The Voices from the Waters International Travelling Film Festival has been unique in stitching together cinematic narratives that speak of myriad relations with rivers, lakes, dams. Deepa Bhasthi talks of such films which employ water as a personal metaphor and question the oft-ignored parameters of development…
In a no-man’s land, nothing goes. Or if anything goes, it depends on how you see it. Like children his age everywhere in the world, Rubel wants to go to school and learn his letters well, he knows that is what will get him out of the drudgery of his life. But the family has no money to waste on something as expensive as an education, and Rubel is forced to cross a river that forms the border between the Indian and Bangladeshi borders every day to smuggle in rice and other goods. His home is the island Char, a no man’s land, patrolled by security forces from both countries. In crossing the river every day, when it rains, when the river bed is dry, Rubel progressively gives up the hope of school and a better future – there is a sister’s dowry to help pay, a family to help feed.
Sourav Sarangi’s Char…The No-Man’s Island is just one of the films screened at the Voices from the Waters International Travelling Film Festival organised in Bangalore recently. The river is what comes to define Rubel’s life. Rivers are what define the lives, deaths, fortunes and destruction of hundreds of thousands of people in the world. This focus, on the rivers and their neighbouring inhabitants, the destruction of lives and histories and on the multiple meanings of development was sharp at the festival, in its 9th edition this year.
There were more than a dozen films that dealt with the importance of rivers in the lives of those that lived near it and the havoc that is created when a dam in built. A dam is development, the ill-fated temples of modern India. These dams don’t just swallow villages in their wake. They drown memories, stories that were passed on from one generation to the next and the next; they drown out hopes and a long, long history. You cannot rehabilitate history, only the people get houses and land.
I ask the festival director Georgekutty A L if it was a deliberate attempt to include more films that told stories of rivers and dams. He said no. “Every year we have been getting films on dams but this year there was a profusion of them. It indicates that people are rethinking development. There is a slow turn towards sustainability. When the whole world is hurling towards development, there are an increasing number of people who are rethinking what development means,” he said.
Georgekutty pointed out that there were two main points of focus among the films that were chosen, seas and rivers and the aftermath of dams. There is Nandan Saxena and Kavita Bahl’s Dammed which talks of how 11 million Indians have been displaced by large dams. The Onkareshwar dam will further create havoc in 50,000 lives, the Sardar Sarovar in 2,00,000. The film follows the lives of the utterly poor who pay the price for this ‘development.’ The decision to start building the Polavaram Dam throws into various uncertainties the lives of Adivasi communities in Khamman, East and West Godavari districts of Andhra Pradesh, Kunta block in Chattisgarh and Mou block in Odisha. A lot of forest land will be submerged. Saraswati Kavula’s Dam’ned highlights the impending loss of land that will destroy a way of living that the Adivasi have been used to for generations.
Victor Stardubtsev’s The Pearl of the City tell the story of the love Siberian dwellers of Zheleznogorsk have for their hand-made blue pearl, the city lake, while Mohammad Ehsani’s Lady Urmia documents the story of Lake Urmia in northwest Iran which is drying up completely. The film takes on the voice of the lake itself, demanding help and aid from the international community.
In paying heed to the crucial need to keep rivers and seas clean, in creating awareness of how much a dam destroys, in questioning, at what cost a nation’s development, the water film festival was relevant and attuned to a changing world. Among a society that is increasingly becoming concerned about the price of industrialisation and ‘development’, the films and documentaries that the water film festival team chose to screen were apt, relevant, disturbing and lent themselves to much food for thought.
