Jio MAMI 20th Mumbai Film Festival Day 5: Lucrecia Martel’s masterclass, Mohamed Siam’s powerful docu-feature Amal

The sprawling Audi 3 at PVR Icon was nearly a full house for Lucrecia Martel’s masterclass, the attendance giving stiff competition to that of Birds of Passage, one of the top billings at this year’s Jio MAMI Film Festival. Not that it was unexpected. The Argentinian filmmaker, who is head of jury for the India Gold section this year, is the toast of film festivals around the world, including Cannes, Venice, Toronto, Berlin, Sundance and Rotterdam, to name a few. She made her debut in 2001 with The Swamp that premiered at Cannes and since then “auteur” has been a popular term to describe the 51-year-old. She has made four feature films till date, barring several short films and documentaries, each time showing how to throw the rule book out of the window. During the session, Dennis Lim who was in conversation with Martel expressed his bewilderment at how a complex family film like The Swamp, that overthrows popular tropes of structure and narrative, could be someone’s debut. Which is when Martel revealed that she had grown up believing that she would become a scientist. [caption id=“attachment_5477811” align=“alignnone” width=“825”]  Dennis Lim with Lucrecia Martel and her translator. Image courtesy: Kusumita Das.[/caption] “But I guess that didn’t happen because it required serious studying,” she said. Her first tryst with the camera came by when she was 15 and her father brought home a video camera. “We were a large family of many siblings, perhaps he wanted to keep track.” Since the camera was too heavy to be carried around, Martel placed it on a tripod in the kitchen area and started looking at the family scenes from behind the lenses. “I would leave it on for hours; the footage was boring but it helped me discover the world beyond the frame which was brought alive by the sound. I was also attracted to the tradition of spoken narrative in North Argentina, where I come from, where people explain things in a roundabout way.” It is her grasp on sound that helps her arrive at the image, says the filmmaker. “For me, the dialogue makes the character appear, and the character makes the space appear.” The idea, she says, is to learn to observe outside of our education. “We are educated to not see a lot of things.” The audience got to see how Martel perceives cinema, as every step of the way she contested our understanding and expectations from the medium. “There is a belief that cinema is meant to tell stories. And if you don’t understand it, it’s a disaster. A film doesn’t equal a plot. We are conditioned to think ‘what happens next’. Just like in life — cut to the next moment. But cinema is an experience, not a story that you see to tell your friend.” Contrary to what one might be tempted to think, Martel clarifies that it’s not about being highbrow. “What worries me is the danger of one form of storytelling becoming the norm. It’s important not to disrespect any form of storytelling that is not classical. Most of us carry backpacks of ‘intellectual cinema’. Truth is that any mainstream film has had as much intellectual work go into it.”

Her flair for freely flouting the convention of film language got her noticed by the men at Marvel who approached her to direct Black Widow. “I had a meeting with them where they told me that they needed a woman director to develop Scarlett Johansson’s character. They also told me not to bother with the action scenes. ‘We will take care of that’,” she said, pointing out that while film studios are looking to work more with female directors, for action stuff, they still trust the men.

“I was thinking I’d love to meet Scarlett Johansson and I would also love doing the action scenes! I asked them if they could do away with the laser lights…I find them horrible, and the soundtrack of Marvel films is unbearable too. I only watch them on flights that’s why. But in case if any of this is going on YouTube, I would love to direct Black Widow,” she quipped. [caption id=“attachment_5477791” align=“alignnone” width=“825”]  A still from Egyptian director Mohamed Siam’s docu-feature Amal.[/caption] The session saw a generous sprinkling of Martel’s wicked and understated humour and a wisdom of a kind we don’t encounter often. I was particularly taken in by what she said of her approach towards actors. “I am scared of actors. They do what none of us want to; they dare to be someone else. That has a power that scares me. Most of us are only trying to be ourselves.” Day 5 also saw the first part of Royal Stag Select Barrel’s Large Short Films. The ones screened were Aditya Pawar’s Face It, Saheem Khan’s Khatoon Ki Khidmat, Abhilash Sahu’s Neel On Wheels and Sudeep Kanwal’s Dhund (The Fog). While each film brought forth a new concept, it was Khatoon Ki Khidmat that stayed with me simply because of its humour and strong performances by the actors. Dhund has a powerful post Partition storyline, but the drama could have been toned down a bit. Face It has an intriguing build-up that nosedives in the end.

However, of the five promised films, only four were screened leaving the audience utterly puzzled and not knowing what to do with the sudden extra hour in their hands. There were mock chants of “Audience ke saath dhokhaa!” as people reluctantly headed for the exit. Although even without the curious case of the missing fifth film, this session was unfortunately a let-down.

The evening screenings included Jia Zhangke’s gangster drama Ash Is The Purest White that was selected to compete at Palme d’Or at Cannes earlier this year. Judging by the queues, it was clearly the toast of the evening. Also screened was the Coen Brothers’ The Ballad of Buster Scruggs, an American western anthology that tells the story of a sharp-shooting songster. None of the events of the day was enough to fade the memory of Amal, which I was lucky enough to catch in the morning. Egyptian director Mohamed Siam’s docu-feature traces the aftermath of the Egyptian revolution of 2011 from the perspective of a young girl, Amal. The film reminds one of Richard Linklater’s Boyhood where you see the protagonist grow in real time over several years. Here too we meet Amal when she is 15, in 2012. A bitter, angry, physically scarred survivor of the riots of Tahrir Square, we see Amal’s journey right up to the time she turns 18. We see the changes in her country manifest in her, as she, like most Arab youths in Egypt get caught between two extremes — fanatic Muslim Brothers and military dictatorship. Watching films back-to-back at MAMI seldom offers any room for contemplation or processing. It’s always a mad rush to catch what’s next, as Martel wisely pointed out in her masterclass while talking about how we think cinema [and even life] should be like - ‘cut to the next scene’. But even on days like this, when the last thought in your mind as you leave the venue is the first film you saw that day, that’s got to have some real power. That was Amal for me. (This is a round-up of the major highlights, fly-on-the-wall conversations, and our top picks of events & films from Jio MAMI 20th Mumbai Film Festival.)