The film uses footage Patwardhan has shot over the decades of his parents and his family to tell the story of a changing India.
New Delhi: Documentary filmmaker Anand Patwardhan’s Vasudhaiva Kutumbakam/The World is Family has won the Best Documentary award at the New York Indian Film Festival (NYIFF). Earlier, the film had won the Audience Award at Indie Meme, a South Asian Festival in Austin, Texas.
The film uses footage Patwardhan has shot over the decades of his parents and his family to tell the story of a changing India. The official blurb of the film reads:
“Vasudhaiva Kutumbakam, a Sanskrit phrase meaning “the world is family” is a universalist idea that competes with dominant, exclusivist Hindu notions of caste. Anand grew up in a milieu that questioned the latter. The family’s elders had fought for India’s Independence but rarely spoken about it. ‘Liberty, Equality, Fraternity’, words enshrined in India’s Constitution, were subconsciously internalized. As his parents aged, Anand began to film with whatever equipment was at hand. Soon birthdays and family gatherings gave way to oral history.
Revisiting home movie footage a decade after his parents had passed, was a revelation. Today, self-confessed supremacists whose ideology once inspired the murder of Mahatma Gandhi, are in power. As they rewrite India’s history, memories of the past have become more precious than mere personal nostalgia.”
A review in Varietyafter the screening at NYIFF reads, “Through his personal study of his family, Patwardhan endears us to the entwined history of Nirmala, Balu, Rau, Achyut, Gandhi and India as a whole. And as he reaches several inevitable crossroads, from personal grief to dismay over the country’s divisive direction, “The World Is Family” becomes a deeply affecting, immensely powerful cinematic lamentation of lost stories and details, and a desperate act of personal and political preservation before time runs out.”
At the award function in New York last week, Patwardhan talked about the ongoing genocide in Palestine and the US’s complicity in it.
Shafkat Raina talks about the history of forced labour in Kashmir.
Kashmiri filmmaker Shafkat Raina talks about his latest documentary, Forced Labour Under the Largest Democracy. The film is a journey into the history of forced labour in Kashmir.
In this video, Raina explains how forced labour first started in Kashmir under Dogra rule and even though it is a gross human rights violation, it continues to be prevalent even today. He points out the various clauses in the Indian constitution that say forced labour is illegal, yet the state and the army remain unanswerable.
The Uttarakhand CM said the film would inspire youths to stay in their villages and work for their communities.
Dehradun:Moti Bagh, a documentary film based on the struggle of a farmer in a remote Himalayan village, has been nominated for the Oscars, Uttarakhand Chief Minister Trivendra Singh Rawat said on Tuesday.
The chief minister congratulated the director, Nirmal Chander Dandriyal, and said the film is based on the life of Vidyadutt, a farmer living in the state’s Pauri Garhwal region.
The film, Rawat said, will inspire youths to stay in their villages and work for their communities. “It will help stop migrations from remote areas,” he said.
The chief minister appealed to young farmers to play a role in preventing migration and said they should take advantage of schemes launched by the state government.
The I&B ministry denied permission for the documentary’s screening, saying it could lead to a “law and order issue”.
New Delhi: The Kerala high court overruled the Centre’s objections to the screening of Anand Patwardhan’s documentary film Vivek (Reason) at the International Documentary and Short Film Festival that is currently underway in Thiruvananthapuram.
The Ministry of Information and Broadcasting denied permission for the film – whoch looks into the murders of Narendra Dabholkar and Govind Pansare, among others – to be screened at the festival. The ministry said the screening could cause a “law and order issue”.
The Kerala HC held that this apprehension was not valid. The guidelines framed by the I&B ministry in this regard allow the the screening of the documentary, it said. However, Justice Shaji P. Chaly, who passed the order, clarified that the film cannot be screened anywhere else.
The court was dealing with a petition filed by the festival organiser Kerala State Chalachitra Academy, against the Centre’s refusal to grant permission for the screening. Patwardhan was the second petitioner in the case.
The four-hour film begins by looking into the murders of Narendra Dabholkar and Govind Pansare, and the role of the Sanatan Sanstha in spreading right-wing extremist violence. It then goes on to Dalit protests and the rise of Dalit leaders in recent years, and ends in Dadri, Mohammad Akhlaq’s village.
The film has won a number of awards across the world, including the award for the Best Feature-Length Documentary at the 31st International Documentary Film Festival, Amsterdam.
According to The Hindu, the Kerala State Chalachitra Academy had postponed the screening of Reason from June 24 till the last day of the event (June 26), hoping that permission may be granted by then.
Festival director Kamal told the New Indian Express that since the film is already available on YouTube and has been viewed many times, it does not make sense for the Centre to deny permission straight off the bat.
The ministry had claimed in its response to the festival organisers that screening Reason could lead to a “law and order issue”.
Earlier too, the I&B ministry had delayed the screening by asking for a more “detailed synopsis”. “While exemption was provided to every other film being screened here, they have asked for more details on just this one. We have sent a detailed appeal two days back. This has effectively delayed the screening of the film. The academy is exploring legal options currently,” one of the organisers told The Hindu.
Films being screened at festivals do not require Censor Board certification, but do need to be cleared by the Central I&B ministry before they can be shown. Filmmakers and festival organisers have alleged in the past as well that the ministry has misused this guideline to stop screenings of films they may not agree with.
