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 Remembered Village

My Mirror column (7 June 2020):

A young filmmaker's atmospheric Maithili debut refracts the experience of his family's village home through layers of distance and memory.

Using an old house as the central motif for a film is not a new idea. Hrishikesh Mukherjee’s fine directorial debut Musafir (1957), an under-watched film that I discussed in an earlier edition of this column, made a house and its neighbourhood the common factor in a narrative about three separate sets of tenants. The French director Alain Resnais, better known for spare, intense films like Hiroshima Mon Amour and Night and Fog, used an outlandish 18th century chateau in the Ardennes Forest as the unifying setting for his era-jumping tripartite 1983 film Life Is a Bed of Roses (currently streaming online). More recently, the Ukrainian director Dar Gai’s dubiously named Teen Aur Aadha (2017) built a composite narrative around a 50-year-old Mumbai building in which there had been a school and a brothel as well as families. People leave, houses remain. Some memories don't need a house to dwell in: it can be a car. The Yellow Rolls-Royce, a somewhat overblown, star-studded 1965 film with everyone from Rex Harrison to Shirley MacLaine, had three very different lives linked only by the eponymous car. It was based on a play by Terence Rattigan, who apparently took the idea from a post-war German film called In Those Days, directed by Helmut Käutner, which used the seven lives of a car built in 1933 and dismantled in 1947 to comment on the Nazi era.

But Gamak Ghar doesn’t really remind you of other films. It reminds you of other houses.

Streaming on an online platform for another day, 23-year-old Achal Mishra's debut feature is a quiet love letter to his grandparents' village home in Madhopur, Bihar. Mishra uses a three-part structure, beginning in 1998 and ending in 2019, and the house does allow us to see its owners grow older, change, move away and return. But Mishra is not interested in plot.

His set is the actual house that he visited twice a year as a child, but whose role in even the family’s ceremonial life began to decrease as the grandparents died. His characters – if you can call them that – are fictionalised versions of his own extended family, played by a mixed cast garnered from amongst existing local actors and acquaintances who had not acted before. And his narrative interest is a socio-economic transition that is specific to his own upper caste Maithil Brahmin family as well as familiar to many, many migrant families across India whose connections with the village have grown irreversibly distant, especially in the decades since liberalisation.

What makes Gamak Ghar unusual is its single-minded interest in capturing a certain experience of time and space. Mishra has, in a recent interview, mentioned the writer Amit Chaudhuri as one of his sources of inspiration, and one can see why. From its very first frames, the film refuses even a glimmer of drama for stillness, displaying a conviction that art can lie in the observation and recreation of sensory detail. So we see the piles of Malda mangoes from the family orchard, and the curds set in an array of flat earthen pots. We observe how people look through a mosquito net, we watch the smoke rising from an agarbatti. We remember rooms lit at night by a hurricane lamp, and recall how tuneless the singing can often be during a religious ritual.

There is almost nothing flashily cinematic here, though an occasional filmic reference gets made – most obviously when a conversation about one of the brothers moving to Delhi is followed by a stunningly beautiful shot of a train viewed through a field of snowy-white kaash flowers, a la Pather Panchali, evoking and portending Apu’s move to the city later in Ray’s Apu Trilogy. There are rapt faces bathed in the glow of a TV screen, and the lone female cousin who, when asked “Sunny Deol or Salman Khan”, says a categorical no to watching a Salman film on the VCR.

And as the film traverses the last two decades, the nods to change are everywhere. We watch as the large wooden bed on which the men played cards in the balcony is replaced by wooden chairs over the years, and then dull brown plastic ones; we note the gradual shift from community feasts laid out on the floor – where everyone knew exactly how much someone was eating and could make fun of them for their appetite – to meals served on chairs apart from each other, and finally, meals eaten by each brother alone in a bedroom.

Evocative and nostalgia-inducing as these sights and sounds are, I was glad that Mishra seems simultaneously able to suggest that this world we have lost – or are in the process of losing – was held up by all sorts of hierarchies and rigidities that we took for granted. In the rosy remembered time of family togetherness in the 1990s, for instance, the women cooked vast meals and looked after the children, while the men played cards and demanded to know whether the food was ready. The daughter-in-law who covers her head with a ghoonghat all through the first segment has become a confident Delhi woman a decade later, leaving her hair open.

But she still joins her sisters-in-law to chop vegetables for the family dinner. The links with the past aren't quite broken yet. At the end, the roof is being dismantled -- but it is part of a house renovation, to host a new child's initiation ceremony. Gamak Ghar isn’t meant to be a sociological or anthropological record, and yet it is that thing we rarely produce in India: a self-conscious cinematic document.

Published in Mumbai Mirror,  7 Jun 2020. 

Isolated incidents

My Mirror column (3rd May 2020):

Placebo takes a personal deep dive into one of India's premier medical colleges and comes up with a disturbing, affecting vision of where we’re headed.

In 2011, a young filmmaker made a visit to his younger brother Sahil, who was studying to be a doctor at India’s premier medical college, the All India Institute of Medical Sciences in Delhi. It was the time of the annual college festival, Pulse, and as happens during ‘fest’ season, enthusiasms and emotions were running high. Before the night was over, Sahil had been admitted to hospital, with his right arm so badly damaged that he would not be able to return to the hostel for three months. The twist, though, is what made the tale possible: Abhay, the filmmaker brother, didn’t go home with Sahil. He decided to stay on his brother’s hostel instead, gradually inserting himself in – and his handycam is – into life on the AIIMS campus. And so began the dark, dark cinematic ride that is Placebo.

Free to stream on YouTube, Placebo is a strange and vivid film, combining special effects, hand-drawn black and white animation, found footage and still photographs with Abhay Kumar's footage. The 96 minutes that we finally see on screen apparently draws on 800 hours of footage, and the filmmaker edited 80 different versions before finalising this one. That process sounds terrifying. The film is a little less so – but not by much.

