GIFF 2018 is a valuable addition to the film festival circuit, but needs more local participation

There have been a number of smaller film festivals mushrooming in India — in places like Jaipur and Dharamshala — and one of the most recent is the Guwahati International Film Festival, which had its second edition between 25 and 31 October 2018. While one cannot be certain that all these film festivals are valuable contributors to film culture, there is little doubt about the value of the one in Guwahati, especially because of the blossoming of North-Eastern cinema in India in the past few years. Rima Das’ Assamese film Village Rockstars was India’s official entry for the Oscars this year; in 2016 Haobam Paban Kumar’s Manipuri film Lady of the Lake was the most interesting film at the IFFI’s Indian Panorama. Both these films were made on minuscule budgets; the very least that North-Eastern cinema deserves is an international film festival and Guwahati is evidently the hub of the North-East. An international film festival does many things for the local culture. In the first place, it is an easy way of acquainting a public with issues from around the world. Anglophone Indians take several things for granted but many people with a college education in India have only a small idea of world events in the last century and almost no idea of economic/ political issues in the global age. Indian cinema is scarcely any help here since it is stubbornly ahistorical in its approach and even realistic films are culpable here. I suggest that films like Titli, Masaan and Mukkabaaz, where appearances are nonetheless conveyed viscerally, offer few clear accounts of how things are run or happen in India — in economic, social or political terms. The first thing an international filmmaker generally thinks of the ‘context’ – since that defines the setting in which the central drama is played out. An instance of an international film full of background information and screened at GIFF was Hubert Charuel’s Petit Paysan (‘Bloody Milk’, 2017) which deals with a French farmer who finds one of his cows infected by lethal disease originating in Belgium. The European Union has ruled that if one cow has contacted this disease the entire herd must be destroyed, and the film deals with a farmer’s efforts to save his herd. GIFF had civil servant Monita Borgohain as Director, with media professional Rahul Jain as Artistic Director. It was organised by the Jyoti Chitraban Film Studio (Chairman: Pabitra Margharita) in association with the Dr Bhupen Hazarika Regional Government Film and Television Institute and supported by the Assam Government. The hospitality offered to the invited guests was exemplary, volunteers always around to assist and help. If there were lacunae, they were elsewhere; one thing I noticed though was the absence of meeting space for local filmmakers and cultural figures and those visiting from outside. [caption id=“attachment_5512011” align=“alignnone” width=“825”]  GIFF 2018.[/caption] By and large, Indian film festivals offer much more in terms of hospitality than those abroad. The biggest film festivals from around the world do not offer five-star dinners to participants and there is no reason for those in India to do so either; but there still need to be gatherings where people come together. Parties need only offer mild alcoholic beverages like beer along with vegetarian snacks, but their presence is essential since they provide the right atmosphere for networking. GIFF did not do this and there were more diplomats than cultural figures at the sparsely attended but lavish dinners. Almost none of the local cultural elite were seen in any of the get-togethers. The money spent at film festivals must primarily benefit the local public and there could perhaps have been more evidence of this. Coming to the films themselves, festivals choose films from lists provided by a handful of local intermediaries and they do not have much opportunity to select — although they can use a larger number of such intermediaries than one or two. The films on offer at GIFF 2018 were not always the latest, but that is really not of much importance since the public in Guwahati would not have seen many of them. The opening film was Jahnu Barua’s Bhoga Khirikee (‘Broken Window’), which deals with terrorism. In this film, a young woman married to a militant in hiding has problems with her father, who is hostile to her relationship with a wanted man. The film is bold in as much as it shows the woman raped by a soldier sent out to search her home, but this boldness is offset when an officer comes by asking the woman to lodge a complaint so action can be taken against the rapist. What Barua is suggesting is that the military is more than willing to punish rapists in its ranks, and it is therefore not the military but individual soldiers who are culpable. While this may be acceptable in theory, what usually happens is that there are deliberate cover-ups and it cannot be asserted that there is justice. The morale of the army is an issue brought up, and such action is resisted. Barua is an important filmmaker but he tries to take a politically innocuous stand; moreover, he shows he is uncomfortable with cinematic violence, which works to the film’s detriment. Among the foreign films on exhibition, the most interesting were Madara Dislere’s Paradise ’89 (Latvia), Jonas Carpignano’s A Ciambra (Italy), Gaston Duprat and Mariano Cohn’s A Distinguished Citizen (Argentina) and Egle Vertelyte’s Miracle (Lithuania). Paradise ’89 tries to examine the events in 1989, when the Soviet Union was in a state of collapse and Latvians were striving for independence, through the eyes of a little girl from Riga whose parents are