Anger as the constant

At the International Documentary and Short Film Festival held in Kerala every year, the audience is hammered down for a week by raw courage.

A still from Slaves of the Empire directed by Rajesh James. | Photo Credit: By special arrangement 

At a private screening in Soho House, Mumbai, of Karan Tejpal’s Stolen, a slick and tightly wound independent film that premiered at Venice International Film Festival 2023, something snagged within me. The film traces two brothers (played by Abhishek Banerjee and Shubham), belonging to the cream of Delhi, who somehow get entangled in the kidnapping of the infant daughter of a Bengali migrant woman, Jhumpa (played by Mia Maelzer). Within this is located the woman’s fiery resolve to find her daughter. With complete disregard for police procedure or for the state, the film runs solely on the horsepower of her courage, intuition, and desperation. The men simply get swept up in her eddied pursuit.

You might think, based on this description and on where storytellers, especially independent storytellers, usually want to pour their gaze, that the protagonist is the woman and that the film is excited by her journey. By protagonist I mean the one who gets the privilege of a character arc, the dignity of internal progression, the satisfaction of narrative catharsis.

Strangely, Stolen chooses to shift the spotlight towards one of the brothers: a rich apathetic Delhi man who, in the course of the film, softens and takes it upon himself to find the daughter, his moral spine realigned. Jhumpa is turned into an electric catalyst, the one who sets the story rolling but whose story this is not. If the “white saviour” complex is a trope we have discarded, or at least given minimal attention to, why have we drunk the Kool-Aid of the upper-class, dominant-caste saviour? Given that the film begins with the epigraph about two “disparate Indias” that never meet, to tell the story of one under the guise of the other is to further cleave them apart.

Who has colonised your imagination?

It is true, we want to tell stories of the oppressed—their narratives quake with abundance. But I do not think enough care is being offered to the question, how do we centre the marginalised in a story that comes from the marginalised?

This is not to say that filmmakers must be arm-twisted into scripting the subaltern. Jhumpa’s story was right there. And yet, you turn away from it. So, one asks out of both curiosity and confusion, who has colonised your imagination and why are you unable to make space for certain kinds of stories? The ideas we have affinities for are like bodies we have affinities for—it is, at the end of the day, a kind of desire. As Amia Srinivasan says in her 2021 book, The Right to Sex: Feminism in the Twenty-First Century, we do not have the right to desire everyone, but we have the duty to interrogate where these desires are formed and how they express themselves. 

When I put this question to the producer and the director of the film, they complicated the very idea of the “protagonist” by saying that Jhumpa is on screen for a considerable amount of time, she kicks ass, she pushes the story forward, she holds weapons. All true. But none of that makes her the central narrative force of the film. It is the man’s arc towards compassion that we are given access to. A woman sitting next to me responded to my query, muffling its edge by saying that Jhumpa reminded her of Durga. Can’t Durga be peripheral?

Living in contradiction

I suppose I was more sensitive than usual to these lesions, having saturated my senses at the 16th International Documentary and Short Film Festival, Kerala (IDSFFK), held in Thiruvananthapuram from July 26 to 31. Organised by the Kerala State Chalachitra Academy on behalf of the Department of Cultural Affairs, government of Kerala, this is perhaps the one film festival that wears its strident politics on its sleeve. For a week, you are hammered down not just by righteousness but also by raw courage.

Documentaries that premiere here—Nausheen Khan’s Land of My Dreams on Shaheen Bagh, and Prateek Shekhar’s Chardi Kala: An Ode to Resilience on the farmer’s protest, both winning last year; Anand Patwardhan’s The World is Family on the Nehruvian roots of his parents yoked to the nation, and Ranajit Ray’s Putulnama (Dolls Don’t Die) on puppetry artists, both winning this year—do not necessarily travel to other, more mainstream film festivals. This is because of the explicit political postures they take, sometimes at the cost of or sometimes ambivalent to, the artistry of the documentary form.

M.B. Rajesh, Minister for Local Self Governance, inaugurates the 16th International Documentary and Short Film Festival in Thiruvananthapuram on July 26, 2024. | Photo Credit: MAHINSHA S

Many films at the festival, especially those created by freshly minted college graduates, were held together solely by the scaffolding of anger. There is as much stridence as arrogance in these films—as though they know, and their knowledge is not received as much as absorbed. This stridence can be its own form of jadedness, its own narrow wrangling for truth.

There are also films like Nishtha Jain’s Farming the Revolution, which lets you seethe in the summers and shiver in the winters that the farmers endured, and Arbab Ahmad’s Insides and Outsides (Ahmad is a recent graduate of the National Institute of Design), which uses sound and visual design and archives to reproduce the horror of being Muslim in India today. They feel like exceptions; both do not forget the pleasures of being, even as they articulate the pathos of it. Walking out of Slaves of the Empire, a black-and-white documentary by Rajesh James on the laundry workers of Fort Kochi, I felt like I had been sideswiped. For a film postured severely, it was cunningly playful, full of barbs and balm, its characters describing love and lovelessness, fandom and irritation.

These films realise that a political life is not a flattened life, but a fuller one, allowing contradiction to dwell at its centre. These films realise that political life is not just an ideological life, but also a material one, and life is what emerges from the dialectics.

The IDSFFK is a festival that prides itself on its politics. At the opening ceremony, M.B Rajesh, the State Minister for Local Self Governments, Rural Development and Excise, noted: “The 16th edition of IDSFFK is more than just a celebration of cinema; it is a powerful statement of support for global justice and freedom.” He added that the festival stood in solidarity with Palestinian resilience. There was even a sidebar curation of four Palestinian films—not all good, but goodness is not the point of these films; merely being there is.

Like the Spanish films whose subtitles did not play, or like Wim Wenders’ Anselm, to be watched in 3D but with glasses with frames that had a mind of their own, the film festival is a space to posture but also to problematise. Sometimes I would walk out of films wondering if I had watched a film or had been held captive to a rant. Other times, pinned to my seat as Prisoner No. 626710 is Present, a documentary on Umar Khalid made by his friends and lovers, rolled to its end, I would hold my body in gratitude; these films are archives because the state wants to erase their presence. These films ask you to look closely at where the state wants to build the illusion of air, of nothingness. To watch them is to see all the evidence of a withering nation, not just vis-a-vis political prisoners, but also vis-a-vis caste, class, colourism, racism, and sexism.

Walking out of the Stolen screening, then, I felt an anger take shape, not just at the film for making me ask the question but also at the way the question was shrugged off. A part of me worries when this anger spreads and clots: what if it taints the film and the pleasure I had while watching it?

I remind myself that if the best political films of our time hold rage and pleasure alongside each other, one never overwriting the other, then the most fulfilling spectatorship, too, must offer that. To hold these feelings—effacing as they might be to each other—alongside and to let the film emerge from that dialectic; to savour an object in its movement, to not let it feel complete and inviolable, to keep stoking it, to keep it alive.

Prathyush Parasuraman is a writer and critic who writes across publications, both print and online.