction is at the Dubai International Film Festival with his film Shooting Dogs. The film, starring Hugh Dancy and John Hurt, depicts the horrific genocide in Rwanda in 1994. Rajeev Nair meets him

FOR filmmakers, genocides are fertile territory. Every man involved in genocide — dead or living — is a potential hero or a villain. And despite filmmakers digging into these horrific crimes on humanity, such acts repeat.
Michael Caton-Jones says it is because we “forget.” And that is the relevance of such films. They dig into the buried past but remind you that no matter how long before such incidents had occurred, they still stand for the universality of human experience.
Excerpts from an exclusive interview:

You shot Shooting Dogs on location, with survivors. How was the experience?
I kind of made a road for my own bag because like the film Hotel Rwanda, we were asked if we would make the film in South Africa. I felt strongly that I wanted to make as accurately as possible what happened in Rwanda. I didn’t feel comfortable at all going to a different country and doing it. I felt that if I could involve the people who were involved and get them to go through the process of telling their own story, it would give things in the film that I didn’t invent. I knew it would have made things difficult for me but in retrospect, the idea was right because there is reality and honesty to the film, which I could not have brought myself. It was difficult, yes, because it was traumatic for the people… they were recreating unimaginable things. But what came out of that was a catharsis to their trauma. The film has a level of reality that you can’t invent and to me that is the strength of the film.

Why do you make films based on reality? Your earlier film, City by the Sea, was inspired by a Pulitzer Prize winning Esquire story…
Personally, reality reinforces something I believe in. In all my works is the universality of the human experience. We are the same all over the globe, no matter the nationality, colour, creed or religion. We are essentially the same people who want to meet, fall in love, laugh and cry, have children, and watch them grow up… I try and make all my films about different facets that are common to human beings. When I went to Rwanda, more than anything else, it made me think how much we had in common, not how different they were. That is why I stress that my film was about the genocide, yes it happened ten years ago, but it was about human beings. And don’t think for a second that it could not happen to you. It could, and we must learn that from history as well as the fact that one person can make a difference.

Isn’t there a danger that the title of the film could be misinterpreted?
The intention behind the title is to show the absurdity of a situation where the UN soldiers in Rwanda were allowed to shoot dogs that were eating corpses because that was a health hazard… but not allowed to use their guns to stop people killing the people that the dogs were eating.

Are you taking the film to Rwanda?
Not until March. I am desperate to go back. This was one of my greatest experiences in my life but honestly, this film is not for Rwandans. It is for the rest of the world. Rwandans know what had happened. It is for us to observe what we did or what we didn’t and maybe try and learn a lesson.

What did you learn from making the film?
That these things could happen anywhere. A lot of versions were fed in the West about what had happened. There was a racial element – Rwanda was too far way, too black and too poor for anybody to care about. But the reality is that if you do not deal with such a thing, the world now is too small that you can’t avoid it forever.

Don’t you think the film comes too close to Hotel Rwanda?
Yes, but Hotel Rwanda was done with a different audience in mind. They had to put a love story and a happy ending, which is absolutely the way Hollywood communicates with the rest of the world. I admire them for going their way and spreading word about what happened. I felt uncomfortable about that approach. I felt that the US involvement in Rwanda was negligible; the European involvement was larger, historically. Even the tapes of filmmaking were different and I felt I could tell the story in a European way and have a different effect on people.

It is such a coincidence that last year Diff featured Red Dust, a film on Africa by a British filmmaker. This year we have you, again from Britain with a film on Africa….
I think it is pure happenstance… It could also be part of a bigger trend (the realization) that Hollywood is not the only thing in the world for films. For me, yes, Hollywood is big; it has many positive and negative points. But I am from Europe and I have a very different sensibility. I come from a tradition of social concern in films mixed with entertainment. That is the kind of films I want to make.

Yet, from Shooting Dogs you go to Basic Instinct 2…
A change is as good as the rest, when I finished with Rwanda, I was really ready for some change and Basic Instinct 2, was to me as a filmmaker, about just using a different muscle to make a slick, glossy Hollywood production.

Basic Instinct has a certain image in the minds of filmmakers. And Sharon Stone has matured since the first film. So what can we expect from you?

Basic Instinct 2 is the same in many ways but different too. First of all, it is set in London. Stone is older and the people she is in contact with are different but as a filmmaker, I will provide all the elements that worked well and people liked in the first film but give it a different way of looking at it.

So one can expect the famous ‘crossing of legs’…
(Laughs out loud)… no, I can’t tell you that, you have to see it… (laughs) I too cross my legs…

Back to your own repertoire; it features a sizeable number of real life stories? Isn’t fiction easier?
As human beings, we are all fascinated by other human beings. A story is a simple form to find how human beings exist and to empathise with them and the situations and what they go through… Real life stories provide so much more richness of texture than what one person’s mind can create. To me, it is a much richer ground to draw dramatic situations from. I believe that films are an emotional medium than even a visual medium. For instance, the human face has 800 muscles and even a person in Bangladesh looks at someone in Chile and smiles, they would understand what that means. You can break that down in a hundred different ways. To me, it is an exploration of what we all have in common.

