Ritu Sarin

Narratives of Conflict and Displacement at the Dharamshala International Film Festival

In Dharamshala, home to many Tibetans refugees, it is films preoccupied with an immigrant’s bid to live freely and be heard that draw the keenest throng of local filmgoers.

The Dharamshala International Film Festival, 2016. Credit: Facebook

Exile, if it could be plotted and defined through cartography, never looked more picturesque. The Dhauladhar range is a meditative blue; a blanket of coniferous green hurts the eyes. The drive from The Buagsu Hotel to the Tibetan Children’s Village (TCV), venue for the Dharamshala International Film Festival (DIFF) this year, is punctuated with ruddy-faced people-in-exile, smiling benignly at the pack of filmmakers and journalists inside the four-by-four vehicle making its way to the film screenings.

The quietude of the place and the obvious happiness of its chapped-lipped people are a far cry from the displaced subalterns one expects to be in exile. And yet, it is this state of fleeing, or being forced to flee, one’s own country, only to exist as an invisible outsider in a strange land, that consumes filmmakers like Sean McAllister. His documentary, A Syrian Love Story, is at once a cold political narrative and a fragile love story. Amidst the civil war in Syria, Amer Daoud and Raghda Hassan conduct a romance through a hole between their prison cells. They are released, they marry and when McAllister unearths their tale, Raghda is in prison for writing a novel that lashes out against Bashar al-Assad’s regime.

McAllister’s auteurship is intensely personal; his lens, an unabashed voyeuristic eye that captures the tumult in Syria and the havoc it unleashes upon the lives of Amer and Raghda. The couple escapes from Syria to Lebanon and ultimately finds political asylum in France. Their marriage crumbles, unable to withstand the wear and tear wrought by what Raghda describes as: “I have a special stress.”

A still from <em>A Syrian Love Story</em>.

A still from A Syrian Love Story.

“I try to find stories and characters that let you get involved; sometimes the process of filming can benefit them,” says McAllister, who was also imprisoned in Syria while making the documentary over a period of five years. Standing against a backdrop of prayer flags stretched horizontally across the Kangra Valley, he mentions how screening the film in Dharamshala, a town peopled by Tibetan refugees, amplifies its underlying mood – an endless yearning for home. “For the Armenians, Turkey was home; the Palestinians think of Israel as home; I’m sure the Syrians too, long for home.” Deep nostalgia, in an otherwise unsentimental film, is captured in cryptic poignancy by the couple’s four-year-old son. When asked, “What do you remember about Syria?” he replies, “Our sweet days.”

A still from A Syrian Love Story.

A Syrian Love Story has appeared in several international film festivals, including BAFTA 2016 and the International Documentary Film Festival Amsterdam 2015. And if McAllister’s camera is the intrusive ‘other’, witness to five years in the life of a couple torn asunder by the churn of political events, other stories too gush out with a complete disregard for objectivity. For instance, Iranian director Rokhsareh Ghaem Maghami’s documentary Sonita is a fiercely passionate account of the life of Afghan rapper and activist Sonita Alizadeh. One sees her as a 14-year-old cleaner at a refugee centre in Iran, who escapes the drudgery of her life by churning out rhymes. She dreams of becoming a famous rapper; she tells the camera in Farsi: “I wrote mostly pop songs before. But I felt I couldn’t express myself with pop.” In school, she goes by the name Sonita Jackson. “It’s because of my dream parents,” she informs the class. “Michale Jackson and Rihanna!”

A still from Sonita.

Sonita’s potent message lies in its young protagonist’s lyrics. “Don’t sell me hope, you’re hopeless too,” she raps at the refugee centre, “My future is bright, don’t worry about me!” Dreaming of being signed by a major record label and of moving to the US, she belts out: “Tonight I’ll break the spell of my hopelessness; I’m tired of going hungry, all the meals I’ve missed…”

The director appears in the film as Sonita’s saviour – she offers Sonita’s mother, who has come to Iran to take the girl back to Afghanistan, $2,000 as a fee to allow her to stay. “I’m for sale anyway,” says Sonita, who appears in a frame with a barcode painted on her forehead. Her inevitable fate – to be sold in marriage by her mother to an elderly Afghan – is averted by Maghami, who pays to prolong her stay in Iran and facilitates her migration to the US. “I spent a lot of time with her; we became close. That closeness is what you see in the film – I think it’s more important than objectivity,” says Maghami, whose film won the Grand Jury Prize for World Cinema at the Sundance Film Festival 2016. Surrounded by the press as she steps out of the Hermann Gmeiner Auditorium at the TCV, where Sonita has received a standing ovation, Maghami smiles with a disarming humility and says, “I don’t make films because I want to change the world. I make films because there are voices like Sonita who need to be heard.”