Placebo is a film about many aspects of the Indian present seen through a sharply angled lens: education, privilege, individualism, community, institutional failure and our failures as a society. Kumar starts by pointing to the competition that these students have dealt with to reach these peeling hostel buildings. According to a statistic cited in the film, MIT has an admittance rate of 9 per cent, and Harvard (the university, I'm assuming, not the medical school) has one of 7 per cent. The rate for AIIMS’s is 0.1 per cent.

Kumar’s voiceover repeatedly emphasises the 'brightness' of these students, and they mirror his framing, telling stories that reveal their sense of achievement in having, as we say in North Indian slang, “cracked” the medical entrance. But watching these nerdy young men talk about girls or play music or collapse in laughter after a doobie or a round of bhang pakoras consumed appropriately on Mahashivratri, what one is struck by is precisely how ordinary their desires are. They seem like any other 23-year-olds, with the same fears and desires and anxieties as young men everywhere – just bearing a heavier weight of academic/professional expectation, without the emotional or therapeutic support structure needed to deal with the pressure. Those who break, the film shows, are not helped to mend themselves. The cracks are papered over, and the fragments swept under a carpet.

All that the Indian educational system seems to have given these young men is the heady sensation of entering an elite. The path from AIIMS could take them on to a well-paying career as a doctor, or a powerful position in the Indian civil services, or to more specialised medical research in India, but more desirably in the USA. There is ambition aplenty – but even among the four or five students that Placebo keeps in fairly tight focus, there is no sense of a vocation.

There's Sethi, a fair North Indian chikna hero type who says his greatest desire is to “look good naked” – “like the guy in American Beauty”. He categorises the species called girls into different colours: “There are orange girls, there are green girls”, and the one who got away, “she was so white”. Sethi wants to be confident enough to ask out girls in America. Getting to America is his second ambition after getting to AIIMS.

There's the tall, bespectacled, pudgy-faced Saumya Chopra, who begins his AIIMS life terrified of ragging but becomes the senior who's suspended for two months in 2008 after a Supreme Court judgement makes the authorities crack down on ragging incidents. There's a tangent here that the film doesn't follow, about how our educational culture is so toxic and so isolating that ragging was the only way to forge intergenerational connections.

There's K, the most meditative of the lot, whose self-reflection does not in fact help him deal with his inner demons. “The respect I have for the word doctor is far more than the respect I have for me as a doctor,” K tells Abhay.

Ostensibly at the other end of that spectrum is someone like Saumya, who's only answer to why he wants to be a doctor is “My parents want me to be a doctor.” “What do you want?” asks the filmmaker. “Whatever my parents want,” comes Saumya's reply. “Our life is a debt to our parents... You can't pay it back ever but one must try at least.”

Saumya's words reminded me of another young Indian captured on camera in a documentary: a Durga Vahini leader-in-the-making called Prachi Trivedi, in Nisha Pahuja's superb 2014 film The World Before Her, who says she would do whatever her father wanted, because she was eternally grateful to him for not having aborted her as a female foetus.

This idea that our earthly existence is essentially beholden to our parents feels chilling to me, and will do to many who see human beings as free-standing individuals. Yet the flip side of that individuation is also a chilling aspect of Placebo, and particularly resonant in these solitary, socially distanced times. As K says to the filmmaker: “Even though we have been talking for so many months, you and me, we're isolated, that is a fact.”

It is a bleak vision of humanity, but perhaps also a self-fulfilling one.

It is a bleak vision of humanity, but also a self-fulfilling

Read more at:
https://mumbaimirror.indiatimes.com/opinion/columnists/trisha-gupta/isolated-incidents/articleshow/75513645.cms??utm_source=contentofinterest&utm_medium=text&utm_campaign=cppst

It is a bleak vision of humanity, but also a self-fulfilling

Read more at:
https://mumbaimirror.indiatimes.com/opinion/columnists/trisha-gupta/isolated-incidents/articleshow/75513645.cms??utm_source=contentofinterest&utm_medium=text&utm_campaign=cppst

Published in Mumbai Mirror, 3 May 2020. You can watch the film for free, here.

Book review: An Englishman In Pune

A tiny book review of a not-so-tiny book, for India Today magazine in February:

Uday S. Kulkarni’s rendezvous with James Wales is a trip down an 18th century lane in India.

One of the first records of the artist James Wales is from 1777. Aged 30, he was evicted from his two-room tenement for failing to pay rent. According to the Edinburgh City Archives, his belongings were auctioned for £11 to pay off his landlady. In 1783, Wales moved to London and set himself up as a portrait and landscape painter. A chance meeting with the artist James Forbes led to a commission to complete Forbes’s sketches of India and, in 1791, with permission from the East India Company, Wales, by then 44 years old, boarded a ship for Bombay. 

Uday S. Kulkarni’s book is a painstakingly detailed and fulsomely illustrated account of Wales’s career in India, where he lived from July 1791 till his sudden death in November 1795. India had proven to be good for Wales—by February 1792, he was advertising a framed set of engraved prints of his ‘Twelve Views in Bombay’ for Rs 350. But the real turnaround in his fortunes came when Charles Malet, long-time British Resident, suggested Wales move to Pune. Based on Malet’s recommendations, he became the painter of choice for the local elite, from the Peshwa and Nana Phadnis to Company officials.

Wales’s masterful oil portraits (‘Peshwa in Durbar attended by his Minister’, ‘Nana Phadnis’, ‘Mahadji Scindia’, and ‘Con Saib’, a portrait of Nuruddin Hussain Khan) and his watercolours (of Ellora and Elephanta, among other antiquarian sites) provide a rare visual record of late 18th century India. But what makes this more than a coffee table book is Wales’s daily journals and frequent letters to England, which bring to life this enterprising, curious foreigner’s experience of a lost world, from ‘nautch’ girls dancing before antelopes at the Maratha durbar to observing preparations for a local sati. 

