On the Indian documentary Nocturnes, shot in Arunachal Pradesh, which won an award at Sundance Film Festival 2024

My review of Anirban Datta and Anupama Srinivasan's documentary Nocturnes. 

Nocturnes won the World Cinema Documentary Special Jury Award for Craft at the Sundance Film Festival a few hours after my piece was published on Moneycontrol.com, on 27 January 2024.

A still from the Sundance-award-winning Indian documentary Nocturnes.

We hear them before we see them -- a faint but persistent rustling in the darkness, which turns out to be the fluttering of a million little wings. And when we first see the moths, they seem tiny, insignificant. Why, we wonder, would two human beings spend so much time and effort on them? A few moments later, though, we see the two researchers again. This time, walking along a forest path, dwarfed almost entirely by the dark green tree canopy that takes up most of the frame, it is humans who seem insignificant, just a speck on the surface of the earth. 

Of such glorious visual revelations is Nocturnes made. Directed by long-time Delhi-based non-fiction filmmakers Anirban Dutta and Anupama Srinivasan, the 2024 documentary which premiered at the Sundance Film Festival in Utah, USA earlier this week was shot on location in the misty mountainous forests of Arunachal Pradesh. This is not Datta and Srinivasan’s first work in the Northeast: their previous collaboration, Flickering Lights, which won the top prize for cinematography at the International Documentary Film Festival Amsterdam (IDFA) in 2023, was about electrification -- or the lack of it -- in a village in Manipur. 

Anirban Datta, one of Nocturnes'
two directors

 Nocturnes, unlike FL, approaches science not   through pragmatics or politics but as a source of   wonder. We follow Mansi Mungee, an Indian   entomologist in her 30s, as she traverses the   forests of the Eastern Himalayas in search of the   hawk moth. She is accompanied by Gendan   “Bicki” Marphew, a young man from the local   Bugun community who works part-time as her   photographer-assistant. Sometimes other   collaborators appear, too, but the point of view   remains very much Mansi’s. As she and Bicki scout out locations, we learn about the practicalities she must keep in mind: the specific elevation or height above sea level; the presence of old-growth trees; the existence of a forest clearing to enable light from the moth screen to travel some distance -- but also some natural limits to that clearing, so that the moths that show up can be assumed to have come from a single elevation. 

Anupama Srinivasan, one of Nocturnes' 
two directors

Sukanta Majumdar’s impeccable location sound brings the forest to life, overlaid by Nainita Desai’s almost eerie musical compositions complementing our sense of visual discovery. But the work of science is not glamorous, and Yael Bitton’s editing stays close to the precision and slowness and often repetitive labour of the process: recording, measuring, comparing, evaluating. We get a real sense of the long hours spent waiting, with little control over the outcome of their labours. Night upon night, the researcher and her assistant are awake into the wee hours, their headlamps and hoods abuzz with winged visitors -- hoping that their little island of light will attract at least some of the specific creatures that they are here to study. But there are no guarantees of anything, and in these moments, scientific work begins to echo the practice of faith. 

At one point, when Mansi sketches out the route along which she intends to map the population of hawk moths, and explains to her assistants that they need to take two hundred photographs at each point on it, one of them stops her. “How long will this take?” he asks. Mansi’s reply is immediate: “However long. Four months, five months, two years -- whatever it takes, we’ll do it.” That commitment to a timeline without end feels like deep romance, especially in a world that thinks it needs everything faster and wants nothing forever. 

Several recent Indian documentaries have gained worldwide attention by training their lenses on the subcontinent’s infinitely various natural world and the relationships we have with some particular aspect of it. Kartiki Gonsalves’ The Elephant Whisperers (2022) won an Academy Award for its portrait of the man-animal bond through one couple and an elephant in Mudumalai, Rahul Jain’s Invisible Demons (2022) mapped the apocalyptic state of Delhi’s polluted air, while Shaunak Sen’s All That Breathes (2022) achieved a brilliant mix of the poetic and political with its mordant portrait of two Delhi-based brothers who run a hospital for injured kites. 

Nocturnes is a quieter, smaller film than both the latter, the filmmakers having chosen a milieu with less scope for ecological handwringing or socio-political critique. But neither does it resort to crowd-pleasing appeals of the orphaned baby elephant variety. It just nudges us to slow down and look -- at gossamer spider webs trembling in the weak morning light, a caterpillar looping itself along the strength of a slender branch, the mist unfurling over a dark forested valley, and most often, at its mysterious world of whirring creatures that sometimes live only a few days, but whose ancestors have been on the planet since before the dinosaurs. Like its researcher protagonist, it hides a deep existential investment in its subject under an implacable workaday front. 