A still from Sonita.

The first world appears in both A Syrian Love Story and Sonita as a glimmering refuge, promising safety, employment and the validation of existing on official documents. But the West isn’t home and the privilege of being alive cannot take away an aching rootlessness, captured by Sonita, when she observes, “With a US passport you can go anywhere, but you cannot come to Iran.” One’s motherland, then, is the fount that nourishes the artistic soul. Maghami insists that while her protagonist has no choice but to move to the West, for her, Iran is, and will always remain, home: “As an artiste, if you immigrate, you lose access to the stories that inspire you.”

Ritu Sarin and Tenzing Sonam, directors of the DIFF, observe that sometimes, the process of curating films at a festival is a subliminal one. “When Ritu and I initiated this festival in 2012, the aim was to promote good independent cinema. We selected films that stood out. But, there’s no getting away from the fact that I’m Tibetan, and Ritu and I have been deeply involved with the Tibetan struggle for independence. So, inevitably, some of the films we end up picking are about conflict and displaced people,” says Sonam. The directors are also keen to encourage locals to watch a few films at the festival. “We want the local Tibetans and more Indians to visit the festival, but it’s a struggle, as there is no real cinema culture here in McLeodGanj and the films are subtitled and not easy to watch!” explains Sonam. Subconsciously, though, of the 43 or so films screened at this festival, it’s the ones preoccupied with an immigrant’s bid to live freely and to be heard, not as a feeble, dismembered voice but as an articulate clamour for social change, that draw the keenest throng of filmgoers here in Dharamshala.

Panama Papers and the Importance of Collaborative Journalism

An interview with the Indian Express’s Raj Kamal Jha and Ritu Sarin on the process – and importance – of collaborative investigative journalism.

An interview with the Indian Express‘s Raj Kamal Jha and Ritu Sarin on the process – and importance – of collaborative investigative journalism.

The Panama Papers has revealed information of money parked in offshore tax havens. Credit: Pixabay

The Panama Papers, a set of 11.5 million documents detailing more than 214,000 offshore companies listed by Panamanian law firm and corporate service provider Mossack Fonseca, has highlighted the extent of secret offshore dealings among the world’s rich and famous.

An anonymous source leaked these documents to German newspaper Süddeutsche Zeitung in early 2015, starting with a cryptic message. “Hello, this is John Doe. Interested in data?” Over the next few months, as the source sent the newspaper a series of encrypted emails, a five-member team at the respected Munich-based publication got down to the task of verifying and studying the contents of the emails.

Given the sheer magnitude of the information, Süddeutsche Zeitung soon turned to the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ), a collaborative international network of more than 190 journalists. Journalists across the world were then invited by the ICIJ to be a part of the investigation, with new information coming in ever so often from the source. Part of the information was revealed to the public on April 3 through ICIJ and its international partners. Meanwhile, Mossack Fonseca has claimed that the documents were released through an “external hack”.

In India, the investigation was handled by the Indian Express. Editor-in-chief Raj Kamal Jha and head of the investigative team Ritu Sarin spoke to The Wire about what it was like to be a part of an effort of this magnitude, the importance of collaborative investigative journalism and future possibilities for collaboration.

How did this project and The Indian Express’ involvement in it begin?

Raj Kamal Jha. Source: Twitter

Raj Kamal Jha: Ritu Sarin is a long-time member of ICIJ, and the reason The Indian Express and she are part of this group is because this paper has always been very investigative, that’s our core. Ritu has led our investigative team for 20 years now. We believe investigation is the only way to value-add a story when much of it is out instantly. We can do that because we are very privileged to have a newsroom that our publisher has ensured is a sacred space. We wouldn’t be able to do investigative journalism with a herd of sacred cows walking around. Because good investigative journalism will almost always be adversarial, it will always try to tell a story that the powerful and the privileged do not want to be told. That’s why we have a special investigative team, and Ritu and her team, P. Vaidyanathan Iyer and J. Mazoomdaar (the lead reporters on the Panama Papers), got eight months to work full-time on the project, no other work. No questions asked. Once in a while Unni Rajen Shanker (Editor of The Indian Express) and I did make them feel guilty.

