Hey peoples!!
So, to get a feel, an “aura” even, of the myriad films in the festival, I took a gander at the Auroville Film Festival website (filmfestival.auroville.org) and looked at their synopses and trailers and where possible looked up the full films on YouTube.com. Here is my humble selection of the best that the Film Festival has to offer….
The first film that leapt off the screen and tightly grasped my attention was the charming little documentary, “Bangla Surf Girls”. This is a story of three slum-dwelling Bangladeshi girls who discover surfing which turns out to be an outlet from the grid-locked rigid societal structure they live in. The film contains a counter-friction, dissent and resistance to the prevailing social mores… which goes to the point of the girls being slut-shamed for surfing. The three protagonists—the “Bangla Surf Girls”—immediately won me over to their side as I felt an expansiveness with their “escape to the sea”. Poignantly, one of the girls says she is only happy when she is surfing, while the rest of the time she is depressed. The fact that the girls have to battle limiting social pressures is, as an overarching world-building, deftly handled by the documentarian as the central conflict of a well-wrought tale. The girls’ increasing self-confidence and growing prowess at surfing gets us to cheer on and root for these girls as the documentary evolves as a delightful, yet gritty, coming-of-age story.
“Dagh Dagh Ujala” (“This Stained Dawn”) is a timely documentary on feminism in Pakistan, centred around a multi-city Aurat March (Women’s March). The film wishes to portray the combat with patriarchy and orthodoxy, and establish feminine bodily autonomy through the slogan “My Body, My Choice.” What is alarming is the backlash by Pakistan’s extreme Far-Right, which labels the movement as “vulgarity, lewdness, irreligious and heresy.” Shockingly the March is met with counter-protesters who throw rocks at the women. The film provided for me the notion of the dire immediacy of a need for a feminist movement in Pakistan. The film also relays a strong message about the formations of political organizing, strategies and movements, just as the film “The Square” did for Arab Spring in Egypt.
Out of the Auroville entries, which are mostly short films, the movie “Adithalam” (“Basic Education”) hollered at me. It’s a charming low-budget film. The most striking feature is its believability. There seems to be nothing fake or phony about the film, it comes across as genuine and authentic, from the acting to the simple plot to the reality of education in a small backward village. The young girl who plays the protagonist Saraswathy steals the show. Saraswathy struggles with her studies—she is in the sixth standard and can’t even sign her own name. Dismissed from school by the principal, the heart-warming turning point occurs when a dedicated teacher takes a personal interest in teaching Saraswathy. The film ends with Saraswathy not only taking part in an essay-writing competition, but winning it.
“The Clean Up” starts with a whimsical and even incongruous question as a premise: is a clean-up of the mind a prerequisite for the clean-up of a room, or vice versa? This short film is done in an abstract, wordless way with a lot of dancing. The best part of the film is that most of the cleaning has to do with cigarettes!
“Galaxy & Ganesha” consists of various renderings of Milky Way Galaxy-shaped designs, reifying the vision of transforming Auroville’s shape into such a pattern. The technique starts with sketches from tree bark that are rendered Galaxy-like through computer enhanced modifications. The idea is to signify the beauty that is created by the symbiosis between humanity and nature. Pretty brilliant!
Next, we come upon a little gem called “Island Reverie”. It is about a man returning to the island of his childhood and realising that he had never left…the most precious thing for him are the people. The film is so profound with artful gravitas that it can only speak for itself. Just take this line: “The golden light shining from within…revealing the weightlessness of the world.” The takeaway: learn to trust so that you can open your heart to new experiences. A must watch!
“A Maatram” (“A Change”) is a movie in which several lives are intertwined in the course of a day. From the initial few scenes, the film throws hints and suggestions of the connections between the various plot threads, which really are sub-plot threads. Although, I must admit the various sub-plots were not well delineated. In the attempt to “not give too much away”, the filmmakers hold back on the clarity of the intertwined connections. Although the connectivity is revealed in the end, the lack of more being revealed makes the film a little confusing.
“Fallin’”, another short, is through interpretive dance a kinetic expression of what love does, stands for, and means. In the end, however short the film was (five minutes), I had to think: “Okay, that was good.”
A very scintillating documentary on the list is “Aware: Glimpses of Consciousness”. Using premises such as “What is life?”, What is consciousness?”, “What does it mean to be aware of being aware?” the film deepens its adventure through the research of six experts in the field. Starting with these basic questions the film unfolds as a compellingly magical entity. The main crux is that consciousness is irreducible and is fundamental, not matter. The argument is that everything, including objects arise in consciousness, and that it is not consciousness that is emergent from the brain. The documentary is an odyssey that tries to portray consciousness as an all-pervading field. It is a journey to the final frontier of science and spirituality themselves—at the confluence of neuroscience, mysticism and metaphysics.
Alrighty then, I saved the best for last: “In the Light of Aurobindo—Plays and Savitri in Auroville”. It is about theatre and the artists involved who perform with devotion in, through and from the plays and the epic poem Savitri of Sri Aurobindo. The film delightfully dances with the inward thoughts, feelings and perceptions of the actors as they portray Sri Aurobindo’s works and the actual output on stage. Here, Sri Aurobindo’s work expresses the possibility (and inevitability) of human evolution. One actor cites the very act of performing takes the texts from the mere intellectual to being truly understood. Another says that he had to let go and trust the text. Yet another says acting became an immersion, a stepping into a hallowed, sacred space, which I saw manifested in the clips from the plays. The whole pivot of the documentary is how Sri Aurobindo’s works are purely, beautifully and powerfully put forth transforming the actors, the audience and the very space of the theatre, into a palpable collective experience. The refrain of the “invisible” sticks with me—the ineffability of the works coming to life with the actors as mediums and agents, at the same time, where their inwardness coheres with the collective expression of the piece acted out on stage.
Hey! My name is Gautam Emani. I moved to Auroville almost three months ago. I love the (once again, brace yourselves) “feel” of the place and find myself connecting with a lot of like-minded people, so I have decided to live here indefinitely. I hold an MFA in Creative Writing (Fiction) from New Mexico State University in the US. But please do check out the films I talked about—and as many of the ones I didn’t, as you can. This Film Festival will grant you sheer delight. I promise!
Peace n Love,
Gautam Emani
