Indie films making waves at global film festivals is often a sign of them subscribing to the Western idea of ‘India’-Entertainment News , Firstpost

The last year or two have been very good for independent Indian cinema at international film festivals, with PS Vinothraj’s visually striking Tamil film Koozhangal being the film consequently selected to represent India at the Oscars.

Films like Arun Karthik’s Nasir, Natesh Hegde’s Pedro, Irfana Mazumdar’s Shankar’s Fairies are among the films to have attracted attention internationally and there are some others as well. But after seeing some of them, one finds that the best two Indian films in the past decade still remain Chaitanya Tamhane’s Marathi film Court (2014) and Raam Reddy’s Kannada film Thithi (2015). There is something even worrying about the new films that is not immediately identifiable, but I get the sense that they are following a film festival formula without attending honestly to the local reality – something that the earlier two films addressed conscientiously.

Film festivals like those at Cannes, Venice, and Busan are meant of art films, films that do not fit any generic category but are intended to decide upon the best achievements in filmmaking in the course of any year. Since filmmaking is a response to contemporary reality, which is exceedingly complex, one would imagine that originality and complexity are the criteria by all films will be judged.

But contrary to what the general public may believe about film festivals, such events do not only choose the ‘best’ in cinema decided on the basis of the above. Through a suitable system of prizes and rewards, festivals also lay down the norms for what art cinema should be. In other words, they decide what ‘reality’ pertaining to their countries they should reflect. In behaviourist terms, rewards are used as Pavlovian reinforcement for desirables in filmic representations.

Over the years, it is becoming increasingly evident that films from all countries are not judged in the same way at festivals. I earlier noted that films should be ‘true’ to local reality but that presumes that it will be a knowledgeable audience that judges the films primarily. The thing about film festivals is that those who judge films from a variety of countries are basically strangers to the realities of that country, aware of them only through narratives already in the media space. Once a local filmmaker figures this out, they will be tempted to make films that confirm that narrative in order to appear ‘true’ before strangers.

In this regard, what people see as virtues in an American or European film will not be virtues in an Indian or
Iranian film. Europeans or Americans are psychologically complex but Indians or Iranians must be flatly drawn, and complexity is out of place. Still, Iran is higher-placed than India in the way it is represented.

Two international filmmakers who have made a mark internationally are the Iranian Asghar Farhadi (The Salesman) and the Russian Andrei Zvyagintsev (Loveless), who are masters at film craft. But both come from what are perceived to be conservative and/or totalitarian countries. Farhadi makes films to unfailingly confirm this view of Iran and he makes mystery films in which an unfortunate event happens without our understanding why. Enquiry into the happening is then initiated by characters to reveal that it was because of deplorable aspects of Iranian society, which are then disclosed. My observation is that these revealed aspects of Iran would be well-known to Iranians but not to audiences at Cannes, and the ‘mystery’ hence caters to these foreign audiences.

Zvyagintsev uses a different strategy and portrays Russia as a society without love or overrun by drunken politicians (Leviathan). As a contrast, Bong Joon-ho’s satirical Parasite, because it is from a democracy and must show optimism in the system, concludes cheerfully with the deprived protagonist hoping to buy the rich man’s house — though everything points to its falsity. Bong Joon-ho has, in an interview, actually indicated the impossibility of realising such a dream. Film festivals apparently decide whether filmmakers of any given country
should be hopeful or despairing about their own milieus.

Coming to the Indian films, above all of them are pessimistic but being critical or pessimistic is itself hardly to be censured. Both Court and Thithi were highly critical of the milieus they were set in but neither was apparently working according to an imposed formula. Neither of the films could have been possible if the filmmakers had not observed their milieus at close-quarters, and deliberately broken with cliché. Thithi, for instance, virtually destroys the myth of the innocent rustic. But this cannot be said about the new films which really tell us little
about social processes and realities.

A favourite narrative about India in the international media is that of ‘religious persecution.’ One cannot deny that religious conflict has increased considerably in the past few years, and religious difference are becoming a way of mobilising the electorate. But if we look at the two films that have made an impression at international film festivals among those named – Nasir and Pedro – we find that both are about quiet people from the minorities who are lynched because of their religious affiliations.

But are the films being truthful in their depictions with actual knowledge of the categories they are depicting? The observation here is that the minorities are hardly ever individually isolated as they are shown; they have their own communities and places of worship where they congregate, and it is their conspicuous strength during religious occasions that usually initiates majority hostility. The isolation of the protagonists also reveals the uncomfortable
fact that the filmmakers know little about the communities depicted, and their cultural specificities. In Pedro, for instance, there is no church to be seen, and the protagonist is not seen to be even religious; only his name marks him out.

Koozhangal has attracted much international attention, and is written about widely in the Western media but instead of writing about film, the pieces in The Guardian and The Observer are about the trajectory of the director from ‘child labourer to Oscar aspirant.’ The stories are based on interviews, and it is unlikely that the veracity of the stories implying a horribly deprived life were checked out, but it is as though the film was less important than the conditions in the milieu. A question I would like to put here is whether the personal story of someone from a
Western democracy would similarly get more importance than their film. It is as though Koozhangal is only important for laying bare the bleak conditions prevailing in India, purportedly shared by the director.

Koozhangal actually uses a visual aesthetic close to that of films from countries like Mali, a bleak story in a bleak landscape. As its design, all it does is to showcase extreme misery – locals smoking mice out of their burrows, breaking their legs and roasting them over a fire; people digging in the sand for a muddy trickle of water, a hungry puppy chewing on an empty water bottle. These elements are unrelated, but the director, through the motif of a
drunken man striding along an arid landscape with his son just pulled out of school, contrives to bring them together as a road movie would – as vignettes of life without making them pertinent.

The film is being passed off in the media as being about the ill-treatment of women in their marriages but we do not see the wife at all. The man is shown as violently emotional but is that in itself an exploration of gender issues? Also, what has the eating of mice by stray people got to do with gender? The presence of a strange rock formation in a parched landscape is another motif familiar from sub-Saharan films.

Still from Koozhangal

What Koozhangal is offering is a picture of India as sub-Saharan Africa, which has perhaps novelty. I am not suggesting that typical Indians should represented as billionaires as Bollywood has done (Dil Dhadakne Do) but that the lives of the poor should not be portrayed without any complexity as the film does. In Koozhangal again, there are no communities in evidence when community life is what enables the poor to survive and gives them solace. If the director had known the lives he was portraying more intimately, he would have given us more in Koozhangal than the spectacle of misery. Parasite is about the poor in South Korea, and if they can have complex interpersonal dealings, why cannot the Indian poor as well, in cinema?

Based on the evidence of the films just described, I would say that the aspiring indie director in India has learned to play the film festival system.

They have read and understood the narrative about India in the international media, with no discernible effort by the Indian state to correct it. It is all very well to make noises about oneself and one’s culture in one’s own backyard but, in a globalised world, cultural nationalism needs to persuade the people outside that India is not like sub-Saharan Africa, unless the comparison is acceptable.

After the success of Koozhangal, Jai Bhim also shows people eating rats or mice as cinematic strategy. If the representation becomes the norm, we may expect that the outside world will regard these rodents as the staple food of the average Indian, and films will be regarded as ‘untrue’ to India if they portray people otherwise.

MK Raghavendra is a cultural, literary and film critic who has authored 11 books on cinema, politics and literature. He won the Swarna Kamal for best film critic in 1997. Two of his books have been translated into Russian.