Is that what filmmaking is for you?
My job is to first tell a story – funny, shocking, sad, thrilling, a whole bunch of things… Two, I want to engage the audience’s emotions and at another level I want them to feel the morality of things, the whole complexity of human emotions.

Despite all these films on real-life incidents, why do such horrors happen?

We forget, people forget…

Are films such as Shootings Dogs meant to remind them?
Yes, it is important to make these films. Incidents like these happen; still happen… it happened in Europe not long before. You must learn to recognize the signals and the more people tell stories about these incidents, the more obvious the signals would become.

Looking for Comedy in the Muslim World (Review)

2005-12-23T17:53:00.000+04:00

Feeble laugh on fear psychosis

SELF-deprecatory humour has a problem: Without the right props, it falls flat. That is the tragedy of Looking for Comedy in the Muslim World. In Albert Brooks' much-hyped comedy, which made its world premiere at the second edition of Dubai International Film Festival, the laughs do not come from the Muslim World. The epicentre of the filmís comedy is America and the Great American Fear Psychosis.
The US, according to Brooks' own portrayal, is indeed a strange world. His film endorses the American stereotype — almost in a Michael Moore meets Austin Powers sort of way — as its people being a bunch of terrified, over-reacting, low-IQ individuals. Indeed, even Brooks plays the absurd role of an actor, out to do the craziest thing he has ever heard of, only because he is lured by the thought of a coveted medal from the president.
All that, for a change, is fine. But if that was a strategy to build bridges with the Arab or Muslim World, sorry, it is a weak attempt at being patronising.
Brooks had a brilliant one-liner for a great film, which he goes all out and spoils. Do not approach Looking for Comedy as a cultural bridge; it is another American comedy that simply tries to cash in on the prevailing attention that the word, "Muslim," ensures. For all practical purposes, the film could have been named "Looking for Comedy in the Hindu World," and nothing would have changed about the filmís structure or narration. Indeed, here is a film that has the most misleading title ever in recent times.
Looking for Comedy, essentially, is a weak attempt at fun with an air of pretentious sarcasm. And whatever laughs that come are because Brooks looks vulnerable, lonely, and yes, sincere too. He strikes that right note of empathy in the opening reel (a mood accentuated at Diff, when the festival audience had the privilege of having Brooks, in person, introducing his film).
You somehow want to love this quirky comedy and the Dubai audience must have cheered up the directorís mind with their thunderous laughter, initially. Who wouldnít when Brooks had just wisecracked: "For all those who do not know who I am, I am really big in Hollywood."
But with the film, the gags soon cease to work. It is almost like a simulation of what happens to Brooks on-screen. Playing himself, an out of work actor being hired by the US government to prepare a 500-page report on what makes Muslims laugh, Brooks discovers that his attempt at stand-up comedy is not working because his jokes go over the head of an Indian audience. He takes the same jokes to Pakistan, performs them to a bunch of "budding comedians" who look more like menacing militants (and probably they are) and they work.
Brooks overplays the stress on "500 pages" of the report and his Muslim World is not in Arabia or in predominantly Muslim countries. His camera is confined to India, and offers a flimsy excuse for being there ... (it could most probably have been because of the ease in obtaining filming permissions).
While in India, he digs up some true moments of laughter though. One such is capturing the ridiculous nature of remote operated call centres. Brooks even overhears a male voice saying: "Yes, White House."
It is easy to take such potshots at India; the country has already learnt to laugh at itself. But to bring out more laughter, Brooks subjects his character to severe ridicule, overplaying the goofy American cliche.
He also loses a grip on the narrative strength the moment he tries to be politically funny. Bureaucratic over-reaction and suspicions make good comedy but the secret of packing a punch lies in being subtle. Brooke surely should know that.
Where Brooks surely succeeds is in portraying the fear psychosis of America; Looking for Comedy thus becomes a portrait of the vulnerable yet all-too-sure American. That is good enough for a quick laughter or two, but surely does not make great comedy.
So what was all that fuss about the ìMuslimî word in the title for? And what comedy does Brooks discover apart from rediscovering the fanciful fallacies of the ill-informed in the US? Pretty little.
That is sad because Brooks, indeed, could have set a new milestone, a new benchmark in employing comedy in cinema. Simply put, he squanders a fine brain-wave. How about a remake?
— Rajeev Nair

Human bond in conflict

2005-12-23T17:51:00.000+04:00

Chilean director Miguel Littin brings The Last Moon, a film about the friendship between a Palestinian Arab and a Palestinian Jew, to Dubai Film Festival. Rajeev Nair meets him

