I would be glad to be proved wrong...

A grab from the film ''Pamphlet'

The success of anything would probably be reflected on how consistent it has been. Judging by this standard, The National Short Film Festival (NSFF), an event organized by the Department of Media and Communication Studies (DMCS) of the Savitribai Phule University in Pune is a highly flourishing film festival, as they have been holding it for nearly eight consecutive years now. The film festival showcases films that are below thirty minutes in length - fiction and nonfiction & student or otherwise - and awards nominal cash prizes in about ten categories. Although the department head Dr Madhavi Reddy is the inspiring force behind the festival, all the planning and execution work is done by her students to whom she has delegated responsibilities.

Going by the films that were screened in the film festival, it seems that the film festival over the years has given a much needed fillip to the ever thriving short film making scene in nontraditional centers in Maharashtra, especially in rural and semi urban areas. One saw films which were either from or shot in Savantwadi, Satara, Nagar, Pune, Alibaug, Sangli, Baramati etc. Although the festival had films from other parts of the country like Ahmadabad, Kolkata and Tamil Nadu, by and large most of the films were owned by rural Maharashtra. Never before rural Maharashtra opened up for me as it did at the NSFF. The films were raw, rustic and had some amount of freshness to them; more importantly they betrayed a commitment and energy that naturally oozed through them.

A grab from the film 'Antyeshti'

The three member jury, of which yours truly was also a part of, adjured 'Antyeshti' (Last Rites) as the best short film in the fiction open category. Set in a tiny isolated village that lies amidst nature in the remote area of rural Satara in Maharashtra, the film potrays the story of a family who have to wait for the incessant rains to end so that they perform the last rights of a deceased person. This highly evolved film cinematically evokes the philosophical dimensions of the forlorn inevitability of life and death amidst overbearing nature. The film maker had the conviction to leave the film a bit open ended, as the rolling titles come in with the widowed daughter-in-law waiting alone for the rains to stop, sitting before her father-in-law's dead body as her hitherto helpful neighbors go back to their respective houses, probably to live their own lives as they wait for the rains to end.  

Conventional film making would demand that the story have a beginning (death of the father in law), a middle (the daughter-in-law and her neighbors waiting for the rains to stop) and an appropriate end. The logical end would probably be that the body be burnt, an event that never happens in the film. The end of the film sees the neighbors leave the dead body, maybe temporarily, lying on the ground besides the forlorn daughter-in-law as she waits for the rains to stop. The middle of the film, therefore is also its end and yet, there is a extreme sense of completeness to the film.  'Rang Rakhadi' (Colour: Grey), which won the best fiction film in the student category, too had a non conventional narrative structure that discards the cause and effect dramatic narrative structure - a classical narrative structure that includes sequences of connected events - one causing and leading to the next till there is a logically led climax, which is normally the emotional high point in the film.

A grab from 'Rang Rakhadi'

'Rang Rakhadi' unfolds a series of events in the life of a few characters as they go about their mundane daily life on a particularly uneventful day. There is no cause and effect relationship between the sequences that leads to a logical dramatic climax. In a small hut in a big city a husband sips his tea and goes off from the house. The wife works in a construction site. The helpful contractor - who is also a family friend - arrives and goes about doing his job. After a tea break, work resumes. The day ends, the lady comes back to her hut and gets involved in her household work. The contractor is with her, supporting her financially. Her husband comes back drunk at night; he takes solace in his contractor friend. Meat is cooked and all of them have their food. The day ends. If at all there is a plot in this film, this is it.

Being non dramatic, in a sense, is the theme of the film. The film explores relationships between people, surveying the gray areas of their routine lives. No character is seen in black and white as the film focuses on their inter-dependency amidst extreme alienation of the city life. The angst ridden husband, the detachment of the wife and the loneliness of the contractor - all supplement each other, all the while indicating that there is something that is missing for these characters. But what is missing is probably being compensated through a sense of belonging and the dependence that they have with each other. Despite incorporating a whole dynamic range of light intensity into its camera work, the film literally has a lot of grey tones embedded into its visuals, as its central motif. 

That life should be looked from the different shades of grey that it embodies in itself is also the world view of the film 'Aagasvadi', the film that won the best documentary film in the festival. Agasvadi is the name of a drought ridden village, again in Satara district in Maharashtra. It is a melancholic film that touches the right issues regarding commercial development of this drought ridden village and the misgivings it has caused to its residents. Like 'Rang Rakhadi', 'Agaswadi' is also from the stable of the student films of the Film and TV Institute of India. The fact the 'Agaswadi' won the best documentary film in the open category speaks well for itself. It is also a comment on the other documentary films in the open category.

