KOLKATA FILM FESTIVAL
Transforming society
MARCUS DAM
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Two filmmakers, one from Chile and the other from Sri Lanka, try to send out a message of humanism through their works.
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"The world over, in the history of human beings, art plays a crucial role in and on life. The poet and the politician play a part in one's life; as did Neruda and Allende in Chile, Tagore and Gandhi in India." littin.
Children as protagonists: Scenes from Somaratne Dissanayake's "Butterfly Wings"
AS one who contributed to the building of a "new cinema" in Chile in the 1960s, director Miguel Littin describes himself as a "revolutionary, a man who fights against any type of oppression"; who believes that "cinema can help unite the third world and help maintain its identity" in the face of a changing global order. It is a struggle, which resembles "a huge chess game being played out on the world arena."
For Littin, his cinematic works "have provided the impulses for society to change". Littin once said: "each of my movies corresponds to a moment in Chilean life".
Fight against dictatorship
In an interview during the 12th Kolkata Film Festival (November 10-17), he elaborates: "They are the testimonies of a certain period. When I made them there was a fight on against dictatorship. Today the dictatorship is no more. We are changing. The films were based on the existing realities. The reality was transforming society which in turn was transforming with the films being made."
His "The Jackal of Nahueltoro" (1970) and "The Shipwrecked" (1994) document political life in that country. Littin went into exile in Mexico during the military dictatorship and in 1985 returned to his homeland, posing as a foreign businessman, to document the conditions of his compatriots. This resulted in the documentary "General Statement on Chile", the subject of Gabriel Garcia Marquez's book Clandestine in Chile. Thousands of copies of the Spanish edition of the book were impounded and burnt in Chile.
Role of art
"The world over, in the history of human beings, art plays a crucial role in and on life", reflects Littin. "The poet and the politician play a part in one's life; as did Neruda and Allende in Chile, Tagore and Gandhi in India". He is contemplating a film on Tagore.
The Chilean's "The Last Moon" (2005) was a major draw in Kolkata Film Festival, which, according to its director, Nilanjan Chatterjee, featured 225 films from more than 50 countries.
The film portrays the life of suffering in Palestine. "I made this film because I am against oppression and Palestinians have been suffering for centuries — from the times of Turkish domination to its division by the British... Then followed Israel's political domination and its control over that land. "Today bigger walls divide people there. Children are forbidden to go to school; young people don't go to universities; men don't go to work. A new type of cruelty is there... the situation has worsened since 1915 when my paternal grandfather went to Chile from Palestine as did many Christians from that country who went to settle in Latin America."
More Palestinians migrated to Chile than to any other country outside the Middle East. "The Last Moon" is an attempt to explore the reasons why.
Littin, whose films featured in the Festival's special "Celluloid Diamonds" section, says that his works "carry the message of humanism".
Focus of children
For Sri Lankan filmmaker Somaratne Dissanayake, children, the protagonists in his films, convey a similar message. Children, he believes, "are more humane than are adults."
"I get them to talk about the adult problems in society", Dissanayake says. Why? "Because they are not corrupted by politics and other aspects of life, religious or cultural," he explains. "I get them to address the problems of a society created by adults... "
These are trying times in Sir Lanka and the task of a filmmaker is all the more. "It's not been good for artists, especially between the late 1980s and the mid-1990s ... some artists have just disappeared; their bodies were found on the beaches."
The attack on creative freedom got Dissanayake and some of his colleagues to set up the Free Artists Guild in 1995 — much like the Chile Films headed by Littin in 1969.
The more than two-decade-long violence in strife-torn Sri Lanka has not "only been a problem for development activity but also for cinema," says the director of "Butterfly Wings" (2005), which was screened at the Festival. "Film production has slumped from between 50 to 60 a year in the early 1980s to barely 20 a year now.
Menace of paedophilia
"Butterfly Wings" brings to focus the menace of paedophilia. A 10-year-old street boy dreams of owning a bicycle and wants to find quick money. Then begin his woes.
"These innocent children are most vulnerable to abuse and prostitution. In most cases they try to achieve a shortcut to success and are easily duped by the perpetrators," says Dissanayake.
"As an artist who cares for society, I am also particularly sensitive and emotional about the position of children in the civil-war-torn areas of my country. The abuse begins with child recruitment for the armed forces. This is increasingly happening in the northern and eastern parts of the country."
"These children are told that since they are going to die any way (from poverty and because of the war) they might as well die fighting," Dissanayake continues.
War and its price
The issue was dealt with in his first film "Saroja" (2000). "Two children — a Tamil and a Sinhala — who found friendship are forced to separate because they belong to different ethnic groups, which are antagonistic to each other as a consequence of the belligerence of the adults of the two sides who are playing out their adversarial roles," the film-maker says.
The civil war in Sri Lanka and the toll it is taking on children is what films by Dissanayake, a qualified doctor who left the medical profession for the sake of making films, are largely about; the products of a "creative energy that is both inspired and challenged by the problems confronting my country."
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