Through his lens, brightly

WHEN HIS intense interests in journalism, art, music and visuals converged, Kjell-Ake Olsson, found a totally new idiom and medium for his expression: cinema. His left-wing ideology and strong positions on issues refined it further: he started making documentaries that are purposeful, stunningly cinematic, clearer than written words and riveting.

The basic strength of this pony-tailed film-maker from Sweden is his 35 years of practice as a print journalist in several left- wing papers and magazines and his ideology. ``Ideology is almost always important''.

The themes he works on, hence, speak for him. Social and political issues, refugees, violence, war, right-wing extremism, poverty and diseases. The titles themselves are eloquent: ``Hold your Breath,'' ``TB or Not TB,'' ``Killer Boots''....

While ``TB or Not TB,'' brings out the contradictions in the globalised, World Bank-dictated solution to a social disease like tuberculosis, in ``killer boots,'' he takes an objective look at skin- heads. The film on TB exposes the people who cry foul and starkly illustrates how inhuman is the divide between the world's poor and the rich. It is the social setting that is more dangerous than the disease causing germs.

In ``Killer Boots,'' Mr. Olsson employs an interesting tool to expose the fascists. He shows the manufacture of the metal boots, interviews the manufacturers and trains the camera from the boot- level and the head-level. The effect is that it hits you on the head. ``The tone was cool, restrained and objective''. ``Like a clown should never laugh''.

The shooting of his film on TB, which had taken him to different parts of the world, had put him in strange and risky situations. While shooting in South Africa, under the guise of shooting Nelson Mandela's prison-cell, he shot the inhuman conditions inside for the prisoners. Though he was finally caught peeping, he played another trick and saved his tape.Lifting of apartheid in South Africa has worsened the living conditions of most of the disenfranchised people. The bosses of the apartheid farms behave much better with their ``slaves'' than the new ones.

Though he is extremely sensitive to poverty, Mr. Olsson believes that ``affluence is as much a problem as poverty''. ``The world is one, but is not treated as one''.

G. Pramod Kumar

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