By Huned Contractor

Bangladeshi filmmaker Yasmine Kabir's A Certain Liberation simply follows Durubhashi, a Bangladeshi woman who lost her family in the 1971 war. Along the way, the film makes a powerful statement on the futility of war

The first time Yasmine Kabir saw Durubhashi Mondol was in a photograph splashed across a newspaper page. Her mouth wide open in ‘mad’ laughter, Durubhashi was wearing a cap with the words ‘Jai Bangla’ on it. Behind the laughing face was anger and grief. It was this that caught Kabir’s attention and led her to locate Durubhashi.

“It was a very strange meeting. She had so many questions to ask me: ‘Had I been sent by the prime minister?’ ‘Was I a government officer?’ ‘Did I belong to the media?’ I felt so disoriented, but then I realised that the madness was the result of a tragedy that had struck her life. Durubhashi was always laughing and mixing with people in the area. Everyone called her ‘mad’. Was she really so? This is what prompted me to make my film.”

Durubhashi is unconcerned about the status of anyone she meets and does not hesitate to give him/her a whack with the stick she constantly carries around with her. “She fears no one. She will catch you unawares and hit you with the stick. She will then breezily put her hand into your pocket to take out money. That’s how she survives,” says a neighbour. Durubhashi is, in fact, the maashi (aunt) in a little pocket of Bangladesh where she lives in a tin hut that leaks during the monsoons. She wanders through the narrow alleys in her neighbourhood, her ‘weapon’ held out in front of her. Insulting and aggressive most of the time, she can suddenly become very emotional when recalling those horrific moments when she was abducted by Pakistan collaborators and her husband and children were killed in cold blood. Within Durubhashi is a boiling rage that she expresses in a desire to see her tormentors killed in front of her. It is the unceasing dichotomy of Durubhashi, captured fluently on film, that makes Kabir’s work so amazing despite its technical glitches.

Kabir’s film does nothing more than follow Durubhashi wherever she goes, the camera bumping along as if on a cart track. But seen in the larger picture, A Certain Liberation is about the impact of war. Durubhashi’s life was turned upside down in the wake of the Bangladesh war of liberation that finally freed the country from Pakistan in 1971. “She is just an ordinary woman, but her story relates the anguish that war causes,” says Kabir.

This is a film from a woman’s perspective about the need to do away with bloodshed and hatred. As you watch the antics of Durubhashi, who adopts her neighbours’ children with no questions asked about religion, you wonder if she really has any reason to live after what has happened to her. And that’s precisely what she asks Kabir.

There is, of course, no answer. The memories will never fade, but they remain hidden behind the veil of a form of madness that is both real and unreal at the same time.

“People wonder why most documentaries from Bangladesh are about the war of liberation. But then, why not? Look at how many films have been made about the Holocaust. It’s one way of keeping in constant touch with our history. Otherwise everything will be forgotten,” says the filmmaker.

In this 37-minute film, Durubhashi is part of that history. Alive and dead. A gruesome reminder of the unfortunate victims of war.

(Huned Contractor is a Pune-based filmmaker and journalist)

InfoChange News & Features, May 2007