Documentary filmmaker Sanjay Kak talks about his new film,
Posted on May 16, 2013 by reed
Red Ant Dream — Trailer Published on May 1, 2013
A documentary about those who live the revolutionary ideal in India
Director: Sanjay Kak
Synopsis: ‘Let us declare that the state of war does exist and shall exist’, the revolutionary patriot had said almost a hundred years ago, and that forewarning travels into India’s present, as armed insurrection simmers in Bastar, in the troubled heart of central India. But to the east too, beleaguered adivasis from the mineral-rich hills of Odisha come forth bearing their axes, and their songs. And in the north the swelling protests by Punjabi peasants sees hope coagulate–once more–around that iconic figure of Bhagat Singh, revolutionary martyr of the anti-colonial struggle. But are revolutions even possible anymore? Or have those dreams been ground down into our nightmares? This is a chronicle of those who live the revolutionary ideal in India, a rare encounter with the invisible domain of those whose everyday is a fight for another ideal of the world.
Gondi, Odiya, Punjabi with English Subtitles—————————————————————
Talking about a revolution…
by BUDHADITYA BHATTACHARYA, The Hindu, Bangalore, May 16, 2013 -
[Sanjay Kak. Photo: Apal Singh]
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The third in a cycle of films that interrogate the workings of Indian democracy, Red Ant Dream by Sanjay Kak looks at the revolutionary ideal as it exists in India today. Moving between Punjab, Bastar and Niyamgiri, the film documents the songs, histories and struggles of people who try to imagine a different world into being. The director responded to questions in an e-mail interview:
Can you talk about the beginnings of Red Ant Dream? When and why did you get interested in making this film?
[Photo: A Still From the Film]
It’s always difficult to say where the beginnings of a
film lie, because in a sense what you put into a documentary could be
the summation of many years of thinking about an idea, your whole life
even! For more than a decade all my films have been about resistance – Words on Water was about the movement against big dams in the Narmada valley, Jashn-e-Azadi
about Kashmir, and now with this new film we look at the stirrings in
Bastar in Chhattisgarh, the Niyamgiri hills in Odisha, and briefly
Punjab. More specifically, I think Red Ant Dream was a reaction
to the way in which the rebellion led by the Maoists in central India
was being depicted in the media and in public discourse – as an
isolated, autonomous outbreak of something like a pestilence, something
alien called Maoism.
What resonances did you see in the three distinct movements you have focused on?
From where I stand it’s been clear that what was
happening in Bastar was part of a much longer and widespread tradition
of people’s resistance, a more militant – if you like, a more
revolutionary – tradition than what we have usually accommodated within
our accepted vocabulary of politics and resistance. That’s what connects
the words of Bhagat Singh to those of the radical poet Avtar Singh
Pash, that’s what connects protesting farmers and landless Dalits in
Punjab to the fighting people of the Niyamgiri hills, and of course all
of them to the armed rebellion in central India. I’m not saying they all
add up to the same thing, of course not, just that if you care to, you
can see the wires that join them, and once you see them, you cannot help
but notice how distinct that desire for revolutionary change is, how
different it is from a more reformist nibbling at the edges of the
current system that we have. It’s the old division you know, sangharsh aur nirman…
The film also shows us the ways in which the
memories of Bhagat Singh and Pash, and the Bhumkal rebellion are kept
alive. How central are these memories to revolutionary imaginings?
I think these are more than memories, and it would be
reducing them if we were to dismiss them as nostalgia. These are what
help construct a genealogy for these movements, this is what gives
fighting people a history: and without a history what are people? So for
Punjabis to remember the contribution of the Ghadar rebellion of 1915,
or for the guerillas in Bastar to invoke the Paris Commune of 1871, or
from more recently, for the fighting Dongaria Kondhs of Niyamgiri to
remember the movement that led to the stoppage of the mining of the
Gandhamardhan mountain in the mid 1980s, all of that goes into the
construction of a revolutionary imagination. And what else is a
revolutionary imagination other than the desire to turn this terribly
unfair world upside down, and build a better, more ideal world for
tomorrow?
Compared to Words on Water and Jashn-e-Azadi,
Red Ant Dream is more diffuse. What were the challenges of narrating and
editing it?
I think it probably might appear so because the earlier
films were specific to one space, and one easily identifiable issue
around which the resistance centres – large dams in the Narmada valley,
the idea of Azadi in Kashmir. Here we take that idea of resistance and
run that taut wire across quite a range of landscapes – Bastar, Odisha,
Punjab…
The film did not involve a great deal of shooting –
probably eight weeks in all. But the edit took very, very long. The
argument of the film was really built on the editing table by an
exceptional collaborator, my editor (and co-writer) Tarun Bhartiya, over
probably a year and a half of intermittent work. You see if there is no
straight narrative, no one geographical zone, not even a set of
‘characters’ on whom you can hang the story, then the task becomes more
difficult. You’re left with the challenges of an essay film, but one
that is constructed not with abstract images but with the brick and
mortar of verite, observed material.
The film also incorporates found material –
interviews with Azad, footage of a Salwa Judum rally and Maoist ambush
videos. To what end did you seek to use these?
I suppose the logic of found material is that you could
never even begin to approximate the effect that they carry: the audio
recording of Azad is an old one, which has been circulating amongst
journalists and others for years; but here it stands in for an insight
into the minds of the Maoist leadership, which otherwise is opaque and
closed to us. So is the material of the early Salwa Judum – that was
shot as Government propaganda, but we managed to chance upon the
unedited material, and that begins to tell a story which is completely
hidden in the finished propaganda film. So are the Maoist videos, not
just of attacks but also the interviews recorded sometimes literally a
day after the havoc was wreaked upon people in Bastar, often recorded
amidst the destruction and smouldering debris of their homes. What other
images can ever convey the look in the eyes of those who’ve seen their
loved ones hacked to death?
What are your hopes of the film? Where all do you plan to take it?
That it will be seen, and talked about and debated. That
it will re-open a conversation about what real change can and must mean
– that’s what the persistence of the revolutionary ideal is about at
the end of the day. The film is already moving – it has been shown at
festivals in Gorakhpur and Banaras, and this past week in Delhi,
Chandigarh, Amritsar and Bhatinda. Documentary films have an amazing
circuit, although it is mostly invisible. That’s what makes its practice
so exciting in India today: there is very little mediation between the
film-maker and audience, it’s not really up to the distributor to decide
which film is worthy of release and which one isn’t. In all the
screenings I’ve mentioned there hasn’t been a spare seat
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