 

Published in India Today, 28 Feb 2020.

Love, Lies and Videotape

My Mirror column:
 
How Francois Truffaut, who'd have been 88 this February, created an on-screen alter ego from 1959 to 1979, weaving happily between life and fiction

Jean-Pierre Léaud as Antoine Doinel in Love on the Run (1979), the last of Francois Truffaut's Doinel films.

There's a quick moment in Francois Truffaut's Love on the Run (1979) where the film's hero Antoine Doinel (a middle-aged but still childish version of the alter ego character Truffaut introduced with his first feature The 400 Blows) tells his son Alphonse that he must practice the violin. “What will happen if I don't?” asks the long-haired little boy. “You'll end up as a music critic,” says Antoine, poker-faced.

The filmmaker who arguably founded the French New Wave isn't undignified enough to milk the line for laughs. We hear it, we move on. But we do so knowing that Truffaut has made one of his frequent joking references to his own life – and as often the case with Truffaut, we don't quite know who the joke is on. Because Francois Truffaut, who was born 88 years ago this month -- on February 6, 1932 -- began his career in cinema as a critic.

After a troubled childhood that landed him in a reformatory, much like Antoine Doinel, Truffaut had come to the notice of legendary film critic Andre Bazin. Over eight years in the pages of the journal Cahiers du Cinema, he grew into an influential voice, critiquing the commercial French cinema of the time. Truffaut wanted people to stop thinking of good cinema as derived from literature or tied too strongly to a script. He called for much greater freedom, new technology such as the handheld camera, and improvisation that allowed for the visual qualities of cinema to be foregrounded.

Oddly for someone trying to emphasise the cinematic over the literary, Truffaut's references remained bookish. His famous “auteur theory” is essentially the claim that the director is the “author” (French: 'auteur') of a film just as the writer is of a book, his sensibility expressed by means of “the camera-pen” (French: 'le camera-stylo'). His filmic alter ego Antoine makes a shrine to the great French writer Balzac in his room as an adolescent. In Love on the Run, the last of the Antoine films, he works as a proofreader, having published one novel and speaking of writing another.

In another Truffaut film, The Man Who Loved Women (1977), the hero Bertrand seeks inspiration for writing an erotic autobiography in other memoirs. “How do you write about yourself? How did others do it?” he asks, coming to the conclusion that there are no rules: for any author, “his writing is as personal to him as his fingerprints”. Love on the Run, made two years later, is also full of conversations about fiction and autobiography, often scorning what might be seen as Truffaut's own artistic project by way of criticising Antoine's. “I'm not smart,” says Antoine's wife Christine, “but I know this: writing to settle old scores isn't art.” Another long and funny sequence involves Antoine's childhood girlfriend Colette (the relationship depicted in the short Antoine and Colette) becoming curious about his literary avatar. Having spied him after many years just as he's divorcing Christine, Colette buys his first novel, and quickly sees that Antoine's 'fiction' is really the story of his life, rewritten to show himself in a better light. Confronted, Antoine agrees mournfully.

“You write well,” says Colette, “But you will never be a real writer until you write something that is pure fiction.” Antoine jumps up excitedly and tells her the plot of his planned second novel, or rather its wonderfully romantic beginning, in which a man picks up the pieces of a torn-up photograph from the floor of a phone booth and “falls madly in love” with the unknown woman whose face is in it. But even as Antoine -- the thin, nerdy-looking actor Jean-Pierre Léaud, who played him in all the five films (as well as acting in other films by Truffaut and Godard) – insists with a certain nervous energy that this is his imagination, what Truffaut puts on screen is Léaud as Antoine glueing together the image of Sabine, the woman we have already met in Love on the Run as his current girlfriend.

Depending on how you're feeling – in general about men, and in particular about male artists who cannibalise their own lives for art – it is possible to view the Antoine Doinel films as a charming piece of whimsy that entertained several viewers over several decades, or as an indulgent ride that no one except Truffaut should have been forced to go on, at least not after Antoine and Colette. Whichever side you pick, Love on the Run is a fascinating cinematic document: one of the world's most influential filmmakers dipping in and out of clips of his own previous films, to continue the fictional story of a character he created out of his own life, played by the same actor and many of the same co-actors as in clips. In one such clip, from The 400 Blows, we watch the 12-year-old Antoine buttonholed by a psychologist. “Your parents say you're a liar,” she says. The boy wriggles his shoulders, as if shrugging off the weight of that accusation. “Well, I lie sometimes,” he says. “Because if I told the truth, they wouldn't believe me. So I lie.”

Fiction always wins, at least in theory.

Published in Mumbai Mirror, 9 February 2020.

Film review: Seeing Allred

My review of an absorbing and important new documentary on Netflix, for India Today:

Lawyer Gloria Allred (right) with Norma McCorvey ('Jane Roe' in Roe vs. Wade), 1989

Seeing Allred is a fascinating introduction to a figure who ought to be better known outside the USA: the lawyer Gloria Allred. Allred, whose website calls her a “feminist lawyer” and “discrimination attorney”, is known for having battled some of America's most powerful men, across the political and social spectrum. She has represented Paula Jones against Bill Clinton, Summer Zervos against Donald Trump, murder victim Nicole Brown's family in the OJ Simpson trial, and 33 women who accuse the comedian Bill Cosby of sexual misconduct – some of whom appear in the film. Famous Allred targets the documentary doesn't name include Michael Jackson, Tiger Woods, Eddie Murphy, former Congressman Anthony Weiner and former Hewlett Packard CEO Mark Hurd.