Ritu Sarin: I’ve been a member of ICIJ for about ten years now. It used to be quite a different sort of organisation earlier, but now as social media has come in and the numbers of members has grown, their format has also changed. Earlier they would occasionally assign you a story in your country and pay you something for it, but as their own projects became more ambitious they decided to have your organisation also on board. Taking a week or two off to work on a story for ICIJ is one thing, but you can’t devote the amount of energy and time Panama Papers took while also doing your regular job. This is the third time a large international project has been done, though it is by far the most expansive of the lot. The first was the British Virgin Islands (BVI) account investigation of a company called Porternicus Trust Net in 2013 and the second was the HSBC story. I was a part of both of them, and these stories took about two or three months.

Ritu Sarin. Source: www.icij.com

Four months after the HSBC project ended they called again, saying we have a new project. The nature of ICIJ projects has moved over time. For the BVI story, ICIJ had a list of names. They sent that list out to their journalists, saying make a shortlist that you are interested in. I gave them a shortlist of 40-50 names, for instance, and they sent me the documents for those names. So I had the documents only for the names I had sent shortlisted. For HSBC, there was a search engine. So you could put in whatever name you were looking into and the documents would be available to you. This search engine is limited to a certain computer number, for security reasons.

This time too there was a search engine, into which they kept feeding the data as it was analysed. That was the problem, the information available kept changing for 6-7 months. It was a total of 2.6 terabytes.

In terms of the content of the stories coming out of this investigation, what they tell us is really the extent of money outflow from the country by prominent people. This is only the case of one incorporating law firm. So what’s important is the hint it gives us on the extent to which this happens.

What do you see as the importance of collaborative journalism?

Raj Kamal Jha: Most of the big stories in the world now – international terrorism, climate change, pandemics, global economic slowdown, migration and displacement – these are stories that know no borders. They come in waves across the world, and how different regions react to them define these stories. When the nature of a story is global, the nature of storytelling has to change. This then calls for collaboration. If I am tracking Zika in India, for example, I need to talk to Bangladesh where the first case was reported a few weeks ago, which is what our health reporter did. She spoke with doctors in Dhaka to understand the patterns they were looking at and their relevance to India.

I believe every good story is essentially collaborative. One straightforward reason for this is that more heads are better than one. For the Panama Papers, the volume of information was so formidable, 11.5 million files, that it couldn’t humanly be done by one person. Also, you always need people smarter than you. I don’t have the expertise or the time to devise a search engine that can go through these documents, sort them through layered directories, etc. but someone else does. Our strength is to report the hell out of the Indian names and connections, which we are doing. In short, you focus on your strength and hope that there are talented and generous people elsewhere who will cover for your limitations. And that’s what happened here.

This also shows the strength of an institution. Where you need a newsroom. Where lone wolves may not be sufficient. In the Panama Papers for example we had 25 reporters, 10 editors, six designers. Ritu went to Munich and did several workshops there to understand what we were dealing with. That’s what a good story needs, back and forth between all these people. It takes a village. I think we tend to forget that in our focus on the 9 pm star.

Somebody leaked the papers, somebody used technology to classify them, somebody said let’s get 106 news organisations together to make sense of it. We were one of them. Or job was to sift through this digital haystack for needles, look into the eye of many of these needles. Check and double check everything. In this case, the checking was the old-fashioned trusted way – sending reporters to addresses, going to a chawl in Bombay, a house in Bhopal, and checking physically the addresses, knocking on doors. Getting phones hung up on you. We love this at the Express. It makes our heart race.

How did the collaboration between journalists work on this project? Were there any negotiations on how much would be shared?

Ritu Sarin: ICIJ set up a forum, a community wall for people working on the project. To access the wall you needed a double password and then an authenticator. They made it very clear from the beginning that they want a lot of interaction, that’s how the stories will develop. For instance, if someone else found information they thought might be useful on India or had any leads, they would put it up there on a group I created. There were also thematic groups – on art dealers, intelligence agencies, etc. Lots of different groups. And everyone kept putting up whatever they would find. You could also interact with particular journalists or ICIJ staff if you needed anything.

