Abu Dhabi Nomads

Indian cinema struggles to reinvent itself

AP Photo

Suryatapa Bhattacharya

Indian cinema is in a moment of crisis, over its lack of definition, that is.

An image that was once dominated by Bollywood grew so large that segmentation was bound to happen. And other forms of Indian cinema — from regional to art — which have been minding their own business for just as long as Bollywood has been hogging the limelight, suddenly find themselves thrust into the spotlight.

From five-day film festivals in New York that showcased Parallel Cinema to Abu Dhabi’s Indian Film Festival which brought regional language films to Abu Dhabi shores, this season has seen no dearth of what else India or its diaspora can offer.

For example, New York watched Amal, a film about an auto-rickshaw driver in Delhi based on a short story co-written and directed by Richie Mehta, an Indo-Canadian, that was shot extensively in Delhi and partly funded by a grant from the Toronto International Film Festival. Mr Mehta, 30, employed Indian stalwarts like Naseeruddin Shah and Rupinder Nagra, who is ethnically Indian like Mr Mehta but from Toronto. Multicultural worlds were colliding on celluloid but it was still considered an entrant at the five-day festival.

Meanwhile, in Abu Dhabi, audiences were introduced to films made in the states of West Bengal and Kerala that were made entirely in India by directors such as Aniruddha Roy Chowdhury and Jayaraj.

This comes at a time when some of Bollywood’s biggest budget movies, made to cater to the holiday season, have not lived up to expectations, so the debate about what constitutes Indian cinema has grown louder. And perhaps justly so.

The niche market abroad has grown as first and second generation Indians find creative outlets and venues for their films. The filmmakers and its audience, who may have grown up on a staple of Bollywood films (including ones that have been catered to them exclusively and made in Bombay but shot in far flung locales with the opulence and grandeur associated with such films) are able to better identify themselves with the story lines of these newly crafted films, just as Indians from various states are able to laugh and passionately discuss what their regional films have to offer.

All this has happened right when Bollywood had started experimenting with fully animated features, sci-fi story lines and soundtracks that include rap.

Bollywood is not dead but it is formulaic and for savvy audiences who can now chose from a variety of films in cineplexes (whether in India or abroad), it has been faced with the challenge of how to keep its audiences hooked.

There are the obvious stars that people line up for. Names like Amitach Bachchan and Salman Khan who represent Bollywood. But even stars like Mr Bachchan are aware of the changing market and have started flirting with this cross-pollination. He recently acted in a movie called The Last Lear, which was directed by Rituparna Ghosh, a Bengali director, that was shot in India, but the dialogues were in English and the film premiered in Toronto.

This is the new face of Indian cinema, and Bollywood better smarten up.

Two films on the neglected and rejected

A scene from the Russian film The Mermaid. Courtesy of MEIFF.

Rym Ghazal

I watched two films on Saturday at the Middle East Film Festival: One a modern Russian take on an old beloved Danish fairy-tale, the other a blunt look at a glum reality of human relations of the deformed and abandoned.

Both the Russian Mermaid (Rusalka) and the Iranian Two-legged Horse (Asbe Du-Pa), in a way, are stories of people rejected by society, neglected and misunderstood. But each left a different impression and emotion in its viewers.

The Mermaid (2007), directed by Anna Melikyan, was a charming movie, full of colour which contrasted with the bleakness of certain parts of Moscow, and life in general.

“When you have nowhere else to go, you go to Moscow,” said Alisa, the main character of the movie. She touches you with her quiet, sad eyes and her innocent smile. We follow her through her childhood, teenage years and short adult life, and the various humorous but tragic moments she experiences.

From her dreams to be a ballerina, to her conflicts with her busty oversexed mother, to her private discussions with her grandmother, and her unrequited love of a man whom she rescued, to her magic powers that move inanimate objects —but fail to move anyone’s heart except the audience.

Throughout the movie, there are lovely dream sequences, where Alisa waits for her father, the sailor, to come back —even though she was brutally told by her mother that he never ever knew she existed.

