Festival Celebrates South Asian Film, Educates Oberlin

by Tim Willcutts
10/27/00
Over the next three weekends, eight award-winning contemporary and classic South Asian films will be screened at the Apollo Theater and Kettering Hall. The South Asian Student Association and the Oberlin Film Series collaborated last spring to organize the festival, called Tasveerein (“images” in Urdu), bringing to campus films from India, Pakistan, and Sri Lanka.
“We wanted it to be for everyone,” said senior Sabrina Rahman, chair of OFS, who termed the films both accessible and provocative. “We wanted to bring films that not only dealt with political and social issues but were also respected for their artistic merit,” she said. 
Manisha Mehta, associate chemistry professor and SASA advisor, conceived of the idea last spring, starting with a list of twelve films from the ’50s and ’60s. “Our original plan,” SASA chair Sakeena Syed said, “was to show films from a particular Indian director. But at the beginning of this year, we decided to show South Asian films from all countries in South Asia.” 
Festival committee head Purvi Patel, Asian and Pacific American Community coordinator k.t. shorb, and SASA member Sudha Muthuswamy also worked to finalize the list which now includes more recent films and represents several languages, including Malayalam, Hindi, Urdu and Bengali. All screenings include English subtitles. 
“The types of films we’re showing,” Patel said, “are not the types of films most people think of when they think of South Asian films.” Unlike India’s more mainstream “Bollywood” movies which are marked by musical numbers and group dances, these films, Patel explained, are driven by more substantive narratives. 
In Throne of Death, a loan from the World Bank and support from America brings the first “electronic chair” to a small island community in Kerela, India. When Krishnan, a struggling seasonal labourer, is sentenced to death for a crime he didn’t commit, islanders demand that he at least be offered a “painless death” care of the new technology. Though somber and understated at the outset, the film grows increasingly sardonic as islanders celebrate the prospect of Krishnan’s exciting execution. 
When asked if this film is an allegory for the kinds of dubious “support” the West has given India in the past, director Murali Nair, responding via e-mail, said, “The film has different layers. One of them is certainly political and the way the industrialized nations capitalize on the less developed nations. When I was a student, I never used to understand the difference between ‘loan’ and ‘aid.’ When a lot of the projects were supported by aid, I used to feel happy — that there are still a lot of humanitarian elements in these aids. But later, I slowly understood that these ‘aids’ are political terminology for ‘loans’ and there are lots of complicated issues, mainly political, behind all these. All I understand is that even the old clothes you donate to the charity nearby your house, with very good intentions, can be used by tactic politicians to destroy the textile industry of a nation.” 
A visually driven film, Throne of Death tells its story largely through landscape shots and body language. Dialogue is sparse by American standards and one is often unsettled by long stretches of silence, a risk few Hollywood directors are likely to make. Last week it played at the Denver International Film Festival, and next week it will be shown in Italy. 
When asked what American film directors can learn from South Asian cinema, Nair said, “Certainly American filmmakers can learn a lot. I am not particularly sure what. The society in South Asian countries is in a different time than that in America. For an artist, he or she has to first of all understand where the society is in the curve of development. Then to understand where he is in that curve. Then express the feelings he has. I think the filmmaker/individual in America is more controlled by the system than elsewhere. And I think there might be a way out.”