By the end of it there were 250 journalists, and the collaboration was really in that forum. What was amazing was also how well ICIJ handled it – you send them an email at any time of the night and you’d get a reply within a few minutes. For them to be coordinating this massive effort was absolutely amazing. They also did a lot of data crunching, and gave us very useful tools. By the end of it they had also put up structured data, where you had entire lists of clients, beneficiaries, directors.

We [journalists] compared notes with each other throughout the process. I had a three-member team. Other countries had up to 25 people working on just this project. There was a mid-project conference in Munich that I attended, there were about 100 journalists there. Some of us even gave presentations on our early facts, and people were very excited. It was also a chance to speak to each other – someone from Ireland told me about an India connection and that turned out to be one of our best stories.

There were some cases where we knew other organisations would also publish the same story, for instance the Pakistan story. We were very interested in Nawaz Sharif and Benazir Bhutto, and given the names we knew that the story would break on Day 1. The embargo was suited for European papers, it was 11:30 pm India time. So we put it up online as soon as the embargo was up. But information on these stories had also been shared earlier.

What is the future of this investigation? Will questions like the legality of the Panama accounts, that governments are promising to look into, also be investigated through the collaboration?

Raj Kamal Jha: We are mining the information and have some important leads, we will continue to follow them. It’s an ongoing investigation, we will follow every lead that we get. I am sure others will too now that we have put a bunch of verified names out. And this is scratching the surface of the surface – as Bobby Ghosh put it so well, these are from one office in one law firm in one tax haven. We hope there will be more [leaks/investigations of this kind].

Ritu Sarin: We’ve opened up lots of fronts of investigation, and hopefully we will be able to continue following up all of them.

The rules of the game are very clear with ICIJ. I’m not supposed to share documents with anyone, all requests have to be routed to ICIJ. There has been a message from them that they are not going to share any documents with any government agency, and we should not either. Our business is to put out the information. They will be putting up an interactive list soon, of about 2 lakh companies. That’s what the government agencies have to look at, along with the reports we have written.

Are investigative collaborations of this sort possible at the national level, for instance if you are reporting on a drought?

Raj Kamal Jha: Absolutely. At the Express we have always had sources we will die for. They collaborate with us. We could look at very interesting ideas of collaboration, maybe between the regional language media and the English language media. There’s important work happening in some small papers, rural spaces, exciting work happening online. We have to be open to ideas of collaboration, because if the goal is to tell a story fairly and accurately, you need more than one person. If you’re lucky you get it in your office, if not, you look out. We have to realise that the news room no longer has a monopoly on story leads – there are people outside who are much smarter than us, who know a lot about a specific subject. Our job, as journalists, is to get in touch with them. Win their trust and respect so that they share their knowledge with us.

Featured image credit: Nick Ares. Flick/CC BY-SA 2.0

Artists in Dhaka Feel the Cold Embrace of Chinese Censorship

Threats by the Chinese ambassador is all it took for the organisers of the Dhaka Art Summit to cover up an exhibition critical of China’s record in Tibet.

Threats by the Chinese ambassador is all it took for the organisers of the Dhaka Art Summit to cover up an exhibition critical of China’s record in Tibet

Small minds, big cover-up. Credit: Special Arrangement

Dhaka, Bangladesh: As the weekend drew to an end amid the colourful chaos of the Dhaka Art Summit, the curtains fell prematurely on an exhibition portraying stories of Tibetans who have set themselves on fire to protest against Chinese rule.

The series, titled ‘The Last Words’ was by Indian filmmaker Ritu Sarin and her husband Tenzing Sonam, a Tibetan in exile. It documents five letters from Tibetans who, since 2009, have set themselves on fire to protest what they say is the oppression of their homeland.

Sarin and Tenzing Sonam are film directors based in Dharamsala, India. The duo has been making films on Tibetan subjects for over 20 years, exploring themes of exile, identity, culture and political motivation in the Tibetan region.

The art summit, hosted in the Bangladeshi capital, is organised every two years, and has successfully drawn thousands of people – both from home and abroad. This year, the summit hosted a series of exhibitions, performance art, film screenings, book launches, and panel talks and discussions. More than 300 artists participated in the festival, putting Bangladesh on the global map for contemporary art.

