By Max Martin

The Vibgyor film festival in Thrissur this May focused on invasions of land, air, water and human rights, and on the dissenters whose voices are seldom heard

A bulldozer tearing up bits of earth lit up by small mud lamps --this installation at the venue summed up all those veiled images and muffled screams that the Vibgyor film festival sought to focus on. While celebrating identities and diversity, the second edition of Vibgyor was all about invasion and dissent.

Anand Patwardhan’s five-minute opening film, Images You Didn’t See set the tone for the festival. It began with a bomber’s video trained on its target, a quiet Iraqi village farm being flattened by precision bombing. Then followed stills of savaged cities, bombed-out homes, blood trailing down a tank’s caterpillar tracks, mutilated children, unarmed people resisting tanks -– all played out in five minutes against the backdrop of Bob Dylan’s Blowin’ in the Wind. Patwardhan said at the inauguration that these images had been blacked out by the media, and that a colleague of his had downloaded them from the Net. As US war photographer Christopher Morris said at an earlier seminar, images of dissent do not fit in with the media story of Iraq’s “liberation”.

Pan the camera to India. There are several simultaneous invasions here hidden from the front pages and prime-time camera. There are invasions from the air, water and earth by the State, political parties and corporates that sell beverages and pesticides.

The dissenting voices of the invaded people emerged loud and clear in the films at this festival. They were datelined from the margins of the map – from the mined-out, polluted hill villages of Jharkhand, Chhattisgarh and Orissa (Iron is Hot) to the fertile plains of Nandigram (Nandigram: The Land is Mine) and Plachimada (1000 Days and a Dream). The stories varied widely -- bonded labourers living under mortal threat in Rajasthan (Azad Nagar), the dalit shoemakers of Tiruchirappally (Seruppu), tsunami survivors braving a second monsoon in flimsy shelters (If It Rains Again), people suffering from cancer and genetic disorders amid State-sponsored aerial spraying of Endosulfan in Kerala (Paradise for Dying).

From across the border came more tales of invasion. The opening day’s A Certain Liberation was all about the scarred mindscape of Bangladesh. It told the story of Gurudasi Dhurubhashi Mondal who chose madness over sanity in 1971 after witnessing the murder of her husband and children by the ‘collaborators’. Liberation forces found her after many days, locked up in a room. As filmmaker Yasmin Kabir says: “The issue of women victims of war has yet to be addressed.” Later, at an open forum, Kabir passionately pleaded for cross-border filmmaking that addressed common issues like water and women’s rights.

Thaw Reh, a Burmese refugee activist based in Thailand, showed Shoot on Sight, clandestinely filmed by his group, Burma Issues, in eastern Burma between July and November 2006, as villagers escaped from an advancing military offensive. “At the black zone back home, the army can shoot at sight anybody, anytime. It is considered enemy territory.”

Hundreds of thousands of Burmese belonging to ethnic minority groups have sought asylum in neighbouring countries; an estimated 50,000 live in India’s northeast with little access to humanitarian assistance, say NGOs. “We get to hear about only the urban Burmese refugees in New Delhi, that too only when Angelina Jolie visits them!”

Clearly, many of the films were shot in situations of clear and present danger. The Land is Mine, for instance, has shots of bombs being hurled at Nandigram. Local people recounted atrocities by the police and an armed Marxist cadre, reminding one of the Gujarat riots of 2002.

Sadly, we do not get to see or hear such stories except on blogs or at film festivals. The gatekeepers of the mainstream media do not allow too many dissenting images in. As festival curator Saratchandran said, the anti-Coca Cola protest in Plachimada had to bubble for several months in order to attract the attention of mainstream parties and the media. And, after all that, the judiciary displayed a ‘let them have Coke’ attitude!

Meghanath, an activist who runs a media initiative for tribal youth in Chhattisgarh, told the story of the land and forests in a music video shot with his colleague Biju Toppo -- Gadi Lohar Daga Mail. This tale of a legendary mountain train got more attention than his serious film Iron is Hot.

Similarly, K P Sasi’s America, an anti-war take on the pop Sri Lankan number Surangani was a hit. Patwardhan showed his We are Not Your Monkeys, a dalit critique on the Ramayana, based on street performance.

Despite the creativity and close engagement, the distance between the margins and the mainstream remains huge. As festival director K P Sasi notes:  “Such images and movements of dissent always remain in the margins -- till more and more people subscribe to it, slowly.”

(Max Martin is a Chennai-based journalist and researcher)