Caption:
Miguel Littin and his daughter Christina Littin.
Photograph: Rajan

CELEBRATED author Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s list of books figures a name, Miguel Littin. And he is real. Littin, the hero of Clandestine in Chile: The Adventures of Miguel Littin, showcases his film, The Last Moon, which tracks the origin of the Middle East conflict.
Unlike his earlier films, The Last Moon narrating the friendship between a Palestinian Arab and a Palestinian Jew has an underlying vein of humane humour. Littin’s daughter, Christine, agrees. “Yes, he is a man with such an incredible sense of humour and he never uses that in his films.”
Littin is a name handed down to the family by a border-guard. Miguel’s grandfather had sought refuge in Chile from Palestine, and while being scrutinised at the border, the guard asked for his family name. He interpreted it as Littin and so it stayed.
Marquez’s book on Littin portrays his clandestine visit to Chile after being exiled during the turmoil that followed the assassination of the country’s president, Salvador Allende. Littin disguised himself as a businessman from Uruguay and spent six weeks documenting the ground realities in Chile under Augusto Pinochet.
On his part, Littin had filmed The Widow Montiel, based on a short story by the Nobel Prize winner. He had also filmed works of Latin American and Cuban classicists including Alejo Carpentier and Pedro Prado.
The Last Moon was shot in the Middle East during 2003. And true homecoming wasn’t easy for Littin, who was elected twice as mayor of his town in Chile. He had to plan ingenious ways to get past the scrutiny of Israelis. At one time, he took his Palestinian cast and crew in two pick-ups with Chilean flags to take them to Dead Sea, which was out of bounds for them.
While returning they were held for eight hours but Littin says the emotional experience he could read in the eyes of the Palestinians at the sight of Dead Sea is worth the effort. And perhaps that could be the subject matter of another movie.
He also remembers the fear psychosis unleashed by the Israeli army during the making of the film. “There would be gun-totting female soldiers on the ground and helicopters flying overhead,” Littin says.
Littin’s first work, The Jackal of Nahueltoro (1969), is regarded as one of the best films from Chile in the last century. He subsequently made The Promised Land, Letters from Marusia, El Recurso Del Metodo, Alsino and the Condor, Sandino (about the life of Augusto Cesar Sandino, Nicaragua’s national hero) and Tierra del Fuego. His documentaries include the powerful Comrade President, dedicated to Allende; and Final Statement on Chile, the one he filmed secretly and was to inspire Marquez to dedicate the book in his honour. In 2001, he presented A Palestinian Chronicle. And with The Last Moon, he indeed goes straight back to his roots.
Littin had arrived to Dubai from India, where he headed the competition section of the International Indian Film Festival (IFFI). He had earlier served on the jury of IFFI, and Littin says India is like his second home. “I feel at home there.” He likes everything about the country, and that fascination will soon translate on-screen as he readies to make a film based on a poem by India’s Nobel Prize winning littérateur Rabindranath Tagore. Littin says he is on constant search for literary works that moves him.
From Tagore, he once again looks back towards his roots with the film of a Chilean woman who returns to her homeland, Palestine. Unlike The Last Moon, which is set in the years during and after World War I, the new film, he says, will be contemporary. Another film about Palestine might be about the first time he visited Palestine in 1995. “We never knew our relatives there and searching for them, the feeling of surprise after meeting them… that could be another film.”
He says The Last Moon is relevant because it “shows the origin of the conflict. I wanted to let the world know that there are not bombs and terror in the region; there are living people, who have a culture of their own.”
Littin says the streak of humour that marks his recent films could be a reflection of the changes in life. “Life is like a classical tragic-comedy,” observes the 61-year-old. Perhaps he has entered into that phase where after many years of struggle, he is subconsciously seeking out a literary catharsis. But he has no regrets.
“My life had been truly emotional – there were powerful moments that influenced and affected me. Today, I have friends all over the world, a loving family. I am happy writing and making movies.”
He is content about the fact that he has played his "minor role," along with countless others, in bringing about a socio-political change in Chile. But would he forget and forgive Augusto Pinochet? He answers for the people who never can: “Those who had their loving ones missing… they can never forget or forgive Pinochet.”

Flight of tradition

2005-12-23T17:46:00.000+04:00

Kiran Over Mongolia, a documentary on the Kazak eagle hunters in Mongolia, is far more than about a centuries-old tradition. It is about a people rediscovering their roots, says its director Joseph Spaid

Picture caption: The cast and crew of ‘Kiran Over Mongolia’ with Lucia Rikaki, programmer, Destination Documentaries.

