Why Watch Films that Trouble the Heart? A Kolkata Film Festival for Palestine has the Answer

The Wire

3 hours ago

From young college and university students to old-timer Leftists in the city, the audience remained engaged and animated.
Kolkata: On August 15, as Lata Mangeshkar's tinny voice delivered the lyrics of Ae mere watan ke logo to a south Kolkata locality, six politically charged films forced its viewers to question nationalism and its markers in a 600-seater auditorium there.
The occasion: the 8th Frames of Freedom film festival, titled 'Burning Earth, Waging Peace', organised by the Kolkata-based Leftist group People's Film Collective. The 11-hour programming consisted of international documentaries that shed light on the ill-logic of Israel's ongoing genocide in Gaza and the effects of war on Ukraine, and, sometimes, the soldiers themselves.
The poster of the film festival.
An initiative of this nature is radical given how pro-Palestine films have been pulled out of schedules from the country's major film festivals. For example, both MAMI Mumbai Film Festival and Dharamshala International Film Festival had to cancel the screenings of Oscar-winning documentary No Other Land (2024). Made by an Israeli-Palestinian collective, the film shows how Palestinian communities have had to suffer in the occupied West Bank because of Israeli attacks.
People's Film Collective had screened the film in Kolkata in May. Like all their screenings, including August 15's festival, it was free and open to all. PFC has previously screened other such films including 5 Broken Cameras (2011) and Little Palestine: Diary of a Siege (2021).
'We are the social Left with no electoral goals,' PFC founder and filmmaker Dwaipayan Banerjee said. 'Therefore, we do not have the power or agenda to engage with electoral politics. However, I do think that had the Bharatiya Janata Party been in power in West Bengal today, we would have been an ideological challenge to them, and then, all this could pose a problem.'
The Friday of August 15 was rife with anti-imperialist emotions as viewers strolled about and debated in the lobby, Free Palestine tote-bags and jute jholas in tow. From young college and university students to old-timer Leftists in the city, the audience remained engaged and animated.
Hearty were their giggles when British journalist Louis Theroux and Palestinian activist Issa Amro expressed confusion about who among them was exactly flipped off by an Israeli passerby in BBC's The Settlers.
PFC was founded by filmmaker couple Dwaipayan Banerjee and Kasturi Basu in 2013. Banerjee had just stopped being a full-time CPI(ML) activist. Basu had returned from abroad after finishing her research. They took their cue from Vikalp, the network of political documentary filmmakers founded by Anand Patwardhan, Sanjay Kak, and others. After their first screening held in an abandoned factory in 2013, the couple methodically set up the PFC to continue hosting yearly festivals and monthly screenings across Kolkata.
'There is a tendency of the Left to do cultural activities shabbily,' Banerjee observed. 'We were sure from day one that we will meticulously organise and promote PFC. All the visitors that leave their phone numbers and email addresses get screening mails, SMS and WhatsApp notifications about our events.'
PFC is entirely crowdfunded, Banerjee and Basu said. Their members work as unpaid volunteers. Well-wishers such as author-activist Arundhati Roy has often given funds to the group. Patwardhan once declined to take any flight fare to attend their event in Kolkata, Banerjee said.
'It's simple,' he added. 'We will continue this as long as people are showing interest in our activities financially and by packing halls.' According to his math, a four-day annual PFC festival, held each year since 2014, costs up to Rs eight lakhs. The auditorium where the August 15 festival was being held charged Rs 15,000 for a single slot of three hours, plus entertainment tax.
'We have often wondered if we should start ticketing,' Basu said. 'But if we do that, I don't think our viewers and supporters are going to take to it. Giving Rs 500 on your own is one thing, but having to pay Rs 100 by rule is another.'
They are also steadfast about not taking corporate money or state patronage for their activities. 'In a world where Trump is offering Putin rare earth minerals to stop the war in Ukraine, how nakedly transparent does it need to be that modern politics is entirely corporatised and profit-driven?' Basu said. ' How can we hope any corporate funding us is not involved in any anti-people activity?'
Midway through the festival, renowned singer-songwriter and researcher Moushumi Bhowmik stepped out. She had come to watch The Settlers, but was incredibly impressed with There Will Be No More Night. Made from archival gunfight and thermal-cam footage of the US and French armies, the documentary is a meditation on the nature of contemporary war. The film reminded her, Bhowmik said, of the work of artist Lawrence Abu Hamdan, who works with 'politics of listening', and London-based Forensic Architecture research group which uses archival data to investigate state violence.
Bhowmik has been supporting PFC from year zero. 'It is not about me supporting something that exists outside of me...' she explained, '...such initiatives are an extension of who I am as a person. There is not much else to do today other than organising small pockets of resistance like this at an individual level. And whatever is to be done must be done with caution. That is important.'
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