Slice of South Asia

From art-house classics to Bollywood potboilers, the recent San Francisco International
South Asian Film Festival brought together diverse images from the region.
Akanksha Bhalla reports from San Franscisco

THE San Francisco International South Asian Film Festival 2008 held recently garnered audience beyond the festival circuit and the South Asians here. There was interest among the American audience to know about the South Asian region through narrative and documentary films from India, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, South Africa, the UK and the USA.

From art-house classics to next-level Bollywood, the festival was an endeavour to bring out diverse images from South Asia. "While Bollywood is a mass entertainer but South Asia is a diverse place with diverse voices which can resonate beyond individual identities," says Anuj Vaidya, Filmmaker and Associate Festival Director. As opposed to the 1980s and 1990s when there was hardly a point of contact with South Asia, the ease of digital technology has made it possible for independent filmmakers to reach out to distant parts of the world. Many of the productions in the festival were collaborations between South Asia and the West. The festival also showed works of up and coming and independent filmmakers making experimental works. "It was very challenging as an independent filmmaker to distribute my films and market my work," says Anuj. Thus, he got together with another filmmaker, Ivan Jaigirdar, to form 3^rd i, a non-profit organisation, to promote independent media from South Asia and organisers of the festival. Some of the films that featured at the festival were:

Flow: For Love of Water is a documentary on the global water crisis. The multinational corporate giants who sell substandard, overpriced monopoly water to people. The documentary features interviews with environmentalists like Vandana Shiva and provides solutions in the form of low cost and alternative purification technologies that can lead to a global turnaround for the poorest and most vulnerable people in the world. The film unveils the corporate greed of businesses like Nestle, Coca Cola and the International Monetary Fund (IMF). The film was followed by a panel discussion with speakers from Thimmakka and the India Resource Center.

The festival tried to venture beyond the Indian identity and project the larger South Asian region which has a shared cultural heritage. Ramchand Pakistani by Pakistani director Mehreen Jabbar is one such example of cultural diplomacy. It is based on the real-life story of a dalit Pakistani boy who wanders into India while chasing a ball. The boy and his father are taken to be spies and jailed. The film tells about the sadness of the politics between India and Pakistan not in a propagandist way but through the eyes of young Ramchand and his devastated mother (Nandita Das).

Bioscope by K.M. Madhusudhanan was particularly admired at the festival. It rewinds time to when the bioscope first appeared in a Kerala village in 1906. The villagers gasped as they saw moving images and thought it to be the work of devil. The journey of early cinema was mixed with suspicion, superstition, fear and astonishment. Some of the other titles shown at the festival were King Siri from Sri Lanka; A Throw of Dice, a 1929 co-production between India and Germany and newly restored by the British Film Institute. The Glow of White Women by a Black Indian director Yunus Vally deconstructs the sexual politics between Black men and White women in South Africa under Apartheid.

However, the festival was not allowed to turn into an intellectual heavy-duty event and had its share of the glitz and glamour of Bollywood with Om Shanti Om and Maqbool screened to a packed hall. But the star of the festival was the closing-night pick Slumdog Millionaire that had the venue thronged. Directed by British filmmaker Danny Boyle and Loveleen Tandan, it is the sensational journey of a slum kid, Jamal, from the streets of Mumbai to becoming a millionaire at an Indian TV game show Who Wants to Be a Millionaire. It won the People’s Choice Award at the Toronto International Film Festival. The film, which opened in the US, will be released in India in January. While the film has the ingredients of a masala potboiler, it brings out brutal images of the Mumbai slums.

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