However, Allred has also fought many cases away from the limelight, on sexual harassment, child support and workplace discrimination. She has been a long-term advocate of same-sex marriage and equal rights for transgenders. 

Filmmakers Roberta Grossman and Sophie Sartain follow the indefatigable 76-year-old as she meets clients, holds press conferences, appears in court and (very reluctantly) speaks of how her own life experiences – single motherhood, being raped at gunpoint and a back-alley abortion in a pre Roe vs Wade era – have shaped her career.

The film traces Allred's initiation into feminism and the law, including early pathbreaking suits: against a toy store for labelling good as “boys'” and “girls'”, against a fancy restaurant for having a 'women's menu' that didn't show prices, against a clothing store that charged more to alter women's clothes than men's. It also uses archival TV clips to present a colourful record of sexism in American popular culture. On one 80s debate, when Allred says, “We don't think our daughters should have to trade sexual favours in order to get a raise.” Then another female guest cuts in, “Why not, we did. How do you think we got on this show?” [Cue raucous laughter].

A vocal feminist long before it was fashionable, Allred is unpopular – to put it mildly. Critics paint her as publicity-hungry, money-minded, aggressive. But these charges fall away as we watch her meet warmly with dozens of grateful, often emotional clients, and respond calmly to nasty commenters.

What remains controversial is her use of the media as an extension of the courtroom – and sometimes in lieu of it. A 2017 New Yorker profile explained her approach as seeking “to influence the court of public opinion by getting the victim's perspective in the news”.

The feminist principle that victims of sexual assault and harassment must always be believed often conflicts with the legal principle that suspects are innocent until proven guilty. But in a world where women are still far from equal, Allred has no doubt which side needs her more.

A slightly shorter version of this review was published in India Today, 1 Mar 2018.

Frames of Production

My Mirror column:

Rahul Jain's spare and affecting documentary Machines, which is on an award-winning streak, turns our gaze onto the oft-ignored world of the factory floor.

"Most narrative films begin after work is over," runs the voice-over in Harun Farocki's 1995 film Workers Leaving the Factory. "Whenever possible, film has moved hastily away from factories." Rahul Jain's powerfully immersive documentary Machines, which premiered at Sundance and has picked up awards at a range of film festivals from Brazil to Greece before winning a Silver Gateway at MAMI's India Gold section last week, seems almost a response to that vaccuum. Unlike Farocki, who paid critical homage to that originary moment of cinema, the Lumiere Brothers' two minute film of workers leaving the Lumiere factory in 1895, but left us still positioned outside the factory gates, Jain takes us inside a cloth factory in Gujarat -- and keep us there for almost the whole 70 minutes.

The effect is often bleak and suffocating. The aim of Jain's film seems to be to make viewers experience, in whatever inadequate way we can, the ceaselessness of time inside that ur-space of capitalism: the factory. We watch as the workers labour through their days, in almost constant activity except the rare moments when they collapse in tired heaps. The camera is not intrusive, but it does not shy away either from these often bare bodies, sometimes clad in thin sleeveless vests that are no longer really white - their meagre coverings juxtaposed with the reams of fabric that surround them. For what seems like minutes at a stretch, we watch the nonstop motion of their limbs - stirring a vat of dye, slapping colour onto a pan, dragging a barrel along the floor. Everything is endless. Men unfurl fabric from gigantic rolls, it pools into unwieldy piles. There is little conversation. Who has the time to talk?

Very occasionally, Jain offers us a moment of pause: such as a sequence with the men bathing. This too is a silent act, though a collective one: four or five men hose each other down with a pipe, squatting, with their underpants on. For once, I felt sorrow rather than relief at the sign on the wall that informs us -- in Hindi, without a subtitle -- that the use of mobile phones is strictly prohibited. Farida Pacha's 2014 film My Name is Salt depicted backbreaking labour, too -- the making of salt in Kutch -- but the stunning desert locales and the presence of a family unit made the quiet seem organic. Here, the silence hangs heavy in the air, as if held in place by the only regular sounds that are permitted - the machines. The trundling of carts, the rumble of the conveyor belt, the twist and thud of cloth as it is printed and bundled.

Of course, the machines do not work themselves. Men are needed to work them. "God gave us hands, so we have to work," says one worker Jain interviews. He follows these words with visuals that echo them - a man daubing dye with his fingers, another using his palm to make a note, or perhaps a calculation. And yet there is something about the mechanised process that makes the labour of hands seem as far from human creativity as it is possible to be. As the German thinker Walter Benjamin pointed out almost a century ago, the rhythm of production on a conveyor belt means that the thing being worked on comes into the worker's range without his volition, and moves away from him just as arbitrarily. In working with machines (wrote Benjamin), workers must learn to coordinate "their own movements with the uniformly constant movements of an automaton."

In one of Machines' most affecting scenes, we watch a young worker - likely a teenager - almost falling asleep on his feet as he turns some interminable crank. The camera forces us to look as he fights his body's uncontrollable need for sleep: his eyelids drooping to a close, shuddering, waking up, yawning, looking sleepily towards us, then almost falling back to sleep before he wakes up again with a jolt. In a previous scene, the same young boy has spoken of how when he arrives at the factory gates each morning, he feels like turning back right then and there. Jain seems to gesture to the physicality of these reactions, the ways in which the body resists being broken in. "My gut tells me to leave," the boy says quietly. Then he stiffens and adds: "But it's not good to turn back."

Between his slow, deliberate and yes, aestheticized images of men turned machines, Jain presents us with a spare, distilled narrative of the systemic indebtedness and inequality that pushes these people into their positions. "Why am I working 12-hour-shifts here, far away from my parents and wife and children? There is no other solution, sir, this is the condition of poverty," says one man.