“If you love a bird, set it free. If it comes back to you, it is yours; if not, it never was.”
Clichéd as it may sound, the bonding of the eagle and the eagle masters in Mongolia is precisely so. And that was to touch the heart of Joseph Spaid, the director of the documentary, Kiran Over Mongolia to be screened at Diff on Tuesday.
Spaid recalls the “quintessential moment” while filming the documentary. The hero, eagle master Khairat Khan, had set the bird free. It flew up, “one kilometre, two kilometres, soaring up and up for some 20 minutes, until it was a tiny speck…”
Spaid remembers that the crew-members were nervous that they would never get to see the bird again. And then Khan, started calling out to the bird in his inimitable style. “Slowly, we saw a speck, and then the bird, flying back, its wings extended, gliding down to land on Khairat Khan’s arms.”
Spaid is marvelled by the fact that the bird chose to return to his master. And it is this bonding Kiran Over Mongolia underscores alongside an exploration of a centuries old tradition.
The film recreates how a young Kazak man, Kuma, retraces the steps of his grandfather who was an eagle master. He seeks tutelage under Khairat Khan, and the learning process is not restricted to the intricacies of hunting with eagles but also the ways of his own people.
The Kazaks of Mongolia had largely been isolated from the mainstream after living behind the “Iron Curtain” of communism. They had lived in the remote and rugged mountain region below Siberia. But even after they fled to Mongolia, they preserved their cultural identity.
Joseph Spaid and his crew spent close to four months on location in Mongolia shooting the documentary. “A great deal of effort was focused in exploring the beautiful and often touching relationships between eagle and master, and master and apprentice,” recalls Spaid.
He says the spark to do the film came while travelling through Mongolia. “I was lucky enough to stumble upon the eagle hunters on my first trip to that country in 1999. We came across a rise and there were two guys sitting on a horseback, and even if it had been 1,000 years back, they would have looked exactly the same — wood, leather, horse hair ropes….”
He decided to make the film and returned two years later when he met Kuma. Khan agreed to take him as an apprentice and the film was on. The toughest part about making the film was that Spaid couldn’t find anyone in the US who spoke Kazak. Until a year later, since he met his translator, Almagul, he didn’t what he had shot. “It was very harrowing. I never knew for sure what I had.”
Khairat Khan and Kuma, who are in Dubai, along with the rest of the crew to promote the documentary, do not feel that they have been thrust abruptly into the limelight. “The documentary will provide an opportunity for the world to know about eagle hunting,” adds Khan, who has heard of Arabian falconry. “In some places, eagle masters use falcons to catch rabbits to feed the eagles.”
Khan says that it is the long-term association with the bird that brings it back to the master. “They get used to the smell and voice of the master so when he calls the bird always returns. Also there is the added lure of the prey the master dangles in his hand.”
Fame and film festivals or not, Khan and Kuma will return to their eagles. And they will continue the legacy, and pass it down generations. After all, this is life as inherited from their ancestors.
Spaid says the learning experience of the film was that “it is nice to live in the countryside. It is a tough life but a beautiful one. In terms of filmmaking, I learnt that a lot have changed in terms of technology. Today, you can make an extremely personal film with limited technology and a small crew so that the vision really remains intimate. For instance, this film was shot in Mongolia and put together in a living room in New York."
Spaid sees changes coming in to Mongolia. The people have satellite dishes, cell phones, the works... “People living in industrialised nations have a tendency to romanticise a lifestyle that we don’t have. Mongolia is changing from a nomadic lifestyle to a sedentary one. Could they go back? Yeah. But will they? I don’t think it is likely. Wouldn’t you want water in your homes? I do. Maybe they will strike a balance.”

From Africa with courage

2005-12-23T17:41:00.000+04:00

Seven films, including a gala screening, are included in Diff’s In Honour of Africa programme segment. They are by directors who resist formula and aren’t swayed by conventions, says Nashen Moodley, programme director. Rajeev Nair writes

CHALLENGE the stereotypes — that was what Nashen Moodley, programmer, looked for in the seven films he picked for the first ‘In Honour of Africa’ segment of Diff. The artistic director of Durban International Film Festival, Moodley says that even though these films address grim socio-political realities, each film reflects optimism and hope.
“These are films about courageous people, and despite talking about serious issues they challenge the stereotypes about Africa,” he says. “These films also bring out the beauty of the continent.”
It was a difficult task for Moodley, a journalist and film critic, to pick the films for Diff. “Whenever I select films for any festival, I look for great films. It is almost impossible to define what a great film is but if you look at our programme, there are films that address serious issues like Aids and civil war while also having a fantastic aesthetic quality. And then there is a less tangible aspect to them all, which makes them truly great. They are all by directors who are not swayed by conventions and who resist formula.”
Surprisingly, despite the march that the Nigerian film industry — now known as Nollywood — makes in Africa, Diff does not showcase any of its productions. Moodley says it was not deliberate. “Nigerian cinema has to be put into context and showcased as a package, and choosing one film alone from Nigeria wouldn’t have worked at Diff.”
His challenge was to find films that reflect African cinema in its totality. “You can’t define African films easily — it is made up of productions from different countries and cultures. Cinema from these countries is different, like, say, the varied fare from (the various states of) India. What we have tried to do is present a selection of films that have some geographic representation of the continent.”
The selection includes Yesterday, nominated for the Academy Award for Best Foreign Film in 2004; Forgiveness, an examination of betrayal and revenge in post-apartheid South Africa; The Hero, directed by Zeze Gaomboa, and winner of the Grand Prize at the World Dramatic Competition at Sundance Film Festival 2005; a Franco-Senegalese production, Moolaade by Ousmane Sembene, who is regarded as the great master of African cinema; Fanta Regina Nacro’s The Night of Truth, an insightful feature on war and peace set in an imaginary African country; and Ougasaga from Burkina Faso, about a group of friends struggling to live in a poor neighbourhood.
The highlight of the segment is Carmen in Khayelitsha, the winner of the Golden Bear at the Berlin International Film Festival 2005 to be screened on Dec.15. The film by Mark Dornford-May is an inventive reinvention of George Bizet’s opera, Carmen, relocated in modern-day Khayelitsha, one of South Africa’s largest townships.
Moodley hopes that these films will give an insight into the cultures of Africa. “My hope is that people will see the films and also learn a little more about Africa. They are strong films that will appeal to anyone; you don’t have to come in with any expertise in African films.”

