Toronto film festival: Stories from South Asia shape the celluloid narrative across the world

By: Faizal Khan

Oscar-winning French actor Jean Dujardin arrived in Kerala early this year to spend a night in Kerala’s cashew capital of Kollam three years ago. The sojourn of the star of the silent-era remix The Artist turned out be a shoot for the celebrated French filmmaker Claude Lelouch’s new movie, not a quiet holiday in the backwaters.

In the film, Dujardin accompanies a French woman on a fertility pilgrimage, one of the quirkiest plots of Un plus une (One plus One), which was premiered at the 40th Toronto International Film Festival (TIFF) last week.

Like his lead actor, Lelouch too was a willing companion in a filmmaking expedition to India and its neighbourhood undertaken by a bunch of directors from around the world in the past year. At least half a dozen films at the Toronto festival, which concluded this week, were shot at the unlikeliest of locations like the Swat Valley in Pakistan, Sompeta in Andhra Pradesh, Vallikkavu in Kerala, the outskirts of Chennai and Dhaka, and the villages in Nepal.

“The first time I went, I found India too much of a shock,” says Lelouch, who made the 1966 Palme d’Or-winning A Man and a Woman. “The second time, I decided this is the place where I would make my new film,” adds the 77-year-old veteran.

Out of the Languorous Settings

“Lelouch certainly saw the romance and passion that is India,” says TIFF artistic director Cameron Bailey. “Some of the best filmmakers in the world today are working in South Asia where there are exciting stories to tell,” adds Bailey, who scouted for films in India during his visit to Mumbai. Many foreign filmmakers are seeing the subcontinent as a fertile ground of imagination, forcing themselves out of the languorous settings of their own countries.

New Zealand documentary filmmaker Pietra Brettkelly went to Afghanistan after the election of president Ashraf Ghani last year, tracking film archivists digging out film cans that had escaped the Taliban purge. “It is not challenging to shoot in my country any more,” explains Brettkelly.

“Kabul was an exciting place to explore,” she says about the painstaking film restoration efforts by the state-run Afghan Films, equivalent of the National Archives of India in Pune. In her film, A Flickering Truth, Brettkelly, who is planning a trip to Chennai next for a documentary on AR Rahman, shows how Afghan Films found more than 8,000 hours of reels, including some hidden from the Taliban.

A Beeline for the Subcontinent

In the British drama called The Man Who Knew Infinity, director Matthew Brown follows mathematician Srinivasa Ramanujan (Dev Patel) into his early struggles with publishing theories in the early 20th century Madras, to the Trinity College in Cambridge where professor GH Hardy (Jeremy Irons) takes him under his wings with the support from Bertrand Russell ( Jeremy Northam). American filmmaker Davis Guggenheim, who won the Best Documentary Oscar for the global warming saga An Inconvenient Truth (2006), borrowed a poignant Swat Valley story to make his new film this year. The documentary, He Named Me Malala, profiles Pakistani teenager Malala Yousafzai, who was shot by the ‘Radio Mullah’-led Taliban for speaking in favour of girls’ education.

Another Best Documentary Oscar winner (for Saving Face), Pakistani filmmaker Sharmeen Obaid-Chinoy, received a call for collaboration from Indian-American director Geeta Gandbhir on a film about police women from Bangladesh on a peacekeeping mission in an earthquakedevastated Haiti. “We started out to make a film on Indian women peacekeepers in Liberia, but ended up making one on Bangladeshi women to shatter the stereotypes of Muslim women from a third world country,” says Gandbhir, whose A Journey of a Thousand Miles: Peacekeepers reveals there is little difference in the lives of the police women back home from those of the quake victims they protect in Haiti.

The song-filled successful protests by villagers in an Andhra wetland against a coal-fired power plant will find mention in the US election campaign and the year-end Paris climate talks, thanks to This Changes Everything, a narrative of the global climate crisis by Canadian Avi Lewis. Based on the bestselling book of the same title by his wife Naomi Klein, the film fields an array of global voices like Gravity director Alfonso Cuarón, who is its executive producer.

“In the fierce dignity and moral clarity of communities fighting destructive fossil fuel projects, I saw that a climate film doesn’t have to be about polar bears,” says Lewis. Australian Jennifer Peedom travelled to Nepal last year to document the “big business” of climbing the Everest. The result is Sherpa, whose cinematic exploration of the complicated social, economic, political and environmental dynamics sums up why western filmmakers are making a beeline for the subcontinent.

(The author is a freelance journalist)