From a labourer who says he has never even seen the seth, we cut to the seth himself, in his well-lit office. "If I paid them more, they would just spend it on tobacco or something. They don't send money home. Almost 50% of them don't care about their families," he says, so convinced of his imagination that the fictional percentage comes easily. Jain does not dwell on the matter, but it is clear that this casual class disdain is crucial to the ideological smokescreens that perpetuate inequality. The seth watches these men labour all day on a CCTV screen, and yet he does not really see them. Machines will have achieved a great deal if we do.

Published in Mumbai Mirror, 22 Oct 2017.

Interview: Dharamshala International Film Festival 2017

An interview I did for Firstpost:

DIFF founders Ritu Sarin and Tenzing Sonam on the festival's sixth edition, and what sets it apart.

The Dharamshala International Film Festival (DIFF) turns six in November 2017. Ritu Sarin and Tenzing Sonam, the filmmaker couple who founded it in 2012, spoke with us about running a film festival, staying local while welcoming the world, and what makes DIFF different.

You've both lived in many places, across continents. Tell us about your connection with Dharamshala. What were the reasons you chose to settle down there?

Ritu: Tenzing and I had been living in London for many years when we decided to move back to India. We had two young kids and we were keen that they grew up in an environment where they would be part of both their Indian and Tibetan communities. Dharamshala was the perfect place for many reasons. My own family were originally from here. It is the home of the Dalai Lama and the centre of the exile Tibetan community, and a lot of our work is focused on issues around Tibet. And of course, it is a beautiful place!

How and when did the idea of DIFF first come to you? Why a film festival? And what were the necessary steps in bringing that idea to fruition?

Tenzing: We had lived in Dharamshala for a number of years when we began to feel the need for a contemporary cultural event that would bring together the town’s diverse communities. Although quite cosmopolitan in many ways, there were surprisingly few activities or cultural spaces in which Tibetans and Indians could jointly participate. As filmmakers, we had been to many film festivals around the world, so that was the most obvious thing we felt we could do.

Ritu: We were also interested in promoting an alternative cinema culture and encouraging filmmaking in a region that has very little access to contemporary cinema or art. Initially, the idea was to show a few films that Tenzing and I really liked and try and bring some filmmakers over.

In this era of torrents and Netflix, is there something about film festivals that still attracts people? What's been your experience over five years of running DIFF?

Ritu: Definitely! Firstly, watching a film in a theatre with an audience that shares your love of films is still a magical experience. In a festival, you also get to listen to the filmmakers and interact with them – that makes it even more special. Like-minded people come together for a few days for the pure pleasure of living, breathing and talking cinema.

Tenzing: When we started DIFF, like I said, our priority was to create a contemporary cultural event locally. But apparently, we had stumbled on an idea that was just waiting to be realised in India – the establishment of a personalised, cutting-edge, independent film festival, in a beautiful location away from the metros. The number of attendees has grown from 2000 people in 2012 to just under 6000 in 2016. Our volunteer force alone represents pretty much every corner of the country!

DIFF definitely feels rooted in Dharamshala. But given it's in such a tourist-friendly place, how do you maintain a balance between local participation and outside visitors?

Ritu: Yes, we underestimated the attraction an indie film festival in Dharamshala would have for a much wider audience. Now we're very aware of DIFF’s potential to enhance the town’s reputation as a cultural destination, and we do our best to cater to visitors from outside. We have a DIFF information-cum-registration booth in the main square at McLeod Ganj. We also run a shuttle service that ferries audiences from McLeod Ganj to our venue at the Tibetan Children’s Village and back. Through the DIFF website, we provide information on travel and accommodation and respond directly to queries relating to attending DIFF. At the venue, we set up a range of food and craft stalls in collaboration with community partners and ensure that our guests have plenty to do besides watching films. Also, our 80 volunteers are on hand to help visitors in every way.

But this does not really impact the way we run DIFF. By our reckoning around 50 percent of our audience comes from outside the Dharamshala area. I don’t have the figures for the split between delegate pass and student pass buyers at hand, but it’s probably half and half, and that’s because we give a lot of complimentary passes for local students to attend specific screenings.

Our priorities are still the same: to show quality independent films and to bring as many filmmakers as our limited resources allow; and to target local communities, especially through a series of outreach programmes. Through September and October this year, for instance, DIFF partnered with Jagori Rural Charitable Trust and the National Film Development Corporation of India to arrange a series of screenings in local schools, colleges, villages and at Dharamshala District Jail — all of which were tailored to meet the communities’ interests and concerns. Our Schools Film Appreciation Competition introduced around 45 students from six schools to the concept of active and critical engagement with cinema. At DIFF 2017, students from ten local schools will attend the Children's Programme, while another 10 local colleges will send students to watch Turup and Newton.

Do the same visitors come back every year? And if you're adding more new people every year, how do you ensure the small-scale indie spirit of the festival will survive? When something is successful, isn't there pressure to go bigger?

Tenzing: Yes, we get many returning film lovers who specifically plan their holidays around the festival. We’ve had loyal fans from as faraway as Hyderabad and Mumbai returning to the festival year after year. Many younger attendees have also returned as volunteers.

Ritu: Maintaining the personalised and intimate nature of DIFF is a huge priority for us. We believe that it is this quality that differentiates DIFF from other festivals. If we lose that, it will eventually become like any other large corporate-sponsored event. Having said that, even to maintain the festival at this level, it is a never-ending struggle to find funding. There are moments when one throws up one’s hands and wonders why we're doing this in the first place!

What has been the most unexpected part of running DIFF? 

Ritu: We never imagined the extent to which DIFF would attract audiences and filmmakers from all over India. It's become a platform for Indian indie filmmakers to showcase and discuss their work. In the past five years, we’ve welcomed most of the films and filmmakers who've made a mark on the Indian indie scene. 

