DIFF 2024: Cinema As A Grand Manifestation Of Madness

A tailor, who just attended the recently concluded Dharamshala International Film Festival (DIFF) — as both audience and actor, with a film of his playing as part of the first-ever Tibetan-language anthology State Of Statelessness — confided during a party, “See, I live a slow life here. Then I see these movies and realize, life can be slower.” It was meant both as an observation and a criticism. Elsewhere, during the audience interaction following the screening of Nidhi Saxena’s fractured and vaporous Sad Letters Of An Imaginary Woman, whose anti-narrative of trauma spreads rather than builds the story, congeals rather than sediments, people reacted strongly — saying this was not anti-narrative, but, clearly, narrative. Saxena was asked how she toes the line between expression and indulgence, poetry and pretension. How can anyone answer the very faultline of filmmaking?

It is the usual fare of a film festival audience — discussions of the length and pace of a film, which are actually veiled ways of expressing our inner capacity for swaying and swirling, even if we are not moving forward in any tangible way. DIFF is no different, in that sense.

13 years ago, DIFF was a small community initiative by Ritu Sarin and Tenzing Sonam — filmmakers who moved to the mountains decades ago — where they showed films on DVDs. Over the years, from Blu-ray to DCPs, the festival has grown cautiously, keeping its intimacy as a center-piece around which to gird cinephilia. Bina Paul, the Director of Programming, in an interview with Scroll, notes, “Festivals get greedy in terms of wanting more star power, more publicity, more delegates, more premieres … DIFF has not fallen for that. It’s a modest, boutique kind of festival that stays within its resources — by cutting its coat according to its cloth.”

This year, there were over 80 films across formats — short fiction, short documentary, feature fiction, feature documentary — with more women filmmakers than men. Like last year, the festival was held at the Tibetan Children’s Village (TCV), which was established in 1960 when 51 Tibetan children, along with the Dalai Lama, arrived in India as refugees. What started initially as a nursery is today a small village with its own school and homes. Children were milling around on the first two days of the festival. This sense of exile permeates the air and curation, not as a sharp resentment, but a quiet enduring.

One of the coups of the festival was Dibakar Banerjee’s Tees, the film Netflix funded and refused to release, a film that tracks a family from 90s Kashmir to 2018 Mumbai to a dystopian 2042 where the state’s interference is farcical and total. When the Netflix logo appeared onscreen, a section of the audience booed, which segued into a cheer as Banerjee’s name appeared. The following day, at Banerjee’s masterclass — where he characteristically denounced the guru-shishya (master-student) hierarchy even as he was always swarmed by his acolytes — he dryly noted, “The world doesn’t need us — artists, directors.” It was strange to hear this, but joy and exaltation is hard to describe as a need.

All We Imagine As Light, Girls Will Be Girls, Santosh, Agent of Happiness — festival favorites — had their serpentine lines. As did some of the more well-known international features — The Room Next Door, Armand (the Norwegian entry to the Oscars), La Chimera. As Paul notes in her introduction to Citizen Saint, there is something brewing in Georgian cinema — a broken society producing images of exquisite brutality, that turns horror into the sublime, and not easy anger. (April from the MAMI Mumbai Film Festival is another bead in that necklace. Other films Paul suggested beaded into this geographic genre were Holy Electricity and Panopticon.)

Two Palestinian films — No Other Land and From Ground Zero — were canceled because the censor exemption needed to screen the films was not given. (At MAMI, too, the exemption was not given for No Other Land) Instead, DIFF screened Shambhala — the first South Asian film in over three decades to compete in the main competition at the Berlinale. A repeat screening was done.

With film festivals — which have increasingly taken on the burden of consciousness keepers — there is a flatness and intimacy with which films are spoken of. Often in Q and As, there were comments shrouded as questions, audience members essentially saying how the film spoke to them, how they could relate to it. Biographies are exchanged in the garb of a conversation. Rightness and righteousness can feel inextricably linked.

If Cinema Pe Cinema charges forward, rudderless and without rigour, from the collapse of single screens to the collapse of our moral fabric, then Nocturnes will still you, stun you with its focus, its almost manic obsession with moths in a corner of the country. If Nishtha Jain’s Farming The Revolution puts the camera in the middle of the farmers’ protest movement, Kinshuk Surjan’s Marching In The Dark — which won the Film Critics Guild’s Gender Sensitivity Award — takes a more meditative and, perhaps, controversial approach by introducing interventions as a filmmaker, looking at the aftermath of farmer suicides. Surjan started bringing widows together to speak — to each other, first, and then to each other, with the camera present.

It is, then, the Werner Herzog double bill — of Fitzcarraldo and Burden of Dreams, a documentary on the making of Fitzcarraldo — that completely unsettles the sureties of an audience that is looking for ethical cinema. Here is a film so tossed into the winds of the Amazon jungles that it does not even have a moment to sit with the choices it has to make to move forward. What would Herzog do when a priest tells him to hire sex workers so the men of his set don’t run wild and impregnate the indigenous women? He hires them. There is a way myth making can make moral questions seem stupid in front of the grand manifestation of madness — cinema. There is also a way we must resist it, the myth, that is. And it is at festivals like DIFF where this can happen — an act of public pedagogy as much as edification.

You can watch a selection of their films at DIFF Online until 17th November.