Politics of marketing blitz

2005-12-23T17:15:00.000+04:00

Guerilla Marketing, a Sri Lankan film being screened at Diff, is a cinematic interpretation of globalisation vis-à-vis the current political scenario of the country. Director Jayantha Chandrasiri and the key cast members are in Dubai

JAYANTHA Chandrasiri makes a killing with the name of his second feature film. Coming as it is from Sri Lanka, the name Guerilla Marketing instantly grabs attention and surely enough headlines. But what you expect is not what you get from the film; the experience is more sublime.
A journalist-turned actor-director, Chandrasiri had debuted with a period film, Agni Daahaya (Fire and Earth). The multiple-award winning film was based on 17th century Sri Lanka, when the Portuguese dominated the country’s maritime provinces. Chandrasiri says the prevailing socio-political situations then aren’t far apart from contemporary realities.
Guerilla Marketing, however, is grounded in today. Chandrasiri explores how the society reacts to the trends in globlisation from which no community, no people seem aloof. “I could feel the pain and this film is my reaction to that.”
Why Guerilla Marketing? That is a question Chandrasiri has been answering ever since he screened the film in Sri Lanka. His answer is: “Guerillas destroy the society; so does marketing. ‘Guerilla marketing,’ the coming together of the two destroys the whole world.”
The film unravels the life of an advertising wizard, a schizophrenic actually, who engineers the election victory of an opposition leader to the post of president. However, the man has many internal demons to exorcise and when present-day realities become too much for him to bear, he shuts himself into a world of illusion and part-reality. And he has no escape. His only solace — to be normal — is to live with his dilemmas.
Despite the “heavy” thematic orientation, the film is also wickedly wacky. The “marketing” plan that the film’s hero, Thisara, draws out for the election is the stuff that makes poignant social satire. The television channel, perhaps state-run, that beams the election bulletins is named “O,” and all that scares away the modern-day politician are evocative drum-beats from the past. The scheming politician also makes some interesting wisecracks, effective potshots against globalisation: “We must sell our culture to protect it,” explaining his decision to sell a national monument.
And Chandrasiri infuses into the proceedings an interesting twist by integrating the rhythm of dance. The mind-games of Thisara too are well drawn out as is the love struggle between his wife and childhood friend.
Guerilla Marketing has a strong theatrical flavour; natural, because Chandrasiri is the author-director of many revolutionary stage shows. But he blends different narrative styles seamlessly to deliver hard-hitting cinema that puts humanity before any other consideration.
That is precisely the way he reacts to the trouble and turmoil Chandrasiri sees around him, in his own country. “As a filmmaker, I am influenced by all that is happening around me. But I know that the Sinhalese and the Tamils — the common men you see on the streets — they are not rivals; they have no enmity for each other. The issues are political and it is the people who suffer. For problems kicked up by the politicians, solutions too should come from them.”
His film therefore does not offer answers. He does not pack any message either. He simply treks through diverse levels of everyday realities and reacts through the movie frames. “I concentrate on human beings. I study love and hatred, the connection between politics and love. In fact, both my films have been discussing the same issues — from different contexts,” explains Chandrasiri. “I have only side: Humanity. My film is not about racial issues, not about extremism; it is an approach to humanity from an ordinary human being’s point of view.”
He moves back to history for his next film, which will be his take on the life of a Sri Lankan king Bimaladharma Soorya. “I love history but I am not a nostalgic man. I love the past because only the past can take you to the future.”
— Rajeev Nair

Exploring the resilience within

2005-12-23T16:47:00.000+04:00

Dhruv Dhawan, a young filmmaker based in Dubai, has an explosive tale to narrate with his film From Dust. Filmed in Sri Lanka, it tells the story of people who were prevented from rebuilding their homes following the devastating tsunami. The film makes its world premiere at Diff on Monday. Rajeev Nair meets him

