INDIA’S AVANT-GARDE
REPRESENTING THE COUNTRY AT THE BERLIN FILM FESTIVAL THIS YEAR ARE TWO EXPERIMENTAL FILMS
There are two avant-garde Indian films that are helping the country save face at the 71st Berlin Film Festival this year. They are Delhi photographerfilmmaker Sohrab Hura’s The Coast, a 17-minute short, and Naeem Mohaiemen’s feature Jole Dobe Na (Those Who Do Not Drown, a Japan-Sweden-India co-production, 64 minutes). Both films have been included in Forum Expanded, the festival’s experimental section that explores cinema’s relations with other arts. Keeping Covid in mind, the Berlinale has been divided in two parts. From March 1-5, the film selection is being shown to the online European Film Market, while the physical festival takes place in Berlin cinemas from June 9-20.
Hura is an accomplished photographer, filmmaker and a full member of Magum Photos. His experimental short, The Coast has no dialogue but observes the Dasara festival in Kulasekharapattinam, Tamil Nadu: hordes of people swim in the sea at night, intercut with religious rituals, some inducing violent frenzy—a man smashes a coconut on his own head. Mostly everything is repetitive and in slow motion, with an industrial sound track adding to the intrigue. “The coast is a shifting, cross-over point. Land is solid, stable; but sea currents make you struggle to stand, force you to shift position. That’s how I feel in the world today,” says Hura, whose parents hail from Dhaka and Lahore.
London-born filmmaker-artist-writer Naeem Mohaiemen has Bangladeshi roots. He works between New York and Dhaka, and has exhibited his work worldwide. His Jole Dobe Na, in Bengali, is his second film at the Berlinale after his short Abu Ammar is Coming was screened at the festival in 2016. Jole Dobe Na, reflecting on the afterlife of caregivers, was commissioned by the Yokohama Trienniale 2020, Japan, curated by the Raqs Media Collective, and co-commissioned by Bildmuseet, Sweden.
In a dream world set in an empty Kolkata hospital, an estranged couple— Jyoti (Sagnik Mukherjee) and Sufiya (Kheya Chattopadhyay)—negotiate a hesitant intimacy in the aftermath of an unknown illness. “In the last days of Sufiya’s life, you see Jyoti’s desire to caress and take care of her in a way that medicine can’t. Sufiya tells him that the separation of plastic-metal barriers could be a relief for him as well; a reprieve to release your partner from a terrible last rite,” Mohaiemen observes, via e-mail.
Jole Dobe Na will screen in Delhi from March 3-10, 2021 (Experimenter, Bikaner House) and in Kolkata on March 19 (Experimenter, Ballygunge Place). ■
—Meenakshi Shedde
BOTH FILMS ARE PART OF BERLINALE’S EXPERIMENTAL FORUM EXPANDED SECTION