A slice of life in the region :Bangladeshi issues showcased at Travelling Film South Asia '08

Two films shot in Bangladesh were the centrepieces of the recently concluded "Travelling Film South Asia 2008" in New Delhi. The four-day festival began with one such film, Every Good Marriage Begins with Tears, directed and produced by UK filmmaker Simon Chambers. The film had a common enough theme-- two Bangladeshi sisters from London being forced into arranged marriages with complete strangers from their parents' homeland. Chambers, however, gave the film a “personal and intimate insight.” As a neighbour of the family in Brick Lane, London he knew girls since they were three years old. There were, therefore, no barriers and Chambers was able to give a moving and gripping account of their lovers, joys, sorrows, hopes and aspirations.



As a westerner, of course, Chambers was in for his share of surprises. “In a way the film is not about arranged marriages; it is about the universal theme of searching for love. In Bangladesh you marry someone who you may not even know and believe that love will grow in time. In the West it is quite the opposite. It is like going shopping, If you find a girlfriend and then may be you don't like them after three years you can kind of take them back to the shop and say I'll get a different one now. The girls were caught between the Bangladeshi culture and western ideas -- you can go and have boyfriends and maybe experiment a little bit, but the parents frown on the western ways. I find this conundrum very interesting,” he explains.


The audience's reaction to the film was evident in the huge applause he received. Along with the film, the music by Tagore singer Aditi Mohsin gave a haunting quality to the work. “Even if you don't understand the music, the poetry and the words, you get a very strong sense of the sound, emotion, feelings of loss and yearnings. The beautiful, magical music contrasts starkly with these London girls who often freely throw four letter words. This is intentional because even though they are very rough outside, the music conveys what I imagine is their inner selves,” says Chambers.


The other film to win plaudits was Eisenfresser (Ironeaters) directed by German-based Bangladeshi documentary filmmaker Shaheen Dill-Riaz. The film zooms in on the aftermath of an annual famine in northern Bangladesh. Two farmers, along with their relatives, are forced to leave their homes and find work as labourers in the ship breaking yards on the beaches of Chittagong. Here they dismantle the discards of the western world: decrepit oil tankers and enormous container ships, which expose them to toxic and other perils. The compelling film bagged the "Ram Bahadur Trophy for Best Film", Film South Asia '07.


Many films left an imprint. There was the Indian film on Partition called Rabba Hum Kee Kariye (by Ajay Bhardwaj), Remembrance of Things Present (by Indian director Chandra Siddan) which won the "Second Best Film Award," Film South Asia '07 and films from Nepal and Afghanistan. Other films came from Pakistan, Bhutan and Sri Lanka.


The outstanding 13 films in Delhi were hosted by the India International Centre in collaboration with Himal Association and Himal South Asian, Kathmandu. This was the sixth edition of Travelling Film South Asia 2008 -- a festival featuring outstanding documentaries from the region produced in the last two years. The screened films were selected from the 45 documentaries aired at the competitive section of Film South Asia (FSA) 2007, in Kathmandu. The FSA is a biennial festival held in Kathmandu once every two years and brings together filmmakers linked by the theme of South Asia, though the filmmaker does not have to be South Asian.


The Travelling Film South Asia 2008 has already traversed many parts of the globe --Chittagong in Bangladesh, Islamabad, Karachi, Lahore, universities in the US, thrice in Delhi, Goa, Colombo and Sussex. On the horizon are screenings in Gauhati, the Bangkok film festival and Singapore.


Mallika Aryal, co-director of Film South Asia, says that they are open to the idea of showing the films in other places in Bangladesh -- provided they get a host. And it is free of cost in South Asia. All the host has to do is to courier the films to the next destination. For the rest of the world, there is a nominal charge of US $800. “Documentaries as a style of storytelling, are gaining momentum,” she says, adding, “If more young people ventured into the art form, the region would see better documentaries and that is our aim.”