It was appropriate that the 2nd Ladakh International Film Festival, which was inaugurated in the absence of its chief guest, Omar Abdullah, also closed without one. Manish Tiwari, the information and broadcasting minister, who was scheduled to give away the awards and close the festival, was requested by the organisers not to fly to Leh because of the embarrassingly low turnout. He obliged.
Melvyn Chirayath, founder and festival director, blamed the local administration for the shoddy organisation and their local partners, the Ladakh Film Industry Association, for the absence of local publicity and, thus, interest and turnout. The Ladakhis in turn blamed the Liff bosses for a dismal show.
While it’s not clear where exactly the cracks lie, it was pretty obvious over three days (September 13-15) that Liff was more like a holiday for some, and for others a networking exercise.
Abhinav Shiv Tiwari’s Oass bagged the best film award, Tsering Motup Chospa’s Lzadol (A broken piece of moon) received the award for the best film in the Ladakhi section. Aparna Sen chaired the jury.
Like all things Indian, Liff was organised and run strictly according to the varna system. Your class decided how you were treated, and nowhere was this more startling than in the amount of time the higher classes could make the lower classes wait.
If you were a member of the upper class -- a Bollywood biggie, mostly -- then you made everyone wait, endlessly and without an apology. And when you did arrive, liveried men and women brought out warm beverages and cheese straws in fine cutlery.
And, of course, your class decided where you stayed, how many hanger-ons you commanded, how much time the organisers spent with you, and how many cars were placed at your disposal.
Even the goras seem to have fallen for Manu’s classification. Terry McLuhan, the director of Frontier Gandhi, made a packed hall wait for an hour. After she finished a tech-check of her film, she returned to her hotel to change and fix her face for the Green Carpet Premiere of her film. That her documentary received a standing ovation made everyone forget her desi nakras.
Journalists and national film award winning, albeit regional, actors and directors stood firmly in the middle class. They got ferried to the main venue in a bus. And in case they wanted to watch films at any of the other three venues, then they could beg, hitch or just learn to fly. Leh has no public transport, and taxis are hard to come by.
Below the middle class squatted the Ladakhis -- directors, actors and volunteers -- and the young boys and girls whose first films where scheduled for screening at Liff. They waited, mostly for their film to be screened. Because, thanks to the Upper Class’ delay tactics, several films were dropped or shifted to another time/venue without any announcement.
While all this is par for the course at sarkari jamborees, Mr Chirayath likes to boast that Liff is one of the two festivals in India which is not state-sponsored, non-sarkari. Mumbai’s MAMI being the other.
If his claim wasn’t toddling, none of this would have rankled. In fact, it would have been just reassuringly familiar.
Despite the apathy of the organisers towards films which were not accompanied by a VIP, for me the festival was saved by the films, especially Terry McLuhan’s The Frontier Gandhi: Badshah Khan, A Torch for Peace, and Stanzin Dorjai and Christiane Mordelet’s Behind the Mirror.
The Frontier Gandhi: Badshah Khan, A Torch for Peace, a documentary on which McLuhan worked for 22 years, and which was finally ready for a theatre release in 2008 but has still not got a distributor, was screened for the first time in India at Liff. India’s first citizen, President Pranab Mukherjee, will be watching it next, at his Presidential Palace in New Delhi.
An impressive and moving account of the life, philosophy and tragedy of Khan Abdul Ghaffar Khan, the documentary traces the rise of the man lovingly called Badshah Khan in the North-West Frontier Province, an area synonymous with violence. McLuhan uses classic techniques (experts, family members, Om Puri’s voiceover reading from Badshah Khan’s own writing, old news footage, etc) to tell a complicated story rather simply: Two men believing ardently in non-violence rose to challenge the repressive rule of the British — Gandhi in India, and Ghaffar Khan in the Peshawar valley.
Both spoke of peaceful resistance — neither retaliate, nor retreat – but one had it easy. He was addressing a largely Hindu audience with a non-violent ethos, while the other was trying to convert people whose honour was insulted easily, and who never forgave a slight. It’s mostly from the martial Pashtuns, but also men and women of other ethnicities and religions, that he created an army of 100,000 Khudai Khidmatgars, or Red Shirts.
That’s one part of the story — the impact he had, the hardships he faced (Badshah Khan spent “one day out of three days of the 98 years of his life in prison”).
The other part of the documentary is his rise to prominence in the Indian National Congress and the ultimate betrayal of his dream — a separate, autonomous land for Pashtuns, Pashtunistan — that explains how and why the towering silhouette behind Mahatma Gandhi disappeared overnight.
The film suffers from a lack of nuance. There are also some deeply ironic moments that are captured but not explored, like when, in 1967, Badshah Khan was awarded the Jawaharlal Nehru Award for International Understanding.
The second film that left me and several others teary-eyed was Behind the Mirror. Again a documentary, its two directors followed a group of 28 Ladakhi children from Landon School, Nubra, on an exchange programme to France in 2010. Before the children set off, we spend time with some of them, in their stone and mud houses, listening to them talk of the most precious thing in their house (in one case, a pressure cooker), the daily struggle of life in Ladakh, their dreams and their strong bond with their family and land.
Then we travel with them to France where each one lives with a French family, as a family member. This is a strange world — there’s central heating, cosy beds and warm bread on the table. There are also skiing classes and swimming in the sea for the first time, and understanding each other’s culture despite the language hurdle.
The final parting, when the kids are to return to Ladakh, is heart-wrenching. As bawling children who don’t even speak one language are pried apart, we are left thinking that our kids, these apple-cheeked adorables, deserve a better life, and this film a larger, bigger audience.