A donation box for an annual film festival, built like an old camera, has four words written on it — “This machine kills fascists.”
The festival showcases “politically committed” contemporary documentary and fiction cinema from India and South Asia. The films tell stories of majoritarianism, discrimination, communal bigotry and State repression. They also tell stories of survival, resistance, solidarity and hope.
The 10th edition of the Kolkata People’s Film Festival — a people-supported, independent, and volunteer-led festival — organised by the People’s Film Collective, starts on Wednesday.
Over five days, 39 films will be screened at Uttam Mancha in Hazra.
One of them is Insides and Outsides, by Arbab Ahmad, which unfolds in 2019, navigating the government’s endorsement of discriminatory citizenship laws. The filmmaker grapples with his Muslim identity amid a backdrop of a State crackdown on dissent.
The Unknown Kerala Stories by Sanu Kummil captures the humanity and communal harmony that defines Kerala’s diverse landscape.
The KPFF started in 2014, the year Narendra Modi stormed to power at the Centre. The space for dissent has since been shrinking and censorship in political art, literature and cinema is on the rise, the organisers said.
“Despite facing challenging times, our festival is a symbol of counterculture, resistance and togetherness,” said Kasturi Basu, a documentary filmmaker and one of the organisers.
“Many parties are fighting the BJP politically. But there is hardly any opposition to the RSS in the cultural space. We are trying to wage that battle,” she said.
For a festival that does not accept corporate or government funding, turning 10 is a milestone.
“We run entirely on people’s money. When someone is spending money on us, there is a co-ownership that is created. To be able to do this for 10 years gives us hope, even in these challenging times,” Basu said.
Amid the frenzy around the Ram temple inauguration, Anand Patwardhan’s award-winning documentary, Ram Ke Naam, which tracks the campaign waged by the Vishwa Hindu Parishad that culminated in the destruction of the 16th-century Babri mosque in Ayodhya, will be screened at the festival on Republic Day.
It will be part of a retrospective of five documentaries that have shaped public perception in the past three decades.
Patwardhan shared his thoughts on the festival.
“What they have been doing is wonderful. They have kept alive the cultural freedom in that part of the world. The governments have mostly failed to do it. Even when the Left was in power, they did not do enough. If the governments had done enough, we would not see the communal virus in Bengal at least,” he said.
“It is a collective failure on the part of so-called progressive Indians that we didn’t concentrate enough on cultural work to prevent bigotry from rearing its ugly head,” he said.
Vasudhaiva Kutumbakam (The world is family) is Patwardhan’s new film that will have a Kolkata premiere at the festival.
The Sanskrit phrase denotes a universalist idea opposed to the supremacist notion of Hindutva.
Patwardhan grew up in a milieu that questioned the latter. His family’s elders had fought for India’s Independence.
“Liberty, equality and fraternity, words enshrined in India’s Constitution, were subconsciously internalised by them. As his parents aged, Patwardhan began to film them. Soon, family gatherings gave way to oral history.... As self-confessed supremacists rewrite India’s history, memories of the past have become more precious than mere personal nostalgia,” said a summary.
The festival will feature films from Afghanistan, Bangladesh, Myanmar, Nepal and Sri Lanka.
The festival will also host conversations. The keynote, on January 25, is to be delivered by author-activist Arundhati Roy.
Sanjay Kak, author, activist and filmmaker, will deliver a talk on January 26 on the space of documentary films in the present times.
“The KPFF stands as a very precious space, where the urgent issues of our times are discussed with the seriousness that they deserve. All around us we see the complete collapse of the corporate media, and increasing policing of the internet. So the importance of sustaining — even guarding — a physical space like this festival offers cannot be underestimated,” he wrote in a message to this newspaper.
