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By Rashme Sehgal The digital revolution has ensured that more and more films are made on subjects dealing with exploitation, injustice and terror. But correspondingly, filmmakers from South Asia reported at a recent seminar, the intensity and frequency of state, mob and media censorship is also increasing
The spectre of censorship is spreading through South Asia, manipulating control of its democratic structures and traditions and creating increasingly authoritarian regimes. Expressing concern at this trend, documentary filmmakers, lawyers and journalists from across South Asia gathered at the Max Mueller Bhavan in New Delhi in February 2006 to participate in a seminar titled ‘Free Speech and Fearless Listening: The Encounter with Censorship in South Asia’. Sri Lanka’s Vimukhti Jayasundra gave up a promising career in advertising to make documentaries. His second film The Forsaken Land won a prestigious prize at the Cannes Festival in 2005. A triumphant Jayasundra returned home and was awaiting a similar response to his film there. To his surprise, he was met with a deafening silence. There were no reviews and no criticism either. As if this was not discouragement enough, the army entered the fray and decided “it was not a good film” and must be banned. Jayasundra next received the startling news that a group of army officers were planning to kill him and the members of his crew. Jayasundra fled the country and remained in exile for several months. Prasanna Vithanage, also from Sri Lanka, described how several kinds of censorship have made life very difficult for the independent documentary maker who he describes as “being part of a vanishing breed”. Corporate censorship ensured that only large production houses were given the finance to make films. Worse was the draconian ‘army censorship law’ whereby any film that was perceived to affect national security would not receive a censor certificate. Two other kinds of censorhip that Vithanage highlighted were what he referred to as mob and media censorship. The former was extremely dangerous because the intensification of the ethnic war had created a situation where filmmakers had become soft targets against whom it was easy to whip up a sentiment of hate. Filmmaker Tanvir Mokkamel from Bangladesh confirmed the presence of a harsh censorship regime in his country. Although he is director of the Bangladesh Film Institute, he described how he has had several skirmishes with the censor board which behaved in contradictory ways that could be harsh, trivial or downright inconsistent. Mokkamel recalls, “Many of my films were banned including my documentary Remembrance of ’71. The film focused on the killing of over 300 intellectuals in then East Pakistan. They were kidnapped, blindfolded and shot by the soldiers of the Pakistani army and by Islamic fundamentalists. It was one of the most horrifying periods of our life.”
Mokkamel added that some of his encounters with the censor board have bordered on the ludicrous. He described one such encounter when his feature film Nadir Nam Modhumat (A River Named Modhumati) was being screened before the censor board. It turned out that the film had several shots of boats negotiating the river. The boat however turned out to be an election symbol of the opposition party and that had the censor board worried. “Why are there so many boats in the film?” he was asked. Fortunately, the government changed and the problem was resolved. “The censors are neither very clever nor very consistent,” Mokkamel added. Two subjects which serve to raise the hackles of the censor board are religion and how Bangladesh is portrayed in contemporary cinema. But even the censor board can change its stance, as was the case with his film Lalsalu (A Tree without Roots) which focuses on the life of a mullah who puts up a false shrine in a remote village. Fortunately for MokkamelS, the film went on to win several international awards and that forced the censors to tone down their criticism. Hasan Zaidi, writer and filmmaker from Karachi, pointed out that the present quasi-military dictatorship in Pakistan was following the method of “killing through ambiguity”. The government was not clamping down on the media but was concentrating on tightening the screws on the television media. For one, it was much easier to put pressure on their owners, and for another, television reached much wider audiences. It was for this reason that Indian networks had been taken off the air since they were threatening the cultural sanctity of the nation. Back home the situation is no better. Anurag Kashyap, who has written scripts for such hits as Satya, Yuva and Nayak, describes the insurmountable problems that he faced while trying to release his two films Paanch and Black Friday. Paanch deals with the sub-culture of violence that has spread through Mumbai while Black Friday deals with the Mumbai riots of 1992. Kashyap described how Black Friday had received a censor clearance. But eight hours before its release, the consent was withdrawn. “I realised then that the police did not want it to be screened; neither did the politicians. .. Underlying this changed stance was the fact that if this film was released, other filmmakers would also start making similar films,” said Kashyap. But these attempts to create obstacles have not impacted the determination of filmmakers. Documentaries in this region have witnessed a huge increase in production. The digital camera has ensured that committed individuals can travel the world to screen films focusing on injustice, exploitation and terror. Other parallel issues were also explored during the course of this three-day seminar. At a session dealing with censorship-related laws participants pointed out the problems of invoking the right to freedom of expression laws because these invariably led to the invoking of other restrictions. Lawrence Liang, a Bangalore-based lawyer, spoke about the need to move from a prohibitive model which curtails freedom of speech to the productive model which removes curbs on creativity. Surprisingly, censorship is as prevalent in western nations as it is in our part of the world. The highly-acclaimed German filmmaker Andres Veiel spoke about the problems he faced while making a film on Alfred Herrhausen, the chairman of Deutsche Bank, who is reported to have been killed by the CIA (at the behest of US banks) because he wanted to waive third world debt. While there was no proof about this theory, Veiel admits to having been at the receiving end of intimidation and threats. The film called Black Box Germany received the European Film Award for best documentary of 2001. Veiel believes that it is possible for independent artists to stay away from television provided they keep their needs modest and find alternative ways to engage with ideas of production and distribution. Many theatres in Germany are devoting two days a month to screening documentaries digitally that have not been shown on television. The good news is that the public is coming to see them. InfoChange News & Features, March 2006
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