IN A world of uncertainties, hope can be a cliché. It almost stands as an excuse for inaction or a promise never meant to be honoured. Like a lazy man’s only resort, hope is that word one easily falls back on — to feed optimism but breed inertia.
Why, Dhruv Dhawan’s self-realisation from the making of From Dust, his first feature, is that he found his ideals and idea of hope terribly shaken. He says he lost his false idea of hope and having known the truth, it hurts. Yet, as bottom lines go, he too finds a silver lining. But that is for the viewer to discover as the film makes its world premiere at the Dubai International Film Festival on Monday.
From Dust, essentially, is a documentary though it does not figure under Diff’s Destination Documentaries segment. And it is made by a predominantly Dubai-based director — Dhruv had lived more than two decades here. He builds his story based on reality, and in doing so, he learnt a lot more about filmmaking than what his master’s degree at the New York Film Academy could have ever taught him.
A take on post-tsunami reconstruction and rebuilding in Sri Lanka, From Dust, included in Diff’s Cinema from the Subcontinent segment, was practically shot as a one-man operation by Dhruv. A graduate in cultural anthropology from the US — he took the course as a route to documentaries because many accomplished documentary makers are anthropologists — Dhruv was moved by the news of the devastation the tsunami had unleashed in Sri Lanka. Somehow, he felt that while the media was covering the event hands-on, a few vital elements were going missing, perhaps untold, or unnoticed. That was the pain and pace with which an affected population would go about to build their lives again.
When, in mid-January, he eventually decided to travel to Sri Lanka with his camera crew to make a documentary, he had his “treatment” ready. He had roped in a former colleague from New York as cinematographer, and they spent the first few days on recon. His colleague fell ill, couldn’t find his inspiration, and flew out. Dhruv almost dropped the documentary, when on the first-month anniversary of the catastrophe, he walked to the beach and saw children lighting candles in memory of the dead.
He started filming. And he never looked back.
That night, he also met one of the three protagonists of From Dust — Ravi, who had lost his father and sister but managed to save his mother. He lost his home, and was looking to pick up his life from the rubbles of destruction. Dhruv moved with him into a camp for the displaced, and there, in the night, his documentary started getting a firmer shape. He shared the nightmares of the children, the camaraderie of the camp-dwellers, and discovered a depth to his tale.
He also discovered two other protagonists: Cyril, a fisherman who lost his home and has now been relocated some 10 kilometres away from sea, and Cameron, an acupuncturist from Australia who flew in to assist the devastated population.
Gradually, From Dust found its true character — it wasn’t going to be another documentary on tsunami survivors. It was to tap and probe further into what Dhruv describes as how the “bureaucratic response exploited a natural disaster and converted it into an opportunity.”
The film is a tribute to the human spirit alright, but it is also an investigation into “why the rebuilding process has been slowed down by design.” Dhruv is not revealing any further except that his work discusses the government’s decision to restrict buildings 100 metres from the sea. The rest, he says, will come alive on screen.
Dhruv isn’t a stranger to the terrible suffering of humanity; he was in New York on Sept.11, 2001. He watched the destruction from the rooftop of his apartment and also filmed the shocked and frenzied reaction of people on the ground. But he says the scope of the tragedy was so overwhelming he couldn’t internalise it.
Subsequently, he returned to Dubai and was working as a corporate filmmaker. He has done films for Dubai Media City and Tecom, and also did the Diff 2004 commercial. The tsunami disaster shook him completely. “I knew there were going to be many stories arising from the situation. I didn’t know what.”
He sought them out in Sri Lanka, trying principally to capture the spirit of resilience of the people. His journey took him further afield. Initially, at times, he was scared of the implications of the journey, of his responsibility to his crew. That wasn’t to be once he began shooting on his own. Assistance only came from his driver, Niranka, whom Dhruv taught to record sound.
His 71-minute documentary is culled from 68 hours of footage filmed over 10 months canned through a very fly-on-the-wall approach to filmmaking. Dhruv would “shoot” without a tape for days together so when he comes back and actually shoots, his subjects wouldn’t bother to look or feel the camera. Not having a full-fledged crew too helped. The film was eventually edited in Dubai by Nirmal Chander.
Dhruv has brought in Cyril to be part of Diff and to interact with the audience and share his real-life experiences. In Cyril’s truth lies the film’s strength.
Cyril is only representative of a bigger picture. Can Dhruv’s bitter truth, told through the lives of Ravi and Cyril, make a difference? If yes, the filmmaker would have scored a lasting triumph that goes beyond the confines of cinema as mere art. Cinema would then become closer to life, no, life itself.