The central character of 'Agaswadi' through which the story is unfolded is a man who over the years has dug his own well and is determined not to migrate into a city like most of his neighbors have done. The film is not a character based documentary, as in it does not follow a particular character 'from birth to death', so to say, as some of the recent full length documentaries do by default. Yet, well digger / farmer is the anchor (not of the TV kind) of the film, binding it together. The film dwells on the other aspects of the issue in hand and peeps into other characters - like the school teacher or the bhajan singing group. Considerable screen time of the film is devoted to the electricity producing windmill  company present in the village and the kind of misgivings people have about it. Particularly poignant is the last sequence where the village gathers at night to discuss their issues. All they manage to do is to complain and crib. As the power goes off, the rain arrives and they scatter off!

A grab from 'Agaswadi'

These three films stood out. There were others too, 'Teen Don Ek' (Three Two One), Stains', 'Gadhul' (Turbid), 'Glow Worm in a Jungle', 'Pamphlet', 'Akki', 'Bhairu', 'Maun' (Silence), 'Phad', 'Pipanya', etc...  - films that were interesting in various degrees. The thematic concerns of these films covered a wide spectrum - position of women in society, urban alienation, rural migration, issues of differently abled persons, superstition, caste discrimination, effects of consumerism, dying folk forms, religious bigotry, same sex relationships etc... But there were a few prominent burning issues plaguing the country that were entirely missing from the line up, not that the organizers had anything to do with it.

We did not see a film on the ever growing agrarian crisis, nor was environmental degradation dealt with in any of these films. The theme of 'Corporatocracy' or the nexus between the country's governance and corporate world - was nowhere in the picture. Neither was another prominent theme that involves a small group of people trying to homogenize culture and control its practices. We did not have anything that represented the indigenous people's voice, the forest dweller or for that matter human right issues. Ultra-nationalism too was missing. These are some of the large narratives that are playing out in India today and it is surprising that they did not find an expression in this eight year old well established film festival. Interacting with the ever energetic film festival organisers it hardly seemed to me that films on these large narratives were made and sent but not curated into the festival.

Which brings me to a bigger question that relates to all film festivals. Why are we short film makers are found wanting in this respect that we are blind to such compelling global narratives that impacts us in our day to day life? Is it so because we are ignorant about these narratives - some of them very destructive in nature threatening our very existence? Is it that maybe we are aware of these issues but don't find it compelling enough to engage with them? Or is it that maybe we film makers know that a relationship based film, for example, stands more of a chance in making it into film festivals than the rest and are thus are dishing out films that we think are likely to be selected in these festivals? Do film festivals really have certain unstated biases in picking up such films for their festivals or is it that we are just assuming that they have certain biases? Most likely, maybe we are simply afraid to confront these compelling grand narratives where it is imperative that you as a film maker take a political stand and thereby assume an ideology pertaining to it. 

Also worrisome is the fact that apart from the three-four films mentioned here, few filmmakers were ready to experiment with the narrative form that they were using. Although there were glimpses of it, there were no films that were predominantly surreal or impressionistic in nature. A parody, burlesque, the free style of a folk narrative ... you name them and they were not there. All we had in the fiction category is the three part narrative structure, attempts to construct such a structure or at best the realist films that were episodic slices of life. The documentary films mainly were in the essayistic mode. Some of them looked like they are dated fifteen to twenty years back or maybe more, as far as their form goes. As hinted before these are the days where long character driven documentaries rule the roost. Fortunately the length restriction NSFF imposes on the films (30 mints) don't allow for such indulgences. From the observational to the poetic, the reflective and participatory modes, the choices for a documentary film maker are vast. But I did not see anyone picking up these choices.

Despite the superior technical quality of many of the films that were screened at the NSFF, the film package as a whole missed out on certain major narratives that are extremely relevant today. The films also had a familiarity to them in terms of the form or the formal devices that were used. Going beyond NSFF and back to the larger issue, the more I think about it the more I tend to hold the view that not engaging intensively in such nature is a deliberate 'dumbing down' process where films are over simplified frivolously with a view that that it finds a larger acceptance. These practices are adopted, I am afraid, not only by short film makers but even by the feature film makers of all kind. It falls in line with the general scheme of things prevalent in the post truth world that we live in - in line with the journalism that does not question, the literature that is superficial, the history that is based not on evidences, the myths that being treated as science and the TV serials becoming de-facto cultural heritage, among other things. We are living in a 'dumb and dumber' times.

And I would be glad to be proved wrong.