on the verge of breaking up, and she has been sent to live with cousins in the country. The director works on the idea that for a girl of eight or nine the political and the personal are mixed up, and the memories of the girl grown up would also show this. The film is remarkably poetic, reminiscent of Victor Erice’s classic Spanish film The Spirit of the Beehive (1973) set in Franco’s Spain. The difference is that Erice’s film was also made in Franco’s Spain and had to contend with censorship while Dislere’s film is from independent Latvia and could be made unhindered. One of the pleasures offered by the film is that the audience is left to disentangle the two strands in the narrative — dealing with a child’s concerns and politics respectively. A Ciambra is another excellent film dealing with a young gypsy boy learning to become a thief and getting caught between African migrants from Ghana and Italian criminals who use gypsies as their agents in crime. A Distinguished Citizen is about a Nobel Prize winner who goes back to his town in Argentina to receive a prize, and the conflicts he is drawn into. The best things about the film are the profound ideas mouthed by the protagonist before he is given a hard time by some bigoted and conservative locals. But a Nobel Prize winner is nonetheless a celebrity in his/her native country and it is unlikely his fate would be as ignominious as the one the protagonist of the film is made to undergo. Also shown were older films like the Hungarian On Body and Soul (Ildiko Enyedy) and the Albanian Daybreak (Gentian Koci), both of which have been shown in India last year at film festivals (IFFI/BIFFES). They are noteworthy films and On Body and Soul won the Golden Bear at Berlin in 2018. Iranian and Chinese films are often the favourites at film festivals in India, but usually, because of the low intellectual demands, they make upon audiences. Films from both countries are marked by a deliberate sweetening of their worlds; in one formula, a humanitarian crisis of some sort is created (preferably involving children) and officialdom is shown to exert itself to help resolve the crisis, though a few perfunctory obstacles are created. In the Iranian film White Bridge (Ali Ghavitan) a little orphan girl who is differently abled has to be put in a special school but she wants to go back to the school from which she has just been evicted. In the Chinese film Ballad from Tibet (Zhang Wei), blind children from a Tibetan village want to travel to Shenzen which is a thousand miles away to sing in a contest. Many Chinese films rely on picture postcard scenery and Ballad from Tibet is no exception. Even when films shown at international film festivals are not the greatest, they often showcase some lovely locations that make one yearn to travel; among the best of such films at GIFF were Haldaa (Tauquir Ahmed) from Bangladesh and the closing film Black Crow (Tayfur Aydin) from Turkey. GIFF 2018 was efficiently conducted but the funds at its disposal could perhaps have been used better. In the first place, there need to be people with a deep knowledge of cinema managing a festival so the right kinds of films are exhibited. Fortunately, no Bollywood celebrities were brought into GIFF, as in some other festivals. Celebrities charge huge sums of money to appear and one must congratulate GIFF for sticking to Aribam Syam Sharma from Manipur (director of two classics — Imagi Ningthem, Ishanou) and Shaji N Karun who is best known for the Malayalam classic Piravi, for the closing ceremony. But there needed to be more categories outside ‘World Cinema’, perhaps more country focuses, more retrospectives and genre groupings. Many great films from Russia have never been seen in India and genres like comedy would be popular. Judging from new films, the West is in decline in cinema. Two French films at GIFF involving leading stars (Isabelle Huppert, Jeanne Balibar) were not even watchable. The best films today are perhaps made in the former Eastern Bloc – countries like Hungary, Romania, Russia and Georgia. If films from the West charge huge sums as viewing fees, better films from these countries are less expensive. And if those in charge of film festivals knew cinema well they could select the best films without having to rely on the winners at the top festivals — which are pricy. On Body and Soul, for instance, was not even the best film at GIFF though it was the top prize-winner at Berlin. To conclude, GIFF 2018 must be counted a success but, judging from appearances, it nonetheless needs more local participation – not only from people in Assam but from the entire North-East. One finds an enormous amount of local interest in visitors – both Indians and those from abroad – and the local people one encounters are courteous and warm. Festival volunteers, for instance, asked to take selfies with me and, when I asked why, it was because I was a ‘guest’! But (correspondingly) one gets only a small sense of the ‘Indian imagination’, as evidenced in the popular media, having a secure place for the North-East. Nothing indicates this marginalisation more than Bollywood’s disinclination to use stars from states like Assam; it is as though ‘India’ is signified entirely by the upper-castes from north, central and south India. Events like the GIFF are important because they perform an important ‘integration’ exercise, but they should bring more locals in touch with visitors from outside. MK Raghavendra is a film scholar and author of seven books including The Oxford India Short Introduction to Bollywood (2016). He is deeply interested in social, political and cultural issues in India, an interest that informs his books on film. He also loves to travel to little-known places.