How the film EXTREME NATION is promoting unity in Southeast Asia.
A new documentary exploring metal in India is shining a light on one of the world’s biggest underground scenes
IF YOU ASKED a metalhead to name their favourite band, it’s most likely that we’d name one from either Europe or North America. These two continents are, after all, where the vast majority of our genre’s commercially successful heroes have emanated from. But heavy metal is a worldwide phenomenon. It has spawned almost innumerable underground subcultures all over the globe, each teeming with artists driven to bless local fans with extreme, cathartic concerts. It is these seedy underbellies that inspired Indian documentarian Roy Dipankar to make his latest film, Extreme Nation.
“I felt that there was a lot of underground activity within extreme music that was connecting my home country,” says the director, “but it wasn’t really being featured anywhere. I have been working for the last 15 years in record labels and used to meet with a lot of artists from other parts of the world, but I had never once interacted with anybody nearby. That’s an atrocity in itself!”
Roy is a diehard member of his country’s metal underground, and has been for more than 20 years. He remembers discovering the genre
“somewhere between school and college”, where playground tapetrading exposed him to the likes of Aerosmith and Iron Maiden. Naturally, the more aggressive likes of Morbid Angel and Cannibal Corpse followed very shortly after, tapping into the young Roy’s growing feelings of teenage angst.
“I wasn’t in a very highly graded college,” he remembers. “There would be a fight every day. The kids were drunk and would bash each other with things. I hated going to college; music had to help me finish my studies.”
Extreme Nation is Roy’s way of giving back to the music that helped him weather his adolescence, giving exposure to local artists that, he feels, are under-represented within his homeland’s mainstream culture. The feature-length film documents the gigs and ideologies of metal bands from all over Southeast Asia – including India, Sri Lanka, Pakistan and Bangladesh – promoting unity between an often culturally disconnected subcontinent. There isn’t one protagonist as much as an international group of unwitting lead characters, all of whom are unconsciously connected through their border-transcending music.
“Seeing bands who were performing in India but came from Bangladesh or Nepal, that was the first real cultural exchange between me and my neighbours,” Roy says. “I feel that most of us in India would rather know more about European history or American history and completely ignore what happens next door.”
He explains: “We live in a region that might look calm on the surface of it, but the subcontinent has a history. The partition of India; wars in Bangladesh; ethnic wars in Sri Lanka. Politically, it’s a very sensitive area and I felt, while filming, that there were strong feelings related to what’s happening in these countries.”
THAT VOLATILITY PRESENTED
itself most powerfully while Roy was filming in Sri Lanka. During his tenure there, the country was besieged by a number of deplorable terrorist attacks, instigated by militant Muslim fundamentalists with ties to the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria. The widespread panic caused by these atrocities led to many of Roy’s Sri Lankan interviewees asking to become “incognito”, with blurred faces and distorted voices whenever they appeared onscreen.
“To portray those people in the film, without jeopardising their lives, was the most difficult thing,” the director admits.
The intense politics of the region continue to be a thorn in his side even
“THIS FILM SHOULD BE SEEN ALL ACROSS THE WORLD”
now, long after the filming of Extreme Nation has wrapped. Distributors within Roy’s homeland of India have thus far refused to touch the documentary, adamantly turning their noses up at the idea of something with the message of unity across such fraught borders. And having something as notoriously anti-establishment as metal be involved has only made the situation more difficult.
“They do not want to deal with bold, brazen topics completely detached from the mainstream,” Roy states. “A few days back, I was talking to an
Indian distributor and they said, ‘There’s a lot of anti-government propaganda.’ There’s hardly any anti-national propaganda in the film. I think it’s an unspoken stigma. People say that the extreme music community should have an open mind; I would say they need an open mind from the mainstream community.”
Despite Extreme Nation facing an uphill battle to be screened in India, the documentary has become an underground hit elsewhere. Roy says that both Europe and South America have received the film with open arms, to the point where it was even shown at the legendary Wacken Open Air festival this summer. From here, the next stop is a wider commercial release, and Roy seems optimistic for the film’s prospects.
“As far as online distribution is concerned, South America and Europe are interested,” he beams. “I do not have as much to say about Asia. Things are getting a little volatile and people want to be safe with their catalogue. So be it. But I feel this film should be seen all across the world.”
One half celebration of metal and one half a lesson in unity in spite of national political relationships, Extreme Nation is indeed a film that deserves to be seen by a global audience. It’s a fascinating piece of foreign cinema, only made better by the fact that it has some righteously brutal music in it.
EXTREME NATION IS SLATED FOR WIDE RELEASE IN FEBRUARY