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Arts & Reviews |
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Art Review |
Raising the Stakes
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| Open Frame’s 11th edition reinforces PSBT’s identity as an invigorating platform for debate |
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Published : 1 October 2011 |
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ALL IMAGES COURTESY PUBLIC SERVICE BROADCASTING TRUST |
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| The Ghetto Girl follows women as they negotiate their surroundings in Jamia Nagar.
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N SEPTEMBER 2009, Ambarien Alqadar started filming, rather obsessively, her father’s descent into Alzheimer’s. His memory contained clues to her family history, a history she desperately intended to save. As he narrated the last fragments that remained, a recurring image stood out in her mind—of him sitting with her mother by a sea one afternoon, her |
mother wearing red bellbottom pants.
The Ghetto Girl (2011), Alqadar’s new documentary, opens with a shot of a woman in red bellbottoms, big sunglasses, a red rose in her hair and black high-heeled pumps. She traipses about a park, stopping only to pose for a camera, the outlines of those in the background blurring. The Ghetto Girl is the story of an imaginary girl looking for a lost home movie, a search that takes her into a maze of lanes in Jamia Nagar, which the documentary calls India’s ‘Little Pakistan’, and which she calls home. The film, which Alqadar describes as an exploration into what it means to be a Muslim in India today, is funded by the Public Service Broadcasting Trust (PSBT) and was screened as part of Open Frame 2011, PSBT’s 11th annual film festival that ran from 9-17 September.
For a decade, PSBT, a nongovernmental, not-for-profit trust, has worked to democratise the media and render mainstream the independent documentary. It supports the production of 100 documentary films a year that are independent of the state and of private enterprise. Every year, it delivers 52 of these films to the national broadcaster, Doordarshan, and, over the last decade, its annual festival has evolved into an invigorating platform for spotlighting sociopolitical concerns. To mark their 10th anniversary, 2011’s Open Frame focused on PSBT-funded films—both those produced over the past year, and a retrospective of those produced over the past decade.
The new films seek to interpret the complicated social realities of India and articulate them in engaging ways. They cover a promising sweep of subjects: the oral histories of tribal communities; the many-layered politics of religion; the sexuality of the disabled; the psychology of online India; newer forms of living in a globalised world; problems with the judicial system. However, it is uncertain whether the stories they reveal are as well told as their agendas are ambitious.
Alqadar, who studied filmmaking at Jamia Milia Islamia, the Central University based in Jamia Nagar in Delhi, used the PSBT grant to document how women negotiate their surroundings in the locality where she grew up. She is part of a focused pool of the university’s alumni and students who are trying to capture the essence of Jamia Nagar, a location that perfectly represents India’s conflicts of identity and exclusion. Operation Batla House of 2008, in which two boys, Atif Amin, 24, and Mohammed Sajid, 18, were shot dead by the police in the Batla House neighbourhood on suspicions of being members of the Indian Mujahideen, only intensified the students’ engagement with their surroundings.
The scenes of the encounter are a recurring presence in The Ghetto Girl, which meanders through the bustling lanes of Jamia Nagar, gathering stories on its way—of the girl who wouldn’t be served tea at a street stall because ‘it’s not meant for girls’, of the girl who was embarrassed of her uncool neighbourhood as a child, of the girls who must suffer the landlady’s glares when stepping out in western clothes, of the women who gather at a beauty parlour to discuss fashion trends, of the woman who refuses to be photographed because it is forbidden in Islam and of the girl who was nicknamed ‘ghetto girl’ in her exclusive South Delhi school.
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Apour Ti Yapour is an exploration of life around the Line of Control between India and Pakistan.
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The documentary moves smoothly across these stories, creating a rhythm both within the scenes and in the larger narrative. It manages to attain a certain harmony with the subject, getting inside its skin without being intrusive. While the film is visually imaginative, it sticks to old-school editing: each character and shot serves to move the narrative forward, the stories adding up to a cohesive whole instead of being simply ‘about’ something.
Because the film doesn’t pitch itself as a straightforward and impartial account, it wouldn’t be fair to judge it for accuracy and balance of perspective. It is certain, though, that indifference to the larger political context limits the film’s prospects—it’s a telling portrait of women in Jamia Nagar, but not quite a story about being Muslim in India.
That there are elements to the Indian Muslim experience far beyond The Ghetto Girl’s scope is clear from another film screened at the festival, Lalit Vachani’s Tales of Napa (2010), the story of a little village in Gujarat that resisted the tide of right-wing Hindu violence during the 2002 riots. The film examines how Napa’s individual Hindus and Muslims, and the village institutions, managed to keep their community calm amidst the encroaching brutality. While it is generally believed that the pogrom spread throughout central Gujarat and the district of Anand, in particular, with little diminution in its virulence, just 10 km south of Anand city, the Hindus and Muslims of Napa continued to live in mixed localities without the slightest tension. Villagers even took in a contingent of Muslims that was fleeing the riots in surrounding areas, housed them, fed them and helped them to start their lives afresh—going as far as to stand as guarantors in applications for farm credit, and employ them in local enterprises.
As the film moves along, a history in which Hindus and Muslims were economic partners, and developed a syncretic culture, is claimed as partial explanation. Lalit Vachani, who has done extensive documentary work in Gujarat, registers a sizable range of perspectives in the documentary, but the movie’s enquiry into the actual depth of the communal calm seems oddly perfunctory.
There is mention, for example, of a small section of the village that tries to undermine the harmony; one of the characters explains that the source of the occasional disturbance is the “young”, who go to cities to study and come back influenced by an atmosphere of communal mistrust and antagonism. In another apparent point of rupture, a poor Hindu woman says that the Muslims they helped during the riots have moved up economically, leaving them far behind. The film makes no attempt to investigate these potential faultlines in Napa.
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