But the spirit changed last Saturday, when a visit from the Chinese ambassador to Bangladesh, Ma Mingqiang, pushed the event organisers to cover up the Tibetan exhibits – actually part of the Mining Warm Data exhibition curated by Diana Campbell Betancourt.

According to Sarin, the ambassador was incensed when he saw the exhibition, and the Chinese embassy later contacted the organisers to demand that the work be taken down to avoid “dire consequences” – a threat that included the potential shutting down of the summit.

So from Sunday onwards, a series of blank white frames stood at the exhibition in place of the artwork.

“When they told us what happened, we asked that the works be covered rather than removed,” says Ritu. “This way, there would be evidence of the censorship (by a foreign country!) that was taking place in Dhaka. It also seemed appropriate because the work itself deals with issues of human rights violations and the lack of free expression.”

A trace from the past

With the issue of Tibet being highly political in a global landscape largely dominated by China, this isn’t the first time artists have felt such restrictions.

This paranoia by the Chinese government is nothing new, says mountaineer and photographer Wasfia Nazreen, a Bangladeshi Tibetologist who has traveled and worked extensively with Tibetans, both inside and in-exile, for a decade.

“The Chinese government has been going to all extremes for the world to believe a certain narrative of Tibet that is mostly fictitious, to justify their claims and continued tight grip in the region,” says Nazreen, who has also been recognised by National Geographic for her work and activism.

“They have been, around the globe, attempting to boycott or silence any voice that disagrees with its official version of what is happening in Tibet.”

In fact, this wasn’t the first time such an attempt took place in Bangladesh. In 2009, the government, under pressure from Beijing, shut down an exhibition at Drik Gallery, titled ‘Into Exile: Tibet 1949 – 2009’.

While Sarin and Sonam were aware of the 2009 incident, they didn’t think their exhibition at the summit would be affected.

“We did know about that but we felt that our case was different,” says Sarin. “That exhibition focused exclusively on Tibet, albeit on a non-political theme, and therefore was much more visible. We did not expect this to happen in the summit as it was a small work amongst many hundreds of others.”

Sarin says the Samdani Art Foundation, which organises the art summit, was well aware of their exhibition and its content.

“We had earlier shown the full multimedia installation – ‘Burning Against the Dying of the Light’ – of which this work was a small part at Khoj Studios in New Delhi,” she said, adding that this wasn’t seen as a potential issue at all.

Other Tibetans’ work

When contacted, the Dhaka Art Summit organisers declined to comment on the matter. However, an official pointed out that there were other exhibitions on Tibet at the event that remained unaffected.

“There were the exhibitions by Tenzing Rigdol and Nortse which were not covered up,” said the official, referring to the two artists whose work also featured Tibetans struggles and stories.

Their work was part of the same exhibition where ‘The Last Words’ was set up. Why the Chinese ambassador made an issue only out of Sarin and Sonam’s exhibit is still unknown.

Since Saturday, many have taken to social media to express their anger at the decision by the summit organisers. However, many are even more upset that the Chinese ambassador went to such a length in a foreign country.

“Especially given our glorious history, we should’ve learnt that an “independent” country’s entities shouldn’t be fearfully bowing down to any foreign government’s threats which attempt to control our right to know or express,” says Nazreen. “Unfortunately, this has now created a dangerous precedent: today it is China, tomorrow it could be Saudi Arabia and so on. No true friendships can be so fear-driven. Yes we can economically or mutually be benefiting from other countries but that does not mean we sell our souls.”

The biennial art summit has over the years become a successful and popular platform for South Asian arts and culture. Many of the pieces at this year’s event summit had a latent political or social message – whether about the pollution of the Buriganga river, the enforced disappearances of free thinkers, or the male gaze on female bodies.

Art is not just about looking pretty. Starting from street art and graffiti to the art of the spoken word, installations and video, art has always communicated. The precise message – documentation of history, or a political stand or social commentary – varies from piece to piece, artist to artist. It is rather naïve to assume art can be depoliticised. But to remove art that is “political” is not just an attack on the freedom of expression. It defeats the entire purpose of art.

Syeda Samira Sadeque is a Dhaka-based writer and journalist