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It isn’t often that a Punjabi-language film makes waves on the international festival circuit. But that isn’t the only reason why Gurvinder Singh’s Anhey Ghorhey Da Daan (Alms of a Blind Horse), a fine adaptation of Jnanpith award-winning litterateur Gurdial Singh’s novel about an impoverished Dalit village, should be celebrated as a major breakthrough.
There is much in the film that elevates it to a league of its own. Its language, thematically germane as it is, is secondary to its cinematic idiom. The debutant director employs a measured mix of images, sound design, gestures, facial expressions and words to articulate the depressed state of the village and its hapless denizens, battered into stupor by years of suppression and exploitation. The critical acclaim that is coming the film’s way is richly deserved. In the third week of October, Anhey Ghorhey Da Daan won a Special Jury Award at the Abu Dhabi Film Festival, where it was in competition in the New Horizons section. In its citation, the jury, headed by globally known Iranian director Bahman Ghobadi, lauded Gurvinder Singh’s film "for its visual style and a poetic journey indicating a new and intriguing voice to emerge from the cinematic landscape of India". Earlier, Anhey Ghorhey Da Daan made it to the prestigious Orizzonti line-up of the 68th Venice Film Festival before being selected by South Korea’s Busan Film Festival. After its triumph in Abu Dhabi, the film is headed for London, Hong Kong and New York, where it is due to play at the South Asian Film Festival.
Produced by the National Film Development Corporation and shot near Bathinda last winter, Anhey Ghorhey Da Daan portrays a desperately indigent rural family — a wizened old man, his irritable wife and their only daughter — through the course of a single day. The film opens at the break of a cold, misty dawn as news filters in of the demolition of a house on the outskirts of the village. Amid sounds that suggest that the village is just waking up after a night of slumber, we hear a voice ask: "Is anyone left alive here?" A little later, another voice laments: "They have hardly left us alive." Indeed, life seems to have ebbed out of this village. Words have lost their meaning. Only the weather-beaten faces of the men and women, grief writ large on them and all vestiges of hope drained out of the veins, tell a tale of despair and deprivation. The Director’s Note provides an explanation for the funereal air that hangs over the village. "The human face is a landscape," writes Delhi-born Gurvinder Singh, who graduated from the direction course of the Film and Television Institute, Pune, 10 years ago.
"The lived reality of the face reflects time endured, lived and suffered." Through the ponderous pace that it sets and the furrowed faces that it lingers on, Anhey Ghorhey Da Daan, in the director’s words, "tries to evoke the effect of years of subordination of the struggling classes reflected in the macrocosm of events spinning beyond their control". We learn that the patch of land on which the village stands has been sold off by its upper-caste owner for the construction of a factory and the distraught Dalit residents are powerless in this utterly unequal battle. In the city, the old man’s son, Melu, a rickshaw-puller, listlessly roams the streets after sustaining a head injury during a strike by his union. As the day wears on and night falls, a gunshot is heard in the village. Commotion ensues. The old father leaves for the city to look for his son. The daughter, Dayalo, wanders off into the night. Melu strays back into the village. But their inert lives can go nowhere. Gurvinder Singh reveals that his film has been "pretty faithful" to the literary text authored by Gurdial Singh. "He was initially closely involved with the scripting process," says the director. "But he, then, allowed me to do pretty much my own thing." "Most of the actors in the film are actual villagers," says Gurvinder Singh. Especially interesting is the casting of Mal Singh, a 60-year-old fertiliser factory worker-turned-contract farmer, as the old man. The role of Melu Singh is played by Patiala-based street theatre activist Samuel Sikandar John, who has for 20 years been staging plays on street corners of Punjab’s towns and villages. Anhey Ghorhey Da Daan draws its power as much from the tangible faces it puts on the screen as from the profoundly pure cinematic devices the director uses to convey the relevance of the time and space he addresses. Punjabi cinema, nay Indian cinema as a whole, has rarely portrayed reality with such astonishing clarity in recent times.
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