Of course, with this success has also come much greater responsibility! We find ourselves in the strange and unpleasant position of having to turn down films — often not because they don’t deserve to be shown but because there simply is no space to accommodate every good film that we see. As filmmakers, we’ve been on the receiving end of this equation and know how disappointing it is when one’s film is not selected for a festival, which makes this part of the job even harder.

You're both longtime documentary filmmakers who have also made fiction. DIFF, too, makes space for epic fiction – say, Rajeev Ravi's Malayalam gangster film Kammatipadam last year — alongside shorts, children's films and searingly honest, intimate non-fiction, like Sean MacAllister's A Syrian Love Story. Do your audiences respond differently to fiction and non-fiction? Is there a hierarchy in people's minds?

Tenzing: Although we are primarily documentary filmmakers, we’ve been avid cinephiles since our college days. We love all kinds of films – docs, fiction, experimental – and we were clear that we would not have any specific criteria; we would simply show films that we loved and felt were important to share. This accounts for the eclectic nature of the films that screen at DIFF.

Ritu: As far as we’ve noticed, there isn’t an obvious separation in the way audiences approach the different kinds of films we screen. We’ve had full houses for films as diverse as Sonita, a documentary, and A Korean in Paris, a dramatic feature, with audiences overlapping both.

How do you choose films for the festival?

Ritu: We follow international film festivals and if we read about a film that sounds interesting to us, we contact the sales agent and get a screener. At the same time, we reach out to a network of filmmakers and film festival programmers from around the world to send us recommendations. And of course, we watch films ourselves at film festivals that we attend. In this way, we build up a long-list of films, which we then start watching. We have an informal group of friends who help us in this process. The final shortlist also depends on various other factors, some of which are beyond our control: e.g. the screening fee may be too expensive for us to afford, or the film might not be available on Blu-ray or as a digital file (we don’t have facilities to screen from DCPs). As far as possible, we also try and select films where the filmmakers can attend.

What are the films you're most excited about this year?

Tenzing: It’s always difficult to single out films as each film is there for a particular reason. However, this year, we’re particularly proud to be having the South Asian premieres of three experimental films: Amar Kanwar’s Such a Morning, Naeem Mohaiemen’s Tripoli Cancelled, and Tan Pin Pin’s In Time To Come.

You mentioned that your volunteers come from all over India. I can vouch for the fact that they really make DIFF what it is. How do you find them, or they you?

Ritu: Yes, our volunteers are the lifeblood of the festival. We've even had some from abroad! We put out a volunteer call on social media and a word-of-mouth network seems to do an amazing job of alerting people. Before we know it, we are inundated with applications. We also get many repeat volunteers, and friends of past volunteers. The enthusiasm of the volunteers is all the more remarkable considering the fact that they have to make their own way to Dharamshala and take care of their own accommodation. We only provide food and transport during the festival. One perk that the volunteers get is that they work in shifts and get to watch films for free during their off times.

Last question — what would you say to someone who dreams of running a film festival?

Ritu: Be prepared for a lot of very hard work, including spending a lot of time pursuing the thankless task of fund-raising! But if you stick with it, the sense of satisfaction and fulfilment you get at the end is enormous.

Published in Firstpost.

2016: From Fact to Fiction

My Mirror column:

A list of my favourite films from 2016 – in which real life is a recurring theme.


The year-end list is a bit of a hallowed tradition among critics, and having failed to fulfil that expectation at the end of 2016, I want to do so before the first month of 2017 comes to an end. Let me begin with the necessary caveat: this is not a list that pretends to anything like exhaustiveness. Like all such lists, it is a selection drawn from the films I happened to watch in 2016 and, like me, it is reasonably eclectic and yet not quite as wide-ranging in sweep as it could be.

In terms of language, for instance, this is a list that tilts very much in the direction of Hindi cinema – but I have included some films in other Indian languages that enjoyed the privilege of what we insist on calling a 'national' release: A few shows each in a couple of multiplexes in the bigger Indian cities, accessible to those of us who can pay and are willing to read English subtitles.

This is the first part of a two-part column, and the five films I list below, while starkly different from each other in tenor and sensibility, are united by the fact that they are all fictional engagements with people and events that we know to have existed in the real world.

Visaranai (The Interrogation) was India's entry to the 2017 Oscars. (It is no longer in the race.)

1. Visaranai (The Interrogation): Vetrimaaran's harrowing film is based on a real-life memoir, offering a blow-by-blow account of the torture a group of young Tamil-speaking migrants suffer at the hands of a posse of Telugu policemen who pick them up under pressure to 'crack' a high-profile case. Tautly crafted and stuffed with affecting performances, Visaranai's devastating home truths about how deep the rot runs in police 'investigation' have managed to travel far and wide while retaining an unapologetic dramatic excess that I can only characterise as Indian.

2. Aligarh: Hansal Mehta's film – also drawing on something that was 'covered' in the newspapers – is a portrait of a deeply lonely man: The casualty of a society quick to stigmatise anyone not exactly like themselves, and a media that does not hesitate to invade anyone's privacy. This is a media that speaks less and less for the individual, and more and more for the mob it is helping to create. Mehta and his screenwriter Apurva Asrani have justly been applauded for placing the right to sexual choice on an abstract moral map – but what makes the film so effective is its ability to make potentially unsympathetic audiences perceive Dr Siras in his particular individuality.

3. Neerja: Yet another instance of a fiction feature informed by factual events, Ram Madhvani's film about the Indian flight attendant who was killed trying to save passengers during a 1986 hijack gave us another unlikely heroine, and an unexpectedly convincing performance from Sonam Kapur. Like Deepu Sebastian Edmond, on whom Rajkummar Rao's journalist character is based in Aligarh, all Neerja Bhanot was trying to do was to do her job well. Making heroism flow from something as ordinary as that – following the rules rather than trying to think out of the box – helped recuperate for us the long-lost Hindi cinema ideal of ‘farz’.

