By C K Meena

A recent film festival in Bangalore featured 14 films dealing with a range of disputes and differences among family members, between workers and management, across races, communities and countries. The films revealed the similarities in the dynamics of conflicts ranging from a local water dispute to a war between nations

Conflict is integral to all life on earth, human lives included. This means that as long as human beings are alive on the planet, those in the business of conflict resolution can be assured of employment!

On a more serious note, though, Conflict Resolution (CR), a simpler term for alternative dispute resolution, is an area of expertise that gained popularity in the ’80s in the northern hemisphere, and has only recently touched Indian soil. There are over 20,000 CR practitioners in the US alone, and its Association for Conflict Resolution (ACR) has over 6,500 member organisations worldwide.

One such member is Meta-Culture Dialogics, a Bangalore-based CR centre that recently organised a weeklong film festival on the theme of conflict, to commemorate Conflict Resolution Day. This day, incidentally, falls on the second Thursday of October, according to a resolution adopted by ACR in 2005. Meta-Culture decided to go one better and observed Conflict Resolution Week, from October 15 to 21, with a package of international feature films and documentaries sourced from the Bangalore Film Society, Breakthrough, Max Mueller Bhavan, and Alliance Francaise de Bangalore. The discussions that followed these screenings at Ashirwad were meant to increase public awareness on the dynamics of conflict.

The films put together by Meta-Culture staffer Rafael Tyszblat and titled ‘Beyond Good and Bad’ were a means of widening the discourse on conflict. Through the moderated conversations (rather than discussions or debates) that succeeded each screening, the audience came to grips with the root causes of conflict, thought of ways to resolve it, and related the on-screen experiences to their own lives and the Indian socio-political context.

The 14 films -- from India, France, Germany, Israel, Chile, Bosnia, Japan, Canada and the US -- dealt with a range of disputes, differences and hostilities between children, couples, family members, workers and management, races, communities and countries. They hinted at what provokes, sustains and resolves conflicts. They also revealed how the dynamics of conflict are similar, whether we’re talking of a local water dispute, a civil war, or a war between nations.

Films on conflict

Leftist filmmaker Yoram Honig’s deeply personal film First Lesson in Peace demonstrated the complexities of the conflict in West Asia through the differing political leanings of his own family (his father is a Zionist and his brother overtly rightwing). His six-year-old daughter Michal goes to Neve Shalom or Wahaht-al-Salaam, the Oasis of Peace, an experimental school where Arab and Jewish children mingle, play, make friends, learn Arabic and Hebrew, and have teachers from both faiths. But the larger conflict, that between Israel and Palestine, impinges on them. The schooling experiment is constantly under threat, influenced as it is by events outside the classroom. During the discussion, some members of the audience felt the school was ineffective since there was no guarantee that when they grew up, these very children wouldn’t hate and kill one another. Others saw it as a sign of hope. All agreed that problems begin when those whose loved ones meet death at the hands of another community start identifying all members of that community with the killer, the enemy.

The love triangle in Mahesh Bhatt’s Arth sparked comments on the Indian way of resolving inter-personal conflict. The film showed that compromise was not the only way of resolving conflict in a marital relationship. In Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s Angst Essen Seele Auf (Fear Eats the Soul), set against the backdrop of the assassination of Israeli athletes at the Munich Olympics, the larger conflict threatens to spill over into an inter-cultural marriage. On all counts it is an unlikely union: she is a white Christian grandmother, he a much younger Berber Muslim migrant worker. Interestingly, their love is steadfast in the face of bitter social prejudice, but when society accepts their marriage that’s when their own racial prejudices surface and their love is once again tested. It was easy for the audience to draw parallels with the fate of inter-religious marriages and love affairs in India, particularly in these troubled times. They spoke of how the environment people live in impacts on and affects their relationships. In contrast to these films, Cedric Klapisch’s Un Air de Famille (Family Resemblances) is a semi-humorous though insightful portrayal of relationships within the extended family, the interplay of love and hostility between mother and son, brother and sister, older and younger brother, husband and wife.

Akira Kurosawa’s Rashomon brought out conflicting perceptions of reality and shed light on the complex nature of truth. At the end we still do not know who murdered the samurai in the forest, and how. The movie was an occasion to discuss the concept of mediation. The mediator does not judge or even search for truth but gets people in conflict to accept differing perceptions even if they don’t agree with them.

The fact that conflicts over water are not just a Third World problem was made clear through Anwar Jamal’s The Little Republic and Robert Redford’s The Milagro Beanfield War. Jamal’s film, which reflected caste conflict and power relations, drew the audience to an interesting question: Are some rights non-negotiable? Are there situations that will brook no compromise? On the other hand, if the sarpanch of the village were able to save face while allowing dalits their rights to water, could conflict have been avoided?

Most conflicts happen in the workplace, and labour conflict is the subject of Laurent Cantet’s Human Resources and Avi Lewis’ The Take. The first is an internal conflict confined to a single company in France, while the other is wider, involving a whole country -- Argentina. The French feature film got the audience to explore the different kinds of conflict in the movie: between generations (father and son), between the union and the management, and even between socialism and capitalism. The documentary on workers in Buenos Aires who take over a closed auto plant and turn it into a cooperative is linked to the economic policies of the Carlos Menem government closely monitored by the International Monetary Fund. While the discussion got heated when participants debated the right of workers to produce on their own, the facilitator emphasised the importance of creativity in conflict resolution. By choosing to take ownership of the closed factory, the workers who had lost their jobs managed to think of a creative solution instead of one that resulted in protests and confrontation with the police.

