By Rafat Nayeem Quadri,
Ahmedabad: The filmograph held from 3rd to 6th December at Golden Jubilee Hall, Memnagar, Ahmedabad had a strong message to convey against the Hindu nationalistic forces making communalism a mainstream political issue for the elections and power.
The Festival was organized jointly by the NGOs; INSAF, Waves, Janvikas, Connect, Darshan, Prashant, Gurjarvani, Open Space and Samuday.
The film festival screened four films representing four major turning events of communalism in our society taking in to account the historical years of ’47-’84-‘92-‘02’. The film show was represented by at least one personality associated with each of those films. Each among them had dialogues with the audience regarding the film and found time to comment and reply to the queries posed by them.
The show was kicked off on 3rd December with the screening of the film ‘Parzania’. It was based on the real life time story of a 10 year old boy Azhar Mody, characterized as Parzaan Pithawala. He went missing since 28th February 2002, during the Gulbarg society massacre. The film pictures his family’s efforts to find him and their struggle for justice. The director Rahul Dholakia and Roopa Mody [Azhar Modi’s mother] attended the dialogues based on the film. The director while addressing the media said that “each one of us is also responsible. We just play mere mute spectators and keep watching the victims being targeted and tortured. Our ‘who cares’ ‘how does it matter to me’ type of attitude has made us careless and we have given free hand to those who know how to play the sensitive issues as a card to gill their stomachs and kitties and fulfill their ambitions and dreams at the cost of human loss”.
The next day, one among the milestone films of the industry ‘Garam Hava’ was screened. It deals with the plight of a North Indian Muslim family in the post partition context. The film features how the partition disintegrated family relations. Farooque Shaikh who made his debut through this film, was present for the show. He reiterated that by creating rifts between any two communities there can never be any good to one, sooner or later everybody suffers.
On 5th of December Sayeed Mirza’s ‘Salim Langede Pe Mat Ro’ was screened. The film had its set for the period of the Hindutva Mobilzation of the 80’s, the consequent explosive communal conflict and its impact on the lives of the Muslim youths. The story features a central character Salim Pasha (Langda), with the role being played by Pavan Malhotra, too had his dialogues based on the screening. Commenting on Babri mosque demolition Pawan asked ‘how long are we going to fight? Is anybody’s God happy with it?
‘Amu’ on 6th December concluded the festival. The story was based on the 1984 Sikh massacre in Delhi. ‘Amu’ is a journey by Kajori Roy, a 21 year old Indian – American girl who had lived in US until when she was three. The film faced several censorship problems and at last was directly released in DVD forms. ‘Amu’s Producer Bedabrata Pain attended the show.
Audience were seen to be so impressed and touched by the movies screened. It looked as if with this small but powerful effort by these NGOs, a strong message has been conveyed and very soon it is expected to float across the society.
[Rafat Nayeem Quadri is the Editor of BILKUL, Gujarat’s First English Fortnightly]