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By Aritra Bhattacharya Films and videos that chronicle the peaceful resistance of people to powerful industrial and political interests that seek to dispossess them are extremely important at a time when all such dissent is criminalised. But they are often lost in the long list of films that seek to do just the opposite
The villagers in Nolia Sahi—A Fishing Village look into the camera, and through the camera, into every one of us watching the film, with suspicion. Who are you, what do you want, they seem to be demanding of the person behind the camera, and of us. The villagers are sceptical of filmmakers; as the camera moves across the outskirts of this fishing village in Orissa, the filmmaker tells us how everyone wanted to know if he knew Subhash Das. Das had come to Nolia Sahi some time ago, stayed there for two months, and won the villagers’ hearts. He had promised he’d take their voice—their opposition to a port to be built by Posco, which will come up in place of their settlements—to the world. Some weeks later, the villagers saw Das’s film on a local channel. He had belittled the villagers, said they possessed a ‘crab mentality’ and did not want others to progress. In its runtime of 9 minutes and 45 seconds, Nolia Sahi—A Fishing Village captures not only the social reality of villagers facing eviction, but also the way film and video is being used by multinational corporations looking to mine huge reserves of natural mineral resources in Orissa. Das’s film, incidentally, was not the only one pushed by big business. Search for ‘Posco Orissa’ on YouTube, and you will come across numerous videos talking about how important Posco’s planned projects in Orissa are for the development of the state. Nolia Sahi and efforts similar to it that talk of people’s resistance to the project and of the huge ecological disaster it will spell for the region, are often lost in this list. Videos that voice people’s protest to mining giant Vedanta’s project in the Niyamgiri area, and the pollution brought on by the company’s plants, are also lost in the list of videos made on the subject. Resorting to videos to counter other videos, in fact, seems to be a conscious tactic adopted by Vedanta. Many of the pro-Vedanta videos on YouTube have the same content though they are titled and tagged differently and appear to have been uploaded by different users at different points in time. The similarity of content makes Surya Shankar Dash, a Bhubaneshwar-based activist and filmmaker, wonder whether industry is promoting the generation of video content. He has good reason to believe so. Dash is part of an informal group of filmmakers, grassroots activists and reporters that brings out Madhyantar, a people’s video magazine. On June 23, 2009, he received an e- mail. The sender appreciated the way Madhyantar was voicing tribal resistance to mining projects across Orissa, and wanted to share his YouTube videos on such resistance. Dash responded to the bait: he clicked on the link to see the sender’s videos, was asked for his YouTube username and password, and on clicking login, was led to a new page. However, after some time, all Madhyantar videos on tribal resistance went missing. Dash realised his YouTube account had been hacked and all uploads deleted. This was two days ahead of the Vedanta annual general meeting in London. Someone surely did not like those counterviews up there. “It made me realise that this was working,” says Dash. He is currently editing the third volume of the eight-month-old magazine, which was born out of a three-day filmmaking workshop conducted by noted filmmaker Amar Kanwar in March 2009. Kanwar’s working process involves training locals in filmmaking, especially in areas characterised by sustained resistance. “Training people connected to social and political movements in filmmaking not only democratises the medium, but also gives birth to different cinematic vocabularies,” he says. Nolia Sahi—A Fishing Village is a case in point: it is not mere documentation; rather, it produces a “different kind of discourse and a different chemistry of visual language”. This language, and these films and videos—speaking to power the peaceful resistance of a people, the burning of papers guaranteeing rehabilitation benefits, or the gathering of 5,000 people to protest an industrial project—become extremely important when all dissent is criminalised, when peaceful resistance crystallises into Maoist violence in state propaganda, and when the paramilitary is called in for a ‘greenhunt’. But why would we need an Operation Greenhunt, or whatever it is called, when a half-hour-long film ‘documents’ the paradise Dantewada is becoming thanks to the Salwa Judum? The film ‘shows’ the large support base for the Judum (in its meetings), the development that has taken place in areas where the Judum operates, and in a rare moment that the editing fails to conceal, the contempt the police have for the tribals. The film, says Ajay TG, a Bhilai-based filmmaker, was commissioned by a small NGO loyal to the Chhattisgarh government, and was supposed to have been telecast on local television. But somehow, it was not. And now, it can’t be, since 100,000 paramilitary forces are camping in Bastar, readying to take on the ‘anarchy’ in the jungles, says Ajay. Despite having been in jail for three months till this August for having made a series of films that exposed the state, Ajay is not afraid to speak his mind. A Malayali in Madhya Pradesh, he started making films out of a basic desire to communicate and now concentrates on voicing the questions of people around him through films like Golapalli: A Fact Finding by PUCL. One shortcoming of Ajay’s films, as also various other films and videos being made by grassroots activists and filmmakers, is the poor quality. This is because most such films are self-funded; outside funding inevitably corrupts the purpose, and also comes with a condition that the film must be made in English, says Ajay. And such films must be in local languages, says Dash from Orissa. After all, the people resisting the state or industries—the main ‘targets’ of such films—know nothing but the local language. But do such films serve the purpose for which they are intended? Films against the oppressive state structure revitalise resistance in a way, says Ashish Rajadhyaksha, culture studies scholar and author of From Bollywood to Emergency: Indian Cinema in the Time of Celluloid. Rajadhyaksha argues that as the form of state oppression has changed over the years, so has the focus of documentaries. As the idea of oppression has become more personalised and subjective, these films have embraced the individuated form, with the filmmaker often ‘appearing’ in the film (in terms of films having an autobiographical strand). Meanwhile, other kinds of films and videos are also being made in the resistance zones as Amar Kanwar’s Azadi shows. The ‘photographer’, armed with a video camera, is a recurring character in Azadi. He has been sent by the authorities to shoot protest meetings and dharnas, so that with the help of the video, the leaders can be identified and finished and the resistance quelled. But what happens when a leader is killed and thousands rise up to take on the oppressors? Whom does the ‘photographer’ shoot then? What kind of films does he make? (Aritra Bhattacharya is a freelance journalist based in Mumbai. He had put together a series of films and videos on development, resistance and violence for Jnanapravaha Mumbai, that was screened in November 2009) Infochange News & Features, December 2009
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