Simone Bitton’s documentary Mur (Wall) is a meditation on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict in which the filmmaker blurs the lines of hatred by asserting her double identity as Jew and Arab. The film follows the separation fence that is destroying a historically significant landscape while imprisoning one people and enclosing the other. The audience explored the meaning of the action of building a wall, recalling the examples of the Berlin Wall, the Great Wall of China, the case of Cyprus, and even the fence between India and Bangladesh. Most participants saw the wall as the ultimate sign of conflict escalation. They also concluded that the wall actually prevented peace.

Helene Klodawsky’s No More Tears, Sister explores the price of truth in times of war. Set during the violent ethnic conflict in Sri Lanka over the last couple of decades, the documentary recreates the life of renowned human rights activist Dr Rajani Thiranagama. Mother, anatomy professor, author and symbol of hope, Rajani was assassinated at the age of 35. The discussion focused on the reasons for violence in large-scale conflicts. The audience looked at the reasons why people become violent: to defend themselves, because they were not heard, because they wanted control. It seemed like violence was a language for people who ran out of means to achieve what they sought.

The festival ended with two films that show how war can prove to be completely pointless, and how conflicts between two people can have the same patterns as conflicts between two countries. The Chilean film To Disobey, directed by Patricio Henriquez, narrates the story of soldiers who dare to defy military authority and orders that are unconscionable. They would rather be jailed for disobeying orders than acquiesce in murder, rape and other crimes. The audience explored the line that separates legitimate self-defence from pre-emptive war, both of which claim to be a way to ensure security. A parallel was drawn between the stories of those soldiers who chose to obey their conscience and the story of Dr Rajani who chose to stick to her primary values of justice.

The Bosnian film Ničija Zemlja (No Man’s Land) directed by Danis Tanovic appeared to be the most appropriate movie to end the festival because it crystallised the absurdity of war: two people who don’t know who started the war, but who are still engaged in it and are ready to lose their lives for it. Set in the midst of the 1993 Bosnian war, it is a black comedy and a parable rolled into one. Two wounded soldiers, a Bosnian and a Serb, are caught in no man’s land between their borders. A third party steps in that does not have a clear mandate and is both powerless and actually unwilling to really make a difference. The audience explored the role of the United Nations in this film, to understand why it could not do much to foster peace: because it was not really interested in solving the issue; because its neutrality was hampered by international power differences; because it was not really accepted by the parties concerned. Some members of the audience asked what the difference was between the roles played by the UN and Meta-Culture. This became an occasion to explain what conflict resolution was all about.

What is CR?

When people -- individuals, communities or nations -- are in conflict, they usually resolve it in one of two ways: they come to blows, or they run to court. Physical attack results in winners and losers, while the courts decide who’s right and who’s wrong. CR does not function on the win/lose or good/bad model. It is founded on the belief that violence and litigation are not the most effective methods to settle disputes.

Conflicts can be resolved through negotiation (when the parties involved try to arrive at a settlement) or through arbitration (when a neutral third party listens to all sides and proposes a possible solution). The most common form of CR, however, is mediation. Mediators are not neutral, ie, neither on one side nor the other, but ‘multi-partial’ -- wishing to support both sides. They intervene only when all parties explicitly ask them to. They do not offer solutions or take decisions. They merely help all parties arrive at a mutually satisfying decision by opening up channels of communication.

Mediation takes up less time and money than litigation. Since the process is kept confidential, privacy is assured. A court-imposed judgment generally leaves some, if not all sides dissatisfied or resentful. But those who have arrived at a mediated settlement tend to comply with it faithfully as they themselves have sat together and worked it out.

Conflict resolution and mediation was virgin territory in India when trained CR professional Ashok Panikkar founded Meta-Culture Dialogics on May 2, 2005. Operating with a modest staff of eight, it has been something of a pioneer in this field. For the first time in the country, it has been addressing disputes between couples, between parents and children, and within the wider community.

Mediators are neither counsellors nor psychiatrists, explained Tyszblat. If a couple with a troubled marriage approaches Meta-Culture, the mediator helps de-escalate the tension so that the couple stops the blame game and expresses their emotions. Even if divorce is inevitable, the mediator helps them find a smooth and non-violent way of parting.
 
Meta-Culture has also started a unique dialogue process where members of different religious communities engage honestly with each other to develop mutual empathy. Unlike the usual inter-faith seminars where spiritual leaders quote religious texts and conclude that all religions preach the same message, here religion isn’t in the forefront. “We help them overcome their prejudices and communicate with one another in ways they have never done before,” said Tyszblat.

Meta-Culture holds monthly dialogues to help activists discuss issues of mutual concern and perhaps collaborate. NGOs that work on common issues might disagree on the approach. The dialogue helps them have an effective and structured conversation without getting into a debate over whose approach is right.

The organisation holds training programmes in mediation and has already started training students to become mediators so that they can resolve conflicts in their own institutions.

(Meta-Culture Dialogics can be contacted on 080-41524785 or This e-mail address is being protected from spam bots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it )

(C K Meena is a Bangalore-based author, freelance writer and journalism teacher)

InfoChange News & Features, November 2007