Strength of subtle realism

2005-12-23T16:32:00.000+04:00

L’ Enfant, the winner of the 2005 Palme d’Or at Cannes film festival, is set in a bleak industrial town and notwithstanding its linear narration, derives is strength from subtle realism

Belgian directors Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne offers little surprise in their Palme d’Or winning film L’Enfant, one of the gala screenings at Diff. Set in a bleak industrial town in Belgium, the film with its linear narrative structure and plain speak, on the surface of it, lacks the depth one comes to expect from contemporary arthouse films.
The film tells everything – from the dilemmas of a directionless youth to dysfunctional families and a failing social support system – almost in bullet point precision. L’Enfant’s take-home quotient is thus considerably reduced; there are no ambiguities to be explored, no questions to be probed.
Despite the peripheral nature of the film, rather because of it, L’Enfant becomes a modern classic for the simple reason: It captures realism subtly. You do not watch cinema; you watch life. And this film could be anywhere – relevant as it is to penury-struck women in Orissa in India to the job-less, petty thieves in Belgium, represented in the film by Bruno (Jeremie Renier). The boy isn’t bad – which is a perfect corollary to the universal truth: After all, who is bad? Who wants to be bad? Bruno is bad because he wants to live in the moment. He sells his baby without remorse because he believes he can any way have another one. But he owns up his failures, and owns up his love and eventually finds his bearing and life in love.
Simplicity is indeed the aesthetics of L’Enfant. Despite the high denominator of realism, the film isn’t stark or grim, which is its biggest surprise. There is happiness, gloom, sadness, misery – all in the every day life of the protagonists, Bruno and Sonia (Deborah Francois).
And through the portrayal of their lives, Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne also take viewers through the shifting dynamics of European societies. There is a simmering tension underneath the narrative – a strain passed on by the society to individuals who simply fail to measure up to whatever decent standards it prescribes. There is also the invasion of market forces – the conflict between true need and fancy desire – as well as the break-up of relationships, often, without identifiable reasons. After all, Bruno is presented as more keen to watch his ‘target’ – the old man he must let loose young muggers upon rather than holding or seeing his nine-day old kid.
For Francois, just out of school, doing Sonia took a lot of mental preparation. “After reading the script, I felt she had to be a lot stronger than I had expected,” Francois says in an interview with The Gulf Today, before the screening of the film.

Short, silent and ambiguous

2005-12-23T16:30:00.000+04:00

Bejoy Nambiar, director of Reflections, an eight-minute short Indian film showcased in the ‘Cinema from the Subcontinent’ segment of Diff, says that actor Mohanlal is the pillar of his film

AS SHORT films go, Bejoy Nambiar’s directorial debut, Reflections, is indeed a trifle too short at eight minutes. He recalls the film’s viewers telling him that they would have loved to watch a little more of the film. But eight minutes is all you are going to get, even from his next film, currently in pre-production stage and to be shot in Kerala.
Reflections was Nambiar’s first practical lesson in filmmaking, a film school, if you may, that he never went to. Involved in his family business of textile exports, Nambiar has been an avid buff and also involved in theatre. He was to have done a film course in New York but when it fell through, he took the camera and went about doing the best thing in film education: Doing it oneself. He wrote about 12 short scripts, and zeroed in on Reflections to be actually made because it was easiest in terms of schedules.
But there was a hitch: He needed Mohanlal, the multiple-award winning Indian actor and a superstar down South. Nambiar hadn’t written the film with Mohanlal in mind but once the script was completed and he had the storyboard, he could fit in no other actor for the key role. It took a while to reach Mohanlal. The actor tossed the script aside and told Nambiar: “You tell me…”
And he told. Mohanlal agreed to do the film but added: “The film is your vision.” Even while making the film — a three-day shot essentially but done at two time periods — Mohanlal seemed apprehensive. He even bounced off his doubts once. “But eventually, it all fitted well,” smiles Nambiar, 26. “He watched the film thrice, screened the film to his wife and pointing at a painting in his home said to me: ‘It is how the way you look at it; that is how the film is too.'"
Indeed, for a silent, short film, Reflections simply passes on to the viewer the task of extracting from it a story, message, whatever. Nambiar agrees the film has an element of ambiguity, which indeed gives the film its strength.
But Nambiar had his reasons to make the film “silent.” He says he is not a good writer. “I have many good ideas but writing is a totally different thing. Silent films convey so much with so little. You can take it this way or that.”
The film, for the uninitiated, starts as a family — husband, wife and girl-child — travelling in car. There is palpable tension between the three. The man tries to lighten the mood by playing the FM, he hums and sings along; the child is amused at first but she gets bored soon. The woman remains nonchalant and when the tension eventually returns, she breaks loose and the three become one in harmony. The film cuts to a restaurant; the same family is at the table and that is when the husband spots a man across. Cut back to the protagonist who enters a phase of "reflections." Doors open and close on his memory — he drifts to love and discord and when a third door opens, the film closes on the viewer.
The non-linear approach to filmmaking, Nambiar says, takes the film further. “It makes you think and thus it stays in your memory.”
Nambiar says Reflections started off as a five minute film. “I didn’t want to include more as it would have killed the film.” In retrospect, he feels he could have trimmed the film more. But that is part of an everyday learning for him. One thing, however, is sure. He is going to explore silent films further.
He says Mohanlal has been the mainstay of the film. None of the actors — Mohanlal or Juhee Babbar — took remuneration though Nambiar paid all his technicians. He has set aside Rs600,000 (approx: Dhs50,000) to make six short films. He used it all up on Reflections, shooting it in 35 mm. And he is yet to see a penny of it. But Nambiar is encouraged by the response to his films at the festival circuit. He also hopes to screen the film in Mumbai multiplexes very soon. The intention is to get the public talking.
Nambiar is a huge fan of the '80s Malayalam cinema, when it was steered by the likes of late writer-director Padmarajan. He believes in cinema that communicates to the audience, works that strike a good balance. Director Mani Ratnam is another inspiration.
For him, the difficult part about doing Reflections was that there were very few people to assist him. “I had to look at the assembling and handling and production; it was a good experience but you tend to lose focus from the actual work at hand. I used to be more concerned about the logistics side than directing.”
He hasn’t got over with it even in his next production but he approaches it with more boldness — encouraged by the audience response to the film and from the learning of taking it across borders, straight to multicultural Dubai.