There were great scenes that exposed the reality of Moscow, with its overly commercialized life, the hovering loneliness of most inhabitants, even the successful, and the ultimate demise of those who don’t keep up with the merciless and superficial city life.

In one scene, Alisa takes a goldfish that was stuck swimming in a wine glass-sized bowl and puts it in a tub to make the goldfish feel more comfortable. Likable even in her strangeness, she dyes her hair green to catch the eye of her love interest. Throughout all of this, the audience feels her unhappiness and I felt frustrated with the unhappy ending.

Even if you don’t believe in magic, you believe in Alisa and begrudgingly accept the shortcomings of those around her who never notice her.

As for Two-legged Horse, it is set in an Afghan village, and it starts off well and intensely, as it made me and almost everyone in the audience cry and shake our heads in disgust over what we were seeing.

A mentally handicapped boy is hired, for “one dollar a day”, to be the “horse” of a wealthy boy who lost his legs when his mother stepped on a land-mine. The mother died, leaving behind an angry, legless boy, and a daughter also with a walking problem.

Very soon, the father figure exits the film, leaving these two boys, the horse and his master, to their daily routine marred by abuse and poverty.

The master beats the two legged horse named Mirvais, who lives in one of the abandoned pipes in the streets, and the level of abuse reaches a point that is too much, which sort of killed the movie for many viewers. There is something such as overdoing or overdramatising a theme.

Over and over again, the allegory between the two legged horse and an actual horse was emphasized. We know! We get it. It got extreme when Mirvais ended up wearing a horse’s saddle, eating hay with the other animals, and even wearing a skinned horse’s head. And lets not forget how the other children sadistically nailed in horseshoes into his feet. Why did he take all of this abuse? It’s never explained.

The more subtle moments in the film are more heart-wrenching, especially when Mirvais turns around and tearfully reminds his master how he cleans him, carries him and even takes him to the bathroom. In return, Mirvais is beaten, unfed and abused to the very end.

Right before the movie started, the Iranian director Samira Makhmalbaf told the audience at the Abu Dhabi Mall theater that: “I want to show what people turn a blind eye to.”

It was a beautiful idea, and one people truly should not turn a blind eye to, but she overdid it and exaggerated, killing whatever sympathy or empathy she might have triggered in viewers.

If I had to give the two movies stars, I would give The Mermaid a four or five out of five, for its beautiful execution and fresh take on an old story, while Two-Legged Horse would get a one or two stars for being a unique idea but poorly executed. I have seen far more touching Iranian movies, and this one by far, is one of my least favorite ones. Watch the 1999 film Colour of Paradise by Majid Majidi and you will see what I mean.

Iranian director Samira Makhmalbaf poses for photographers on Sept. 19, 2008, after the screening of her film Two-legged Horse during the 56th San Sebastian International Film Festival. AFP

Inspiring women to help themselves

Carole Bouquet

Rasheed Abou-Alsamh

The spotlight on women event yesterday at the Middle East International Film Festival was an enjoyable one that highlighted the fact that change in society can be achieved by the smallest of actions.

The event started off with the screening of Kum Kum Bhavnani’s 2006 documentary about women entitled The Shape of Water. British of Indian origin, and now teaching at the University of California Santa Barbara, Bhavnani shows the daily struggle of women in Brazil’s Amazon forest; in Nigeria battling female circumcision; Israeli women fighting the occupation of the Palestinian territories, and Indian women opposing the building of a dam in the foothills of the Himalayas.

The screening was followed by a panel discussion which included Susan Sarandon, who narrates the documentary; Euzhan Palcy, a film director from Martinique; the Egyptian actress Yousra; Magida Abdi, a film director; Carole Bouquet, the French actress; Yamina Benguigui, a French filmmaker of Algerian origin who is now the deputy mayor of Paris for human rights, and Bhavnani herself.

