WUNRN
Women's Feature Service
India - New Delhi
Gender
& Film - The Lens as Witness
By Surekha Kadapa-Bose
PHOTO from the award-winning
documentary film by Israeli director, Natalie Assouline, 'Brides of Allah'
showing Kahira, who is an inmate in an Israeli prison. The film portrays the
intimate details of the lives of women serving time for terror attacks in
Israel. (Credit: WFS)
Mumbai (Women's Feature Service) - "I hope when I go out of this prison
after serving my term, my world would have changed; my family and my country
men would be leading a better and dignified life," says Manal, a Hamas
sympathiser, who is serving sentence for being a suicide bomber in an Israeli
prison.
"I want to go back to my country, eat my food, converse in my language. I
am hoping the day will come soon when without jeopardising the lives of my
family, I will be able to get in touch with them," says Ka Hsaw Wa, a
human rights activist from Myanmar.
"I just want to know if my son is alive or dead. If dead, where has he
been buried?" cries out a mother from Kashmir. For the past 15 years she
has been waiting for some news of her son, who was picked up by the Indian army
for questioning and has not returned since. She is a member of the APDP
(Association of the Parents of Disappeared Persons).
These are only a few stories of human tragedy and endurance that were showcased
as part of the Fifth Tri-Continental Film Festival of 2009, held from January
23 to 25 at the National Center for Performing Arts in Mumbai. The festival now
travels to Goa, Bangalore and Kolkata over the next three weeks.
Though struggling and helplessly fighting for survival, the films show how all
the victims and protagonists see a ray of hope for a better tomorrow for their
world. And that was what made the festival so immensely viewable. In all, there
were 28 films from more than 20 countries. The festival has been organised by
Breakthrough, an international human rights organisation.
"I came across the story of Ka Hsaw Wa and the lawsuit he had filed on
behalf of the victims of abuse in Burma, against two American oil companies -
Total and UNOCAL," explained Milena Kaneva, director of 'Total Denial'.
Milena was born in Bulgaria, and moved to Italy before the fall of Berlin Wall.
She went to Myanmar when the country opened its doors for tourism. What she saw
there compelled her to make the film that took more than five years to
complete. The American companies had invested in Myanmar to lay down a gas
pipeline, which ran across the country, connecting it to Thailand.
To clear the way for the pipeline, villages that came in the way were burnt
down and its residents burnt alive. Those who managed to stay alive were abused
and treated as slave labour. They were paid less than one dollar a day by the
military. In a shot, a teary-eyed Hsaw Wa asks, "I can never understand as
to how human beings can ill treat one of their own kind. The turning point in
my life to expose the military regime of Burma was when I saw a dead woman with
one of her nipples cut and a tree branch shoved up her vagina."
The award-winning 'Brides of Allah' also deals with human helplessness and
tragedies, but in a different way. "We may look like monsters to you,
killing innocent people. We don't want to do it. But what other alternative do
we have? We either die as suicide bombers and hope to reach Allah or die in
inhumane conditions, forced to live in a small strip of land, and get
humiliated by the Jews occupying it," says Kahira, an inmate in an Israeli
prison. Kahira, along with many other women all aged between 18 to 32 years,
are serving their terms after being arrested either as suicide bombers or for
other terrorist activities.
Israeli director, Natalie Assouline, has done a remarkable job of portraying
intimate details of the lives of women serving time for terror attacks in
Israel even though this is only her first full-length documentary film. She has
tried to uncover the motivation behind the actions of these girls. The film
that took more than two years to shoot has several emotional moments - one of the
girls delivers a baby; another girl has to part with her son because children
aren't allowed to stay with their mothers after the age of two; then there are
shots of women talking about their husbands who have abandoned them.
Another impressive offering was the award-winning 'Tapologo'. After the
screening, the directors of the film, Sally and Gabriela Gutierrez-Dewar - they
are sisters incidentally - explained, "While making the film, we have shot
several feet of footage of the horrible plight of the sex workers of the
Freedom Park in South Africa. But we had to self censor it as we didn't want to
make a sensational film and take away the importance of the people who are
working there."
'Tapologo' is set in Freedom Park, a squatter settlement in South Africa, where
the population comprises mostly illegal labourers coming from the central
African region to work in the mines. The local men pick up poor women, willing
to cook, wash and bed with them for some money and food. In the process the
women get infected with the HIV virus.
In such a harsh scenario, a group of HIV-infected former sex workers, created a
network called Taplogo. They learn to become home-based care-givers for their
community, transforming degradation into solidarity and squalor into hope with
the help of retired nurses, social workers and religious leaders. One such
care-giver jovially remarks, "I told my new boyfriend that I am an
HIV-positive woman. If he wants me to be with him, he has to use condoms.
Others used to refuse, so I refused them. He agreed, so I am staying with
him!"
In the film there is also a Catholic bishop Kevin Dowling, who frankly raises
doubts on the official doctrine of the Catholic Church, regarding AIDS and
sexuality in Africa. "There is no point in asking these women for
abstinence. They are forced to become humiliating sex workers if they need to
put food in front of their children the next day," he says.
Many of the directors, whose films were screened at the festival, have either
had the experience of interacting with social activists or have been reporting
on these issues. But when Kavita Pai and Hansa Thapliyal from India, made
'There Was a Queen', they both lacked the necessary experience. "It took
us more than two years to complete the documentary as we really didn't have
experience of working with any NGO or any other group of people working hard in
such heart rending situations," said Kavita. 'There Was a Queen' presents
the problems faced by the women of Kashmir who are confronting violence and dealing
with many crises every day of their lives.
The film discusses how women's engagement in everyday violence has led them to
think of security, peace, conflict management and the transformation of the
state. One finds more 'half-widows' (whose husbands have disappeared) than
widows in these areas. Also several mothers have lost their sons. "Today,
I have applied lipstick. It was my desire. The way bombs go off and both army
men and militants shoot, who knows if I will be alive tomorrow or not!"
says a young girl, who attends sewing classes to learn the craft to eke out a
living.
The two shortest documentary films, of three minutes duration each, by
Mumbai-based film director Shakuntala Kulkarni, were very abstract. 'Is It Just
a Game? 2' and 'Is It Just a Game? 3' deal with childhood games of 'kabaddi'
and trust. The game is being played quietly and one has to decipher the
conflict and problems from the background score.
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