— Rajeev Nair

Dubai likely location for ‘The Alchemist’ filming

2005-12-23T16:25:00.000+04:00

By Rajeev Nair

Matrix star Laurence Fishburne will direct the film adaptation of the best-selling and seminal work of fiction by Paulo Coelho, The Alchemist.
Academy Award-winning producer of the Lord of the Rings, Barrie M. Osburne said on Friday that Dubai is among a list of probable locations from the region for the film, which will go into production mid-2006 and be released in November 2007.
Fishburne, who walked the opening gala of the second edition of the Dubai International Film Festival (DIFF), has already done several versions of the script with the support of Coelho, said Osburne.
“Coelho loved Laurence’s script; he is very supportive of the project and has given his inputs,” he added.
Zeroing in on Dubai as one of the locations of the epic film will depend on the “support and welcome” the film receives, said Osburne.
“It is a combination of factors — a question of who wants to support the film, the work and labour issues, government support, customs and immigration, and some finance.”
He said looking into the facilities offered by Dubai Studio City “could be a possibility if they can accelerate that.”
Osburne is looking for a ‘Lawrence of Arabia’ kind of feel to the film with some “great desert” locations.
The novel’s story-line traverses from Andalusia through the Saharan desert to Egypt.
The cast of the film is yet to be finalised, though Osburne revealed that there is someone in mind for Santiago, “a young actor, perhaps an upcoming one that people know.”
He said The Alchemist will have the two strong essentials for any good film: “The right cast and the right script.”
Though Laurence Fishburne has directed only “one small film” earlier Once in the Life in 2000, Osburne said he trusts the actor implicitly.
They have been working together for years now, from Apocalypse Now to The Cotton Club and Matrix.
Osburne is also the producer of accomplished Indian director Shekhar Kapur’s Paani (Water), which he said might be delayed since Kapur is “said to be involved in Elizabeth II.”
He said Paani, a “sort of Romeo and Juliet set in a society where the (precious) commodity is water,” might also be renamed in the wake of Deepa Mehta’s Water having already hit the screens.
Osburne, who is credited with developing New Zealand as a filmmakers’ destination following the success of the Lord of the Rings trilogy, said The Alchemist could be a “great opportunity to portray the Arabian culture in a positive way.”
When a film of epic proportions is shot anywhere, “you are going to build an infrastructure as we did in New Zealand and generate interest in the area,” added the producer, who has worked with the likes of Francis Ford Coppola and Sydney Pollack.
Osburne said that the poor show of Hollywood productions this year is only a reflection of the industry’s cyclical nature. “There is pressure on those who run the studios to come out with high grossers, which lends itself to films that aren’t necessarily the best or most original,” he noted.
But it is encouraging to watch the emergence of independent films that have a lot of originality.
The boom time for documentaries such as the March of the Penguins is “a sign that people want to see what is topical and connects with the psyche of the general population,” he said.
“But again, that is not a major shift. It just means that you should be paying attention to what is of interest to the population,” he pointed out.
Osburne praised Diff for its “amazing accomplishments in just two years” adding that the festival “makes you want to come back.”
On a personal note, Osburne said the many decades of experience in making films for Hollywood has reinforced the fact that "making films is what I enjoy doing and I have learnt to make large-scale complicated films."
He might produce a series of documentaries on the state of oceans and the environment – a genre he has not tackled.
Talaat Captan, executive vice president, Prime Pictures, said he had been “literally chasing and begging to” Osburne to come to Dubai. “It is such a great opportunity to make his film here and create an industry like (he did) in New Zealand.”