Film Southasia (FSA) is a bastion of cultural programming in Nepal. It has been a source of entertainment, education and the occasional glimpse of illumination since I was a teenager. I’ve grown older, but the festival keeps on going, and I wonder if my years of flight and turmoil have added the layers of disillusionment so necessary to review and judge.
Picking from 55 documentaries based on a picture and a short synopsis is hard. The potential of each one being great or absolutely wretched or somewhere in the dull zone in between is very real. I struck lucky. Keeping in touch with my educational experience of FSA, I chose three films from the western end of South Asia – Transgender: Pakistan’s Open Secret, A Letter to Light, and Half Value Life. The latter two are from Afghanistan: the first on the loss of sight and the other on Afghanistan’s first female provincial investigator.
The documentary on transgenders in Pakistan is engaging because its characters are interesting, different in their own ways, but distinctive in the limitations they face in the ways they can live their lives. My primary criticism lies in the alienation one feels from the narration. Affecting the tone of a Western news feature, it patronizes the viewer and the subjects. It not only spoonfeeds us, it chews the food for us and proceeds to shove it down our throats. The story that is being told would have come through stronger without such petty impositions.
I did not find the film on transgenders to be surprising, but I found it easy to empathize with the characters. I saw a world that was previously an idea, become my own. But other than the transgendered characters, the placeholder haters seemed fake and staged, not in of themselves, but in being structured and planted. Did I need to be told that people find the transsexuals an anomaly? How could a character profile of someone on the fringes of society hold any meaning without this coming through?
The two Afghan films were surprising in terms of how different they were. Half Value Life is a straight-up profile of a woman of considerable strength, of a society that is fractured, of a social structure that does not value its women. It does nothing special with its cinematography, but the story is powerful and moving. It will give you a sense of Afghanistan that you will be pressed to find in news articles and reports. The place will mean something to you.
A Letter to Light could not be more different: it is an artistic portrayal of a child dealing with the gradual loss of sight. It is strange and eerie, reveals little of Afghanistan, but that was never its intention. In terms of exploring sight, its presence and the awareness of what its absence can mean, the film does enough to remain with you. It will make you think and hope and deny.
Youtube and HD videos on our phones are making us more narcissistic, pushing us inwards, rather than opening us up to discover the world. If these documentaries are anything to go by, well-planned films can pull us out of our egoistic soups and reveal how much more the world is. But most of all, it shows that the power of a good story should never be doubted: it will continue to pull on our heartstrings and make us dance to its whims. This alone should make a trip to Film Southasia worthwhile.
Film Southasia runs from 3-6 October at QFX Kumari, Kamal Pokhari. More details: http://www.filmsouthasia.org