Sarandon stressed how change should come from ordinary women talking to other women and pulling together to press for change. Bouquet talked about how she as a mother felt she had to speak out against injustice if the world were going to change for the better for future generations. Yousra recounted her acting in a TV series that depicted the lives of women who had been raped and the shame they have to face, and Palcy recounted her difficulties to get Hollywood interested in any movie proposal that had blacks in the lead roles. Palcy was the first black women to direct a Hollywood film when she made A Dry White Season in 1989 starring Susan Sarandon and Marlon Brando.

I watched the legendary actress Jane Fonda, who was sitting in the audience and wearing dark sunglasses, nod her head in agreement to what Sarandon was recounting how she and Fonda have always felt the need to speak out on political and societal issues.

All in all it was an informative session. I just wish that all of the photographers and videographers could have been kept out of the auditorium during the panel discussion. They kept taking pictures which was quite annoying when one was trying to listen to what the panelists were actually saying!

 

Yousra

The smell of death

Rym Ghazal

It was only yesterday that I learned that the poisonous gas used by Saddam Hussein in 1988 on Halabja in northern Kurdistan smelled like sweet apples.

“People of Halabja don’t like the smell of apples,” Ravin Asaf, the director of the movie The Smell of Apples told the audience as we prepared to watch the debut of the 2008 Kurdish movie on the big screen in the Marina Mall cinema.

The Smell of Apples is part of the ‘Festival of Festivals’ series of the Middle East International Film Festival and is an Iraq/German co-production filmed in different parts of Kurdistan as it wasn’t “safe” for the film crew to stay in any one place.

“It was dangerous and we had to get scenes from different parts of Kurdistan,” said Asaf, who sat biting his nails during the showing of his movie.

The movie was beautifully shot, with the recurring scene of an apple tree decked in colourful pieces of cloth tied to its branches to mourn the victims of the gas attack.

Clumsy close ups of the main characters, dream sequences and the occasional political jab at the American invasion help transport the audience into Halabja’s murky world of sick residents and their poverty stricken lives.

The main character, a boy whose parents died in the attack, acted his part so well, that I was really annoyed by him and wanted to slap him! You have to see the movie to understand why.

The boy was in love with his teacher, Zara, who was in love with a German Kurd, who in turn had a wife in Germany. It was drama with lovely music in the background to set the mood.

The movie brought to life different slices of Halabja’s society, showing the bums who harass those who are better off, and teenage boys who believe that drumming brings down the rain. There was also a recurring warning throughout the film for women not to have children because of the fear that they may have deformed babies as a result of exposure to the nerve gas.

There was a particularly disturbing scene in which the annoying boy is helping a “land mine” smuggler dig out mines from the soil. The mine smuggler trips while carrying a bag packed with land-mines. You can imagine what happened to him. Gruesome.

I actually held my breath at one point in the movie when some characters in a bus, who were crossing into and out of Baghdad, were praying for their safety afraid of suicide bombers. You felt this relentless yet quiet sense of danger always hovering over the lives of the people in the movie.

While its end was sort of predictable, I enjoyed the movie and recommend it to anyone who wants a glimpse into the lives of the Kurds and how they have dealt with the 20-year-old gas attack and its aftermath.

I also found out the origin of the expression used by Arabs: “You are dressed like a Kurd!”

The Kurds in The Smell of Apples wear very flamboyant colourful, beaded outfits —especially the women.

Seeing Spike Lee’s new film: A ‘miracle’ at Marina Mall

Rasheed Abou-Alsamh

It is not often that I am disappointed to find that a movie that I want to watch is sold out, but that is what happened yesterday at Marina Mall when I showed up to see Spike Lee’s new film Miracle at St Anna.

Being screened as part of the second edition of the Middle East International Film Festival here in Abu Dhabi, Miracle at St Anna was only being shown once because it has not been released commercially here yet. That probably explains why it was a full-house.

After a few frantic phone calls to the festival’s director a colleague and myself got two tickets to watch the film. Little did I know that I would soon face more hurdles. Upon entering the CineStar theater I found that all seats were already taken except for the last two rows of seats which were all marked “Reserved” and decidedly empty. I took a seat in the forbidden zone, since there was nowhere else to sit and within a minute of doing so a well-dressed man approached me.

