Tales from afar

Saibal Chatterjee

Filmmakers Ritu Sarin and Tenzing Sonam, who founded the DIFF in 2012, have just completed their second fictional feature, The Sweet Requiem. The festival will witness the film’s Asian premiere. The duo brings to DIFF a pure love of cinema and a keen connect with the challenges facing humanity. Both attributes are fully reflected in their selection of films.

The independent films they handpick reveal the potential of the medium as well as the state of a world beset by conflict and exploitation. The hill town’s laidback ambience offers a sharp contrast to the radical, fiercely uncompromising cinema on show. These films ask questions, seek answers and address the plight of the marginalised.

The festival opens with the screening of Mumbai-based Ukrainian filmmaker Dar Gai’s second feature, Namdev Bhau: In Search of Silence. The film tells the story of a 65-year-old Mumbai chauffeur who flees the cacophony of the big city in search of tranquility in Ladakh’s Silent Valley only to discover that escape from high decibel levels is well-nigh impossible.

While many directors will be in attendance during the screening of their films, the festival will also host, among others, Manoj Bajpayee, star of Devashish Makhija’s Bhonsle, and photographer Raghu Rai, the subject of An Unframed Portrait, a 55-minute documentary on his work made by his daughter Avani Rai.

In Bhonsle, Makhija probes the violent anti-migrants stance of political outfits in Mumbai, reflected in the story of a terminally ill and retired policeman who forges an emotional bond with his new Bihari neighbours and finds one last battle worth fighting.

As far as loners go, there could be none who has been forced more into a shell than the protagonist of New York-based experimental filmmaker Hiroshi Sunairi’s documentary, 48 Years — Silent Dictator. The film probes the mind of the world’s longest-serving death row inmate, Iwao Hakamada, a year after his release in 2014, when a court found that he had been convicted on a fabricated mass murder charge.

Apart from the Raghu Rai film, three other non-fiction features in the DIFF lineup — US Indie filmmaker Sara Driver’s Boom for Real, Swiss director Luc Schaedler’s A Long Way Home and Stephen Nomura Schible’s Ryuichi Sakamoto: Coda — focus on the world of artists negotiating personal, creative and political issues.

Boom for Real, Driver’s first feature in 24 years, explores the late teenage years of American artist Jean-Michel Basquiat and the late 1970s NYC art and cultural scene of which the director herself was a part. In Long Way Home, Schaedler focuses on five artists — two painters, a modern-dance choreographer, a subversive cartoonist and a police officer-turned-poet — whose boundary-pushing work takes the audience on a journey from the flashpoints of recent Chinese history to the highs of the nation’s contemporary counterculture scene.

Coda presents an intimate portrait of music composer and anti-nuclear campaigner Ryuichi Sakamoto, whose scores for Nagisa Oshima’s Merry Christmas, Mr Lawrence, Bernardo Bertolucci’s The Last Emperor and Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu’s The Revenant are part of cinema folklore.

Among the India narrative features that will screen in the DIFF this year is a trio of titles that, in keeping with the spirit of the festival, tells unusual stories rooted in specific, even remote, cultures. Ridham Janve’s Gaddi-language film The Gold-Laden Sheep and the Sacred Mountain features a cast of locals in a mystical drama set in a remote location in the upper Himalayas. It tells the story of an ageing shepherd who sets out in search of the pilot and the wreckage of a crashed fighter jet when news of the accident spreads.

Theatre doyenne Anamika Haksar’s Ghode Ko Jalebi Khilane Le Ja Riya Hoon, a lighthearted ode to Old Delhi, is woven around interviews done with 75 migrant workers. The film employs a mix of languages, including Urdu, Hindi, English, Bhojpuri and Malayalam, as it takes the audience into the heart of Shahjahanabad’s migrant communities.

Debutant Dominic Sangma’s Garo-language film Ma’Ama, a deeply personal essay, is set in a village on the Meghalaya-Assam border, where an 85-year-old widower spends every day of his life in the hope of reuniting with his wife who died 30 years ago.

Films from 15 other nations are part of the DIFF 2018 programme. While Bhutan’s Red Phallus, about a widower who makes wooden phalluses and his teenage daughter, is set in Phobjika Valley, the Georgian film, Namme, directed by Zaza Khalvashi, takes the audience to a remote village, where a girl takes upon herself her water healer-father’s work when her three brothers drift away from the family.