The film’s least successful moments, for me, are those when its almost meditative focus on time and labour and the eternal ‘show’ of nature is punctured by overt moments of ‘tell’: Mansi verbalising her enchantment with the species she studies, or asking existential questions to which science may not have any answers: “Why are moths so variegated in colour and pattern? Why do they thrive in these remote forests?” It would also have been interesting to see a little more of the indigenous Bugun and Shertukpen communities, who are thanked in the credits as “the guardians of this forest”. But that would have been a different film, and for now, this one is quite enough.

First published in Moneycontrol on 27 Jan, 2024.

The smells of others

My Mirror column:

Nicholas Kharkongor's Delhi-set dramedy Axone traces some of the fault lines that mark the urban Indian melting pot.

Growing up between cultures, I learnt long ago that smell was most people’s strongest, most intimate sense – and thus the one that lent itself most easily to kneejerk reactions, especially with relation to food. Members of my family’s staunchly vegetarian side, North Indian Jains of the not-even-egg variety, have sat me down as a child to tell me how difficult they found it to keep their own food down while having their nostrils assailed by the fried fish smells wafting down from a tenant’s house.

Nicholas Kharkongor’s film Axone, recently released on an online platform, is named for the strong-smelling fermented soya bean paste that forms a necessary ingredient in many traditional northeastern dishes. Often spelled akhuni, axone has a distinctive smell that you can’t ignore – which makes it a useful metaphorical marker of difference. And differences that cannot be ignored make for a strange but potent cocktail of attraction and repulsion.

That mixture of attraction and repulsion appears sharply in the film, in the alternately lascivious and judgemental gaze that Delhi folk turn upon the young northeasterners in their midst – being judged by the women for wearing ‘Western’ clothes and having boyfriends, while being the object of the men’s unsolicited attentions. But that attraction and repulsion also plays out, perhaps unintendedly, in Axone’s own cinematic form. The film plays out the food/smell motif against a tenant-landlord scenario in one of those urban villages in Delhi that thrum with the sounds of many languages, focusing on a group of friends from the Northeast who have to make an akhuni-flavoured pork curry for a last-minute wedding feast. That food-and-wedding narrative, though, feels like a mere sweetener, an attractive hook on which to hang a script full of bitter – abeit necessary – pills. Kharkongor's central concern is the racism, sexual predatoriness and aggression that migrants from the Northeast are forced to suffer in Delhi (and most other Indian cities). But what he does is to take that disturbing narrative and plonk it down in a Delhi-set middle class comedy that has become a Bollywood subgenre from Do Dooni Chaar and Vicky Donor to Queen to Badhaai Ho.

So alongside the central group of friends, we get a fairly detailed glimpse of the landlord's family: the hard-nosed landlady (Dolly Ahluwalia doing a version of her alcohol-swigging Punjabi grandmother from Vicky Donor), her layabout son-in-law (Vinay Pathak) and her overenthusiastic grandson, the curly-haired Shiv (Rohan Joshi). Shiv's multiple machinations and largely well-meaning mistakes form some of the film's warmer bits of comedy, but his father and grandmother's characters feel derivative and ungrounded. Still, there is something to be said for the fact that the homogenous lower-middle-class Punjabi milieu, a staple of so many previous Delhi films, has finally been extended to a whistle-stop tour of the very real admixture of so many Delhi neighbourhoods like Humayunpur, where locals rent out parts of their properties to people from across India and beyond.

Axone gently impresses upon us that everyone judges each other, using community and skin colour and language to make easy categorisations. If the Hindi-speaking landlords claim not to be able to tell northeastern faces apart, or remember their names, then the Nepali girl, too, can't get her head around her African neighbour's name – and the African neighbour, in turn, makes an assumption about her based on her looks. And the whole group of northeastern friends keep their distance from the landlord’s son, whose interest in them is very much a curious fascination with the coolness their clothes, their English-speaking-ness, their music represent for him.

Kharkongor’s real sympathies, though, lie with Chanbi, Upasana, Zorem and Bendang (played by Lin Laishram, Sayani Gupta, Tenzing Dalha and Lanuakum Ao), each of whom is dealing with their own troubles. Even here, however, his script constantly points out how their relationships with each other, and with themselves, are inflected by the politics of identity and belonging. These include some small observations that shape the plot – like the perceived difference between being Nepali and being northeastern, and other observations that don’t quite go the distance – like the fake American accent or the Bollywood lyrics that are needed to get by in a world in which those languages have bigger markets. But whether it be the northeastern man who feels emasculated by racist North Indian violence, or the northeastern woman exhausted by nonstop sexual slurs and harassment, Axone brings home the trauma and injustice of the migrant northeastern experience as perhaps no Hindi film has before.

Published in Mumbai Mirror, 21 Jun 2020.