Welcome Guest! You are here: Home » Views & Analysis

What I saw at Kerala film festival 2024

The 29th International Film Festival of Kerala (IFFK) and so many highlighted films are marvellous masterpieces addressing human pain, offering a platform for social commitment and historical justice

Sunday December 22, 2024 9:33 PM, Musharraf Hussain

This country has tremendous festivals to celebrate, as the population and culture are so diverse from North to South, with hundreds of religious, seasonal, and cultural events every year. As its plurality and diversity, there is so much literature and cinema as well.

Still, mainstream media and advertisement keep the constraint limited to films with vested agendas that often fuel religious hatred, historical misinformation, and polarisation in a society that already hasn’t recovered from the fracture lines of partition, seven decades back in the Indian sub-continent.

Movies like "Kashmir File" lime lighting conflict zones in a particular narrative which helps the agenda of communal thought processing as well as promotion and hero-worshipping of misogynistic and rowdy clutter like the Bollywood movie “Animal”.

In all this sea of hopelessness and embedded narratives, one ample eye moment was the recent 29th International Film Festival of Kerala (IFFK) in Trivandrum. It covered works of wizards of cinematography, keeping the idea of contemporary cinema alive in a country where the ideas of social cohesion, freedom of expression and solidarity with oppressed in different parts of the world who are suffering the onslaught of neo-colonial global powers is already under scrutiny and highly affected by fascist narratives and meddled policies. The current generation is already under a facade of constrained information or fast-forwarded narratives ranging from reels, cinema, and multimedia consumed every day.

The opening film of 29th IFFK was an interesting choice, a Brazilian movie “I am still here’’ directed by Walter Salles, a screenplay on the enforced disappearance of dissidents by Brazilian military dictatorship in the 1980s. What I could see was a focused audience for 135 minutes with teary eyes, utmost silence, accolades, and a standing ovation at the end.

The film was played in the evening in open-air theatre at Nishagandhi Auditorium. It was appreciated by a mixed audience and a place that may not have ever seen or experienced or shunned a thought of militarisation but as humans we are bound by feelings of affinity towards sharing bitter pains.

It gives one a sense that despite linguistic differences, movies creating a sense of social commitment and portraying historical injustices may outrival mainstream genre production, just not at market values but with a deep impact on social upliftment in terms of convergent thinking.

Overall, more than fifty international movies screened at the Kerala film festival at 7 different venues in a dozen different languages. Few of them have also covered sensitive and preceptive international issues ranging from Palestinian struggle and apartheid in the West Bank. The crisis of refugees in Greece and the EU border, especially during 2014 at the peak of the Syrian civil war. Hundreds of thousands marched towards Germany, Italy, and other European nations in search of a better life and asylum, while many faced the fate of getting drowned in the Mediterranean Sea on dingey boats at the hands of shady human traffickers and smugglers.

One such masterpiece movie screened was “The Teacher’’ Arabic word standing for Ustaaz. It depicts the political commitment of a Palestinian school teacher and his relations with students, trying to improve their lives while keeping the constraint of the struggle for national liberation and personal losses.

Apart from the movie plot, it renders the reality of settler colonialism in the West Bank of Palestinian territory, colonial apartheid, and misery at checkpoints every day one goes through. Burning of crops of olives, confiscation of lands, and military courts where even juveniles face long imprisonments for mere stone-throwing incidents at Israeli military vehicles. One may remember the famous poem written by the late Palestinian national poet Mahmoud Darwish on March 30 which is marked as the "Land Day" in Palestine.

If the olive trees knew the hands that planted them, their oil would become tears.
The olive tree is the colour of peace, if peace needed a colour.
No one says to the olive tree: How beautiful you are!
But: How noble and how splendid!
And she...
She who teaches soldiers to lay down their rifles ….

Such masterpieces like "The Teacher" generate absolute rawness of complex geopolitical places and understanding miseries of the common man without compromising the beauty of social engagement and cinematic poetry.

The last gem of this event was a movie directed by Mahdi Fleifel, recently released in 2024 “To a land Unknown” revolving around Arab refugees in Athens undergoing the worst mental traumas and ripping off by human smugglers and survival in the streets. This may focus on a particular event, but it comprehends one to think of fate evading refugees created by wars and onslaughts in one place which leads to a catastrophe. It rips off social tranquillity and even provides a guileful opportunity to political actors for meddling narratives, one can see the rise of AfD in Germany, Turkish election narratives, and even controversial laws in this country regarding the Citizenship Act and CAA. In the end, the real sufferer is the refugee who may not keep their basic dignity and have no control over their fate and future.

The festival and so many highlighted films are marvellous masterpieces addressing human pain, offering a platform for social commitment and historical justice. At the same time keeping alive the idea of contemporary cinema and a platform for the paramour of cinematic poetry free from propaganda and divisive agenda-based sponsored movies maintaining cultural discourse.

[Musharraf Hussain (Mush) is a student at IISC Bangalore. Views are personal. Suggestions, queries and gossip is highly appreciated. He can be contacted via email dreamsanddestiny99@gmail.com.]

Follow ummid.com WhatsApp Channel for all the latest updates.

Select Language To Read in Urdu, Hindi, Marathi or Arabic.

 

....

..