Recent international nods
Often the question of the role of art is raised when human lives are at stake. Artists, creatives, intellectuals, you and me, pour all our thoughts into the endless vessel of conversations when we ask ourselves: what significance does art hold in the presence of unfathomable atrocities inflicted upon humanity?
In his book Memory of Forgetfulness, which delves into the 88day siege of Beirut in 1982, poet Mahmoud Darwish recounts a conversation with his friend, the renowned Urdu poet Faiz Ahmad Faiz. It is regarding the role of art amidst the turmoil of the siege.
“Our great friend from Pakistan, Fayiz Ahmad Fayiz, is busy with another question: ‘Where are the artists?’
‘Which artists, Fayiz?’ I ask. ‘The artists of Beirut.’ ‘What do you want from them?’ ‘To draw this war on the walls of the city.’
‘What’s come over you?’ I exclaim. ‘Don’t you see the walls tumbling?’”
When our surroundings lack physical barriers, the practice of art can become seemingly impractical — an aspect that may whose docuseries Wedding.con dropped on Amazon Prime Video this year contribute to the scarcity of Palestinian poetry in the well of the Internet. What does art then mean for us at this time as we witness a genocide unfold from the comfort of our bedrooms? Art is used to amplify voices, honour narratives, and uphold the dignity of those whose stories demand to be heard, especially in the face of cultural erosion.
Piece of heritage
One such erosion is the uprooting of olive trees. Since 1967, Israel has uprooted around a million Palestinian olive trees alongside
◣
Gulabi Gang in 2012 — on the lives of a Bundelkhand women’s group that fights oppression, violence and caste dominance. Jain shares how she and her producers couldn’t get Netflix to buy Gulabi Gang. “At best, OTTs want a modified reality that everyone can consume. In their defence, however, it’s not easy to show bold content in India.”
Narrative documentaries “complicate the gaze and celebrate the plurality and complexity of our existence”. Her last film, The Golden Thread (2022), was set outside of Kolkata, and looks at the lives of jute workers. It is still doing the rounds of international film festivals. Her forthcoming film is on the farmer protests of 20202021.
Tanuja Chandra’s docuseries Wedding.con, which dropped on Amazon Prime Video this year, borders on docufiction but stays unflinchingly with the voices and emotions of her subjects: Indian women who have undergone extreme distress because of matrimonial frauds. A director of feature films, BBC Studios approached Chandra to direct the series. “I feel funding should be an unprecedented number of human lives. These revered trees not only form the backbone of the Palestinian economy but also hold deep cultural significance in Palestinian heritage. Olive trees serve as living chronicles of Palestine and are passed down through generations as family heritage.
Some of these ancient trees, from centuries ago, endure harsh conditions such as drought and poor soil, reflecting their inherent resilience. Rooted deeply in history and tradition, they are the testament of the Palestinian land. much more generous. So many documentary producers work on abysmally low budgets. Having said that, I do know that OTT has made audiences at least become aware of the beauty of documentary films,” she says. The responses to her first nonfiction project have been overwhelming. “Documentary is a thing of slowburn, though. It’ll be many months before we know the extent to which our show has touched people. And deep down, I know it’ll be extensive.”
An older generation would remember Doordarshan documentaries about social issues that ran like message films. There was something noble, and deathly boring, about them. Today, the best documentaries don’t run on binaries. The nomination of To Kill a Tiger is another propeller to Indian narrative storytellers to “complicate the gaze”.
The writer and critic is based in Mumbai.
Palestinian poetry intricately maps the multifaceted meaning of these trees. In her poem ‘Different Ways to Pray’, AmericanPalestinian poet Naomi Shihab Nye invokes the pain of people who have died on the land of the olive trees:
Under the olive trees, they raised their arms —
Hear us! We have pain on earth! We have so much pain there is no place to store it!
But the olives bobbed peacefully in fragrant buckets of vinegar and thyme.
At night the men ate heartily, flat
◣
Almost a was a st the cou domina cycle. The disappe murder of 25yearunveiled an intern drama that put to s wildest of masala p
To recap, Bora d April 2012; three y sister, media mave Mukerjea (who tur her mother), was a murder along with and her exhusban Khanna. A few mo Bora’s stepfather a current husband, P former CEO of Star arrested. As details public, it turned o dating Rahul, her s from his previous Confused?
With its myriad headspinning case makings of a great A new Netflix docu
on abysmally low budgets. Having said that, I do know that OTT has made audiences at least become aware of the beauty of documentary films
TANUJA CHANDRA,
bread and white cheese, and were happy in spite o pain, because there was also happiness.
Despite the pain, the oli persist, bearing fruit as a testament to resilience and fortitude in the face of occu The olives they yield serve symbol of hope and streng offering a source of joy ami surrounding turmoil — a ba wounded spirits, a healing in a landscape scarred by c
Politician and poet Tawfi also looks at olive trees as a