“Excuse me sir,” he said. “I’m the head of security for the festival and you cannot sit here as these seats are reserved for the sheikhs.”

“But I’m from the press and there is no where else to sit,” I protested. “Look around!”

Just as I was about to move, a fully-covered Emirati woman appeared with an American family in tow and she said: “It’s okay, he can sit here.”

So you see, I was saved by the kindness of a stranger.

At 166 minutes long, I was afraid that Miracle at St Anna would be difficult to get through. Thankfully I was wrong.

Set mostly in 1944 Italy, the movie documents the struggle of an all-black US Army unit that becomes stuck behind German lines in the hills of Tuscany.

The film opens in 1983 with one of the members of the Buffalo unit, Corporal Hector Alargon (Laz Alonso), now an old man working in a New York City post office literally going postal and killing a foreign-looking man who wants to buy stamps.

The boyish Joseph Gordon-Leavitt (remember him from Third Rock from the Sun?) makes a cameo appearance as a cub reporter covering the murder, and it is through a flashback while Alargon is telling him his story that we find out what happened with him and his unit in Italy during World War II.

Omar Benson Miller is Private First Class Sam Train, a gentle giant who befriends an orphaned Italian boy called Angelo (the wonderful Matteo Sciabordi). They soon become fast friends even though neither can speak each other’s language.

We learn through further flashbacks (or rather, a flashback within the main flashback) that Angelo escaped from a Nazi massacre of innocent civilians at the St’Anna di Stazzema church in August 1944, and is rescued by a German soldier with a conscience who deserts the Nazi army.

The ending of the film is extremely contrived and is the only part of Miracle at St Anna that I found to be utterly unbelievable. But apart from that, I found Lee’s film to be a monumental epic story that never bored me and although some critics said that it could have benefited from some judicious editing, I felt fully engaged for all 166 of those minutes!

Click here to check the MEIFF’s schedule and to buy tickets online.

Italian and Iranian films at the Cultural Foundation

Rasheed Abou-Alsamh

A series of Italian and Iranian films are being shown this month at Abu Dhabi’s Cultural Foundation for free. I went last Sunday with a group of friends from work expecting to watch an Iranian film and was pleasantly surprised to instead see Ingrid Bergman in Roberto Rosselini’s 1954 film Voyage to Italy.

It turns out that it was Italian Sundays, while the Iranian films are being shown on Thursday, Friday and Saturday nights. The audience was small, and there were a sprinkling of Italians who seemed to enjoy the movie.

Although filmed in Italy, the entire movie is in English and is about a wealthy British woman, Katherine Joyce (Bergman), travelling with her stiff husband Alexander Joyce (George Sanders) to Italy in order for him to sell off a house he inherited from a relative who used to live near Naples.

The house is located near Mount Vesuvius and the island of Capri, and serves as an exotic backdrop to the Joyce’s troubled marriage. Katherine feels neglected by her cold and often cruel husband, while he feels bored by her sentimentality. The film has great dialogue, here are some examples:

Katherine Joyce: This is the first time that we've been really alone ever since we married.
Alexander Joyce: Yes, I suppose it is.

Katherine Joyce: I wanted you to take a rest. It didn't occur to me that it'd be so boring for you to be alone with me.
Alexander Joyce: What's that got to do with it? I'm just bored because I've got nothing to do.

Alexander Joyce: What noisy people! I've never seen noise and boredom go so well together.
Katherine Joyce: Oh I don't know, Uncle Homer lived here for 40 years without getting bored.
Alexander Joyce: Uncle Homer was not a normal person.

This film was a box office flop when it was released in 1954, but was rediscovered years later by French film critics who pronounced it one of Rossellini’s best films ever. I liked it very much, especially Bergman’s performance and her great sense of style and dignity. It’s definitely worth watching and is available on DVD.