4. Raman Raghav 2.0: Marking the return of Anurag Kashyap to top form, this film is less about humanising heroes and more about humanising villains. It's scary stuff, with Kashyap and Vasan Bala's present-day reimagining of a‘60s serial killer given chillingly ordinary form by Nawazuddin Siddiqui. Siddiqui's outstanding performance is hard to rival, but Vicky Kaushal's cokeaddled Raghavan does add an additional layer to the sinister vision of police impunity laid out in Visaranai.

                    

5. Dangal: A wonderfully enjoyable imagining of the childhood and youth of the Phogat sisters: real-life wrestling champions Gita and Babita, who were dragged kicking and screaming into the sporting life by their father Mahavir (played by Aamir Khan). Nitish Tiwari's film offers us new age heroines: Two winsome young women we can cheer for as they kick and punch their way into hard-won stardom, in a male-dominated sport in the male-dominated state of Haryana. And it does so in the finest traditions of old-school Hindi cinema: A song-studded filmic childhood, complete with the heroines 'growing up' before our eyes in a single heart-thumping instant of achievement; plenty of comic relief; a villainous coach whose excessiveness is made believable by the always-marvellous Marathi actor Girish Kulkarni.

(To be continued next week)

Published in Mumbai Mirror, 22 Jan 2017.

Film Festival: Mise en City

An essay on the Urban Lens festival, published in Open magazine. 

A vibrant new film festival portrays the multiplicity of claims on Indian cities, the freedoms they enable and the burdens that still weigh them down

UNTIL THE MIDDLE of the 20th century, the Indian city was viewed with deep ambivalence by many of our most influential thinkers. If, as Mahatma Gandhi put it, the future of India lay in her villages, urban life was a strange new blip on the horizon, the city a den of new vices in which anything could happen.

But the breakdown of pre-existing social norms—the very thing that made the city potentially anarchic—was also what made it potentially revolutionary. The city became a true home to the accoutrements of industrial modernity: factory labour, public transport, urban forms of mass entertainment—ensuring that people who had been kept apart by centuries of socially-enforced codes were now forced to jostle against each other.

As new classes and communities laid claim to the shared spaces of the city, they looked to the promise of modernity and democracy made by the new nation. As more women came out to work—and sometimes play—they slowly but surely challenged the assumed male control of the public sphere. An urban working class acquired a consciousness of its identity. Castes that had been deprived of most rights in the village made a concerted effort to get justice in the city. And yet none of these claims, or identities, was formed without a struggle.

In more recent times, the city has become the site of new movements for recognition and freedom—fighting for the liberty of sexual orientation, or against new forms of late capitalist ‘development’—as well as the locus of powerful attempts to polarise and/or crush them.

This glorious multiplicity of claims to the city—and via the city, to fuller citizenship—were put on view in cinematic form at the recent Urban Lens Film Festival. Organised by the Bengaluru-based Indian Institute for Human Settlements (IIHS), the festival’s third edition this year followed up its annual Bengaluru screenings with a packed weekend in Delhi. A refreshing mix of films by established names and upcoming directors, the fare was largely non-fiction (although a couple of animated films and a semi-fiction one made it in). And while some well- known filmmakers—Harun Farocki and Fatih Akin—represented the rest of the world, the festival kept its focus on the Indian city.

Caste made its appearance early on, with two student films. Not Caste in Stone (2014), directed by a group of students from the Tata Institute of Social Sciences (TISS) is a thoughtful encounter with how the city can simultaneously reduce the stifling grip of caste, as well as create new avenues for it to express itself. The 31-minute film is structured around an anecdotal history of Mumbai’s Tamil- speaking communities, mapped onto the city’s geography. While most upper- caste Tamil migrants settled in Matunga, at least 25,000 families from Tirunelveli district arrived in Dharavi and went to work in tanneries run by Muslim traders. Matunga, despite being the best known site of Mumbai’s Tamilian cultural presence, remained off-limits to Dharavi’s Tamil population, especially in terms of access to temples. Despite this reinforcing of caste divisions, the city is seen by many Dharavi residents as offering a degree of freedom unavailable in rural areas. “Apun Schedule hai... Indiaaazaad ho gaya, hamara samaj toh aazaad nahin hua (We are ‘Scheduled’… India got freedom, but our society didn’t gain freedom),” says Kanakraj. “Bambai mein aazaad hai... Lad ke bhi dikhaya idhar (In Mumbai we’re free... Here we fought and showed them).”

The carving out of a caste identity in the city, the film suggests, initially involved the establishment of civic associations like the Adi-Dravida Sangh. But also crucial was an actual space that could mark the community’s location in Mumbai—and this, inevitably, was a temple. Battles over temple entry were waged and won in Matunga, too, but the creation of ‘their own temple’ in Dharavi seems to offer a more permanent, visible articulation of collective identity.

Meanwhile, with B-22 (2014), set and shot in Delhi’s Budh Vihar locality, student filmmakers Shilpi Saluja and Akshika Chandna of Sri Aurobindo College of Arts and Communication (SACAC) offer us a gentle slice-of-life that addresses caste more indirectly. The film’s protagonist, Manju, who literally guides us through her neighbourhood, brings home the intersections of caste with class and gender: the violence of one is tied to the violence of the other.

If B-22 is poker-faced about the depressing water situation in a Delhi slum, the brilliantly designed film Good Morning Mumbai (2011) uses animation and humour to draw attention to Mumbai’s sanitation issues. Remarkably, this too is a student film. With their charming, funny little fiction about a poor jhuggi- dweller’s tortuous quest for a peaceful place to take a shit, National Institute of Design students Rajesh Thakare and Troy Vasanth C flag the issue of Mumbai’s abysmal lack of toilets. The beauty of the drawings partially leavens the squalor of the world being evoked, while the superb soundtrack—juxtaposing a DJ on the radio with an oily minister, toilet sounds and the local bhai—roots us back in an unfortunate reality.

