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The travails of Assam's elephants

Sushanta Talukdar

Film on Assam's `jobless' elephants to go to Los Angeles festival

Guwahati: In Search of Job, a small-budget documentary on the struggle and pain of the unemployed elephants of Assam, has been selected for screening at the Silver Lake Film Festival, Los Angeles, devoted to discovering cutting-edge movies, on March 23. The organisers have invited its maker, Mrinal Talukdar, to attend the festival.

Erika Kao-Haley, Fusion Asian Cinema Program Director of the Silver Lake Film Festival, has informed him that the organisers would direct a part of their marketing and media campaign to promote the film to the press, the general audience and Hollywood distribution channels. Mr. Talukdar made the film last year on the theme of the 1,200 domestic unemployed elephants of Asom, whose owners are struggling to cope with the ways of the bureaucracy and a general lack of awareness about their plight to make an honest living.

The film was screened in the South Asia Documentary Film festival, New Delhi this year and earned good reviews. Later it was screened in the Bring Your Own Film festival (BYFF), Puri.

The 14-minute film deals with owners of the elephants allowing mahouts to take out the pachyderms to beg on the streets. "Drive across the main roads of Assam, you will witness elephants begging on the street. For a society that has always had a culture of keeping elephants as a part of family or a family legacy this is tragic... ," Mr. Talukdar said.

For centuries, domestic elephants have been an integral part of Assam's society. Their primary job was logging in the jungles. But they became jobless after the Supreme Court banned all logging in order to save the forests.

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