In February 2018, a documentary on artists in the Kashmir Valley was denied permission to be screened at the Mumbai International Film Festival at the very last minute – after an audience had already collected to watch it. In 2017, a number of jury members of the International Film Festival of India in Goa resigned after the I&B ministry dropped two films they had selected from the list of films to be screened. In 2015, a documentary produced by
The documentary looks at the aftermath of Rakbar Khan’s lynching – for both the victim’s family and the perpetrators.
In one of the more memorable scenes from Shirley Abraham and Amit Madheshiya’s first documentary, The Cinema Travellers (2016), the camera settled on the faces of the audience members in a tent, in a village in Maharashtra, in thrall to cinema. It was a tender scene encapsulating the power of movies – the different ways in which they unite and liberate us, make us human.
There’s a similar scene in their latest short documentary, The Hour of Lynching, where the camera focuses on the people in the audience, sitting under a tent, in a village in Rajasthan. This time, though, they’re not watching a film but listening to an activist from the Vishwa Hindu Parishad – their faces impassive, but not devoid of curiosity, as if waiting for a nudge for this universe to make sense.
The speaker, Nawal Kishore Sharma, chief of the VHP’s gau raksha cell, says, “The youth serving our religion have been arrested” – referring to the lynching of a Muslim dairy farmer, Rakbar – “on mere pretext of constitutional law. Our cow protectors have been jailed [in Rakbar’s case]. That night [of his death] I was with them. And now I’m also being made an accused.”
He speaks for one more minute, telling his listeners that “Mother Cow is imploring” them to rise and “behead the heathens”, and that if Hindus “lose their minds” they’ll clear “Hindustan’s kachdapeti (garbage)” – the 200 million Muslims in the country. People applaud and raise slogans of “Jai Shri Ram”.
Cinema was a soothing balm in one tent, a wonderful illustration of the human spirit, but what would you call the second one? Isn’t that case too, it can be argued, an example of human spirit – a common cause that brings people together, empowers them, and makes them connected? If filmmaking is understanding the human condition, then how would such a movie look where the human itself is under question – easily swayed, faltering, crumbling?
The Hour of Lynching opens with a title card which, in part, reads, “In 2014, Narendra Modi was elected Prime Minister of India. Since then, 47 people have been murdered in cow-related hate crimes. Seventy-six percent of these were Muslims.” And then, almost preempting a ‘whataboutery’ boomerang, states, “No cow-related lynchings were reported between 2010 and 2013.”
This is a powerful thesis – backed by stats and facts – laying the foundation for the rest of the documentary. But in a world where beliefs trump facts, numbers twirl in our consciousness like inconsequential back-up dancers.
A few days ago, I read, and re-read, a comment on Facebook by a New-York based Indian, on a column on Indian liberals, shared by my friend: “It is amazing how a few dozen cases of lynching (none endorsed by the central government) hog any discussion of the current government among the liberals.” It was a remarkable bit of literary baton twirling — “a few dozen lynchings”, as if even one is okay.
Divided in two parts – the first centred on Rakbar’s family in the aftermath of his murder and the second on Sharma and other Hindutva proponents – The Hour of Lynching is an account of a nation in a flabbergasting flux: a desperate desire to assert dominance, lust for violence, unchecked power and yet, a strange persecution complex. “They slaughter cows, kidnap our girls, and steal our vehicles,” Sharma tells a few villagers earlier in the documentary. “We can’t even park our unlocked bikes in front of our houses.” To this an older man in the group says, “This is a fact – we’re living in fear.”
The other part of the documentary shows what living in fear actually looks like. A few women surround Asmeena, Rakbar’s wife, consoling her. “Such is the reign of Modi,” one of them says. “The life of Muslims is worth nothing. We’re being killed like cats and dogs.” Two stories of fear separated from each other by two religions and a few kilometres. Asmeena, continuing to sob, covers her head with a saree; Sharma walks freely, issues threats, gives speeches.
Even this stark juxtaposition – of the perpetrators and the victims – could have made for a compelling documentary, as it probes their mindsets and motivations, something that’s difficult to incorporate in a news article. But Abraham and Madheshiya go further, spinning stories in a story.
Rakbar’s lynching is not just the death of one man – and of human values – but also the slow poisoning of an entire family. His relatives – controlling and patriarchal – make Asmeena mourn for months in purdah. They also, as claimed by Rakbar’s daughter Sahila, take away the compensation given to her mother. Asmeena can’t work anymore, so Sahila drops out of school, tending the family cows.
The documentary also captures the pervasive spread of hate – now no longer confined to a political party or an ideology. At one point, Rakbar’s father, Suleiman, is smoking hookah with his friends. “If we dare express our anger, we’ll be declared terrorists and shot,” says a man with a conical beard, his face (perhaps deliberately) out of focus. “If the government stops supporting them, and gives us free reign for a day, we would seek revenge. We would go after the RSS [Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh] folks. We’d hunt them down, I promise!”
Amid all this, the only voice we don’t – and can’t – hear is of Rakbar’s. We see him once, at the start of the documentary, when Suleiman hands his passport-sized pictures to (presumably) another relative. The two photos, both of them slightly soiled, are identical – Rakbar, wearing a white shirt, looking into the camera; in effect, looking at us. A man who got swallowed by the night – a night that refuses to end.