Civic worries are also at the heart of Usha Rao and Gautam Sonti’s Our Metropolis (2014), which takes the construction of the Metro in Bengaluru as the central thread of a lament about the future of Indian urbanity. Shot between 2008 and 2013, the film tracks a rather vast swathe of ominous developments in the creation of a ‘global city’ that seems to care little about most of those who live in it.

A much more specific tack on the ‘global city’—specifically its bulldozing of rights in the service of big business— is taken by Rahul Roy’s The Factory (2015), which traces the Maruti Suzuki case, in which 147 workers of India’s largest automobile manufacturing unit were jailed for years, without bail, on charges of destroying company property and murdering a senior manager. Roy’s engrossing film combines his observational style with an investigative element, providing chilling details that make apparent how baldly fabricated the case is.

The prosecution’s four star witnesses for instance, ‘saw’ the accused workers engaging in violence—in perfect alphabetical order. As against the Maruti establishment’s horror story of worker violence, the workers have a completely different narrative: the entire incident, they say, was a conspiracy by the company management aimed at eliminating the lone manager who had helped get the Maruti Union registered (Awanish Kumar Dev) and simultaneously ridding the company of actively unionised workers. Bouncers in Maruti workers’ uniforms were the ones who started the rioting and set fire to the room in which they had locked Dev.

Roy also goes beyond the case, tracing the history of Maruti in India, and allows us to enter the increasingly constricted world of the industrial worker. His unpacking of life on the factory floor makes for depressing viewing. Worker after worker, from among the 2,500 men dismissed by Maruti Suzuki, provides Roy with details of the organised fashion in which the company had begun to squeeze those labouring at its lowest echelons: reducing the number of ‘relievers’ assigned to each group of workers, doing away with toilet breaks, firing men after they had served their apprenticeship period so that they could hire new ones at lower rates. When Maruti workers—faced with impossible time pressure, humiliating punishments and harsh pay cuts (a single day of absence cost a worker Rs 2,000: a fourth of his monthly variable pay, and a full eighth of his total salary) —sought to unionise and strike work for their demands, the management came down even more heavily on them.

Roy’s film captures the terrible sense of attrition a long-drawn court case can produce, especially under conditions of poverty and political corruption. When he draws the viewer’s eye to the guns and lathis in the hands of security guards and policemen, it is hard not to see these men—likely from similar backgrounds as the workers they’re escorting—as hired guns acting on behalf of a state that is acting on behalf of the corporation. Hope is in short supply.

A comparable sense of the city as a stultifying space which has belied its promises of equality and liberty emerges in Ruchir Joshi’s much more amorphous My Rio, My Tokio. Although as different in style and intent from The Factory as perhaps possible, My Rio... shares with it and Our Metropolis a dull, throbbing anger about the state of things in our cities. Joshi’s series of what he calls ‘video-poems’ about Kolkata takes in a disparate set of things that sometimes seem like events (the death of CPM leader Jyoti Basu, the horrendous Stephen Court fire) and sometimes not (women dancing during Durga Puja, a conversation about Fashion Week).

AT TIMES, THE particular quality of a city emerges unbidden, unplanned from the kind of films made about it. If the Mumbai films at Urban Lens—from Paromita Vohra’s joyful dissection of a stereotype in Where’s Sandra? to Mira Nair’s portrait of cabaret dancers in India Cabaret—displayed a quirky indefatigability, the Kolkata films had an air of melancholy, an insistence on poetry in the midst of death and decay.

A memorable Bangla poem called Nishir Dak (‘Night’s Call’) by the historian Sumanta Banerjee threads together Ruchir Joshi’s ramblings across the city in time and space. The poem itself makes reference to other cultural pasts: the playwright Bijon Bhattacharya’s work on the Bengal famine, Ritwik Ghatak’s cinematic masterpiece Subarnarekha and its brilliant leitmotif phrase ‘Bibhotso moja’: ‘horrific fun’. My Rio also cites Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities, a Mohiner Ghoraguli song and other poems. Poetry is writ large across a film by another non-Bengali Kolkatan resident, Joshy Joseph, which offers a lyrical tribute to the city’s indomitable spirit via portraits of two men—a retired footballer and coach called PK Banerjee and a poet-filmmaker called Goutam Sen, who was making a film about Banerjee when he succumbed to cancer. The third Kolkata film at Urban Lens, Debalina Majumder’s Taar Cheye Se Anek Aaro is very different from these—a tender fictional portrait of two young women in love, interspersed with real footage of people discussing homosexuality— but it, too, relies more on songs and lyrics than almost all the rest of the films shown. “You can’t run away from text if you’re dealing with Calcutta,” said Joshi during the discussion.

Sometimes, rarely, a filmmaker might want to run not from words but from images. With a city like Delhi, whose iconic monumentality lends itself to having its ‘sights’ ticked off by so many Bollywood films, this fear is all too real. Humaira Bilkis’ Maine Dilli Nahi Dekha (another student film from SACAC) steers clear of this repetitive Delhi: visiting the Adhchini Dargah of Mai Sahiba instead of that of her more famous son Nizamuddin Auliya, bantering with shopkeepers in Chittaranjan Park rather than Chandni Chowk. In one lovely little scene, Bilkis’ camera lingers on a child’s drawing book. “The Taj Mahal,” says the young artist. “Have you seen it?” she asks. “No.” “Then?” “I copied it from my brother’s drawing.”

Those who work with images, like those who work with words, can never cease from quotation. But whatever else our cities may or may not provide, they are an inexhaustible stream of words and images for filmmakers to dip into and bring their nets out gleaming with fresh catch.