Recovered memories
History gets a revisit at South Asian documentary festival.

By Camille T. Taiara

NINE YEARS AGO Tareque Masud and Catherine Masud faced the censors for the last time. It had taken five months for Muktir Gaan (Song of Freedom) to make it through Bangladesh's official permitting process, and no distributor would accept their film, a documentary of the country's brutal war of liberation against Pakistan. Pieced together from archival, black-and-white footage of the bloody events of 1971, it recounts the suppressed history of Bangalis' struggle to create an independent, secular state.

From 1996 to 1998 the directors and a couple students from Dhaka University traversed Bangladesh arranging for independent screenings of Muktir Gaan. In Dhaka they rented auditoriums and printed their own tickets, showing the documentary at the university and at a school for street children. They held open-air screenings in rural areas and announced the movie through word of mouth or by riding around on a rickshaw with a loudspeaker.

The screenings soon took on a life of their own – and uncovered collective memories and layers of history never before recorded. The result of the epic journey with the film was another film altogether: Muktir Kotha (Words of Freedom), the story of Muktir Gaan's trek through a country still plagued by nepotism and inequality.

"Our experience in the villages is completely different from the cities," Tajul Hoque, one of the students on the cross-country expedition, tells us as the team rides in a fisherman's boat to a hamlet where people fought the barbarous Pak Army with spears and shields. "In the cities, where mostly middle-class people come, it's more about rekindling the spirit of '71. But in the villages the spirit was never lost. After the shows, they've thousands of their own stories to tell in return.... What they see in the film happened to them in '71."

A truly remarkable testament to the transformative power of historical memory, Muktir Kotha is one of 19 films in Traveling Film South Asia 2004. The documentary film festival, presented by EKTA and Friends of South Asia, offers rare snippets of politics and culture in a region of the world that remains largely alien to most Americans – and whose content, in many cases, is even more inaccessible to the very populations they represent.

The Masuds are not the only directors to have faced hurdles getting their work shown in their native countries. Journalist and independent filmmaker Shubradeep Chakravorty faced censorship and physical threats in India for Godhra Tak (The Terror Trail) – and even had to flee Ahmedabad (in India's Gujarat province) to avoid releasing a copy to hostile police, according to an account in the Hindu newspaper.

An investigative doc on the burning of a train compartment carrying karsevak pilgrims in Godhra, a town also in the Gujarat province, on Feb. 27, 2002, which killed 59 people and led to months of religious riots, Godhra Tak digs well beyond the superficial impressions provided by the mainstream media. Chakravorty visits the crime scenes, interviews numerous victims on both sides, and follows forensic scientists and investigators. What he uncovers runs counter to official depictions of the train burning as a Muslim terrorist conspiracy – and exposes the Indian government's complicity in a murderous campaign against Godhra's Muslim minority.

Most of Sabiha Sumar's movies have been banned altogether in her native Pakistan. Described by festival organizers as Pakistan's "only independent film director," Sumar has two pieces in the festival: Don't Ask Why, a portrait of middle-class 17-year-old Anousheh's struggle to reconcile her dreams of freedom and gender equality with traditional proscriptions on the role of women, and For a Place under the Heavens, her latest, which explores the contentious relationship between women, Islam, and the government since Pakistan's birth as an Islamic state in 1947.

Understandably some of the films presented as part of Traveling Film South Asia suffer from poor production values and, in a couple instances, frankly, a lack of filmmaking savvy – notably, Shei Rater Kotha Bolte Eshechi (Tale of the Darkest Night), whose subtitles are virtually illegible. And the film utterly fails to provide any context whatsoever for the Pakistani army's 1971 massacre of intellectuals at Dhaka University – a bloodbath that took more lives in a single day than any other event during Bangladesh's war of independence.

But there are plenty of gems to be found among the various offerings. Persistent themes include the inequities of social caste systems (Resilient Rhythms, Naata [The Bond]), real-world consequences of large-scale development projects (notably, Buru Sengal [The Fire Within] and Vikas Bandook Ki Nall Se [Development Flows from the Barrel of a Gun]), gender and tradition (Swara [A Bridge over Troubled Water], Skin Deep, The Unconscious), and the relationship between nationalism and contemporary pop culture (Made in India).

Traveling Film's unquestionable strength lies in the critical insights it lends – to Americans and South Asians alike – into the realities of a truly intriguing, and ever more internationally significant, part of the globe.

Traveling Film South Asia 2004 runs March 12-28 in San Francisco and Milpitas. The San Francisco venue is Mission Cultural Center, 2868 Mission, S.F. $6-$9. (415) 821-1155. For this week's S.F. schedule, see Rep Clock, in Film listings. For complete schedule go to www.ektaonline.org/tfsa.