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Magazine
Candid experiences
ANIL DHARKER
Michael Winterbottom with the Golden Bear for "Best Film"...
THE first film I saw at the Berlinale was In This World. The film I liked best at the Berlinale, after days of watching, was In This World. The film which won the Golden Bear for the best movie in competition was In This World. Does that make me a prophet? Or at least a good film critic? What it does make me, is feel pleased.
That's because Michael Winterbottom's film is so right for the times and so appropriate in the context.
The context, of course, is the Berlinale, the most political of the major international film festivals.
Starting in 1950, bang in the middle of the Cold War, bang in the middle of the city which was divided by the Cold War, the Berlinale could be nothing else. But since real artists (and some film-makers are artists) are nobody's pawns, the Berlinale didn't become a mouthpiece for the West's (i.e. the Free World's) propaganda. Instead, it showed a willingness to look sympathetically at both sides of a political question, sometimes screening movies which upset Americans and sometimes the Soviets. This openness, in fact, made the Berlinale a showcase for Western liberal democracy and thus the envy of people who lived in totalitarian countries.
Winterbottom's film is also appropriate for the dislocated times we live in. Its theme is simple, being basically about Afghan refuges trying to smuggle themselves into Britian. Yet the film was conceived and its pre-production planning was done well before September 11, mainly as the director's response to popular and political rhetoric in Britian about refugees. "Send them back" would be an apt summation.
Yet one million refugees from all over the world put their lives every year in the hands of often unreliable "people smugglers". Why do they do it? What are the risks involved? And the hardships? Winterbottom and script-writer Tony Grisoni decided to find out, and having done their research, filmed it as the story of two Afghans, a young man called Enayatullah and a boy called Jamal, both of whom live in Peshawar in Pakistan on the Afghan border, and whose families decide that the only future for them is to escape the present.
... looking at the world of the refugee.
Their journey — often as smuggled cargo — takes them over the border to Iran, across to Tehran, into the mountains of the Kurdish region and on into Turkey.
From Istanbal, the pair undergoes a gruelling 40-hour journey sealed in a freight container along with other desperate refugees.
Not everyone survives. Those who do, cross into Italy, then across Europe living on wit and luck till they reach a refugee camp in Sangatte in France. Then the last hazardous leg, stowed away under the chassis of a truck bound for the United Kingdom.
Although Enayatullah and Jamal's trip is a distillation of the experiences of a large number of refugees, we come out of In This World believing that the pair are real human beings.
This has to do with the way In This World has been filmed, using a tiny digital video camera and no lights. This gives you the feeling of actually being there, out there amongst the dusty border towns, amidst the rocks and the hard places, with the wheeler-dealers in shanty tea-stalls. The graininess of the film and the use of non-actors heightens the spirit of realism.
Cinema, of course, does not have to be like the documentation of real life drama. It can be a vehicle for entertainment as a lot of cinema is. The Berlinale's opening film, for example, was the vastly amusing Chicago and its closing film Robert de Niro's The Gangs of New York. But the fact that films like In This World are being made, and are recognised for their quality, is a very positive thing.
It's also significant that In This World is not an Afghan film but a British one, financed partly by the BBC and partly by Britian's Film Council, which gets its funding from the national lottery. All this says a lot about political consciousness and the willingness of governments to put in money in ventures which chauvinists would call "alien" concerns.
Germany too supports cinema of this kind through its Federal Film Fund which, incidentally, gets its money from box office sales of cinema tickets. In other words, money earned by movies, is ploughed back into movies. And since commercial, entertaining, box-office movies find finance in the market place anyway, the Federal Film Fund basically finances serious German cinema. So, surprise, surprise, there are a lot of serious — and excellent — German films being made.
Our state, on the other hand, sees cinema as a source of revenue collection. So we get Bollywood, Tollywood, Chollywood and other jungles of similar nature.
Anil Dharker is a noted journalist, media critic and writer.
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