Regardless of whether you like Rohit Shetty or Shyam Benegal, you’d find it difficult to argue with the hypothesis that cinema is the Pied Piper of the current epoch. Or rather, cinema is both the rat and the Pied Piper: victim and perpetrator, oppressor and oppressed. The escapism peddled by the Bollywood/Hollywood mainstream feeds society’s less-than-ideal status quo — this is true even for poor Karan Johar, who has just been successfully extorted to the tune of ₹5 crore. The creators who drive the mainstream are quick to point out the industrial-complex nature of their endeavour; they are giving us what we crave, what we have thrown our time and money at repeatedly. And then there are those, like the incarcerated Iranian filmmaker Jafar Panahi, who find cinematic release even in the most dire circumstances; he found a way to make movies within the strict conditions of his house arrest. When your drug peddler also runs the biggest rehab centre in town, it’s time to accept that he enjoys your undivided attention.

The most vital conversations of the day are no longer started by nailing sermons to doors, writing philosophical treatises (in cryptic one-liners) or, god forbid, singing a protest song. They’re made on Friday evenings at the box office, at streaming websites — and at film festivals, like the recently concluded Dharamshala International Film Festival (DIFF).

Pushpa Rawat’s debut documentary, Nirnay , was screened at the 2014 DIFF. Being a part of the audience, I can testify to the acclaim and the spontaneous applause it earned there. She was back this year with her second documentary, Mod (The Turn) , which proved to be an even better film, the missteps and rough edges of the debut smoothed, a new almost-swagger acquired in the lingering takes and determined interrogations. Nirnay was about young Ghaziabad women (including Rawat herself) of a ‘marriageable age’ and what arranged marriage meant to their autonomy and self-esteem: Rawat decided to make the film after her then boyfriend broke up with her to marry the girl his parents had chosen for him.

Mod is her attempt to understand boys: she shot a bunch of aimless, morbid young men from Pushp Vihar, Ghaziabad (indeed, her work is quickly becoming an exemplary ethnographic document on Ghaziabad). Stung by a lack of good jobs and general aimlessness, these boys (including her younger brother) while away their time playing cards and smoking pot at the local paani tanki (water tank). Rawat’s filmmaking style is distinguished by her quiet persistence and an instinctive feel for the emotional temperature of the moment. Again and again, the boys express their discomfiture at being filmed, at being asked tough questions about their agency in an increasingly cut-throat, class-driven world. Some of them give false names, hoping to throw her off-track. Their ideas about masculinity are constantly under scrutiny, and these questions are fielded gamely, partially out of deference to her status as didi (elder sister). It is interesting that a couple of these boys are into desi hip-hop of the Badshah/Honey Singh persuasion. A scene in the film sees one of the boys breaking into an impromptu rap about an affair that didn’t end well. For these boys, the expression of decidedly ‘uncool’, ‘feminine’ emotions is kosher only when filtered through the hyper-masculine braggadocio of hip-hop.

Something fascinating happens when Rawat interviews the younger brother of one of the tanki gang. This boy, no more than 10 or 11, cheekily puts on a camera voice, pulls out the Bollywood mannerisms he has clearly picked up on TV and generally behaves like a good-natured little imp, sensitive about his mother’s needs and his brother’s short temper. We then cut immediately to his elder brother lighting a cigarette at the tanki . Clearly, something is going wrong between the ages of 12 and 18, as far as our education system and our society as a whole are concerned. We’re taking innocent young tweens and turning them into apathetic, even nihilistic young men. It’s a bit like watching Calvin (from Bill Watterson’s Calvin and Hobbes ) grow up into Alex from A Clockwork Orange .

At the beginning of the film, we are shown a book trapped in a wall cavity, pages fluttering in the wind. Towards the end, that same cavity appears sans book, a gaping void at the heart of these boys’ psyches. Like Anand Patwardhan’s Father, Son and Holy War , Rawat’s documentary exposes the toxic masculinity cult at the heart of India. Unlike Patwardhan’s film, though, Rawat brings compassion to the table. It is difficult not to admire her attempts to nudge these boys towards redemption — including, and especially, her own brother. When I asked her about the starting point of Mod , she told me: “ Mere papa mujhe kaafi pyaar karte hain aur support bhi kiya hai unhone, lekin bachpan se hi mere bhai ke liye unka pyaar bilkul alag thaa ” (My father, although he loves and supports me, always had a special affection for my brother, right from our childhood).

The young men that Rawat trails are beholden to what Chetan Bhagat described as the twin pillars of young (and, of course, male) India’s aspirations: naukri (employment) and chhokri (girlfriend). And while the likes of Bhagat would encourage the simplistic idea that the former begets the latter, things are not so simple. One boy, a petty employee at Tech Mahindra, lamented that the “HR madam” at his firm was way out of his league; the implication being that money and your place in the corporate pyramid have instated a new caste system in India.

The removal of agency is thus a direct consequence of the overall ‘industrialisation’ of every branch of human endeavour: romantic, artistic, even culinary, as Mangesh Joshi’s Lathe Joshi showed us. Still to be released commercially, this Marathi film — and its lead actor, Chittaranjan Giri — received a well-deserved standing ovation and thunderclap applause at DIFF. Lathe Joshi is about Vijay “Lathe” Joshi, who is called that because of his artistry with the manual lathe machine. Because this machine tool is now outdated (most big units today use computerised CNC lathes), the workshop he toiled at for over three decades is shut down and his trusty lathe sold off to a scrapping unit.

The film is about Joshi’s attempts to come to terms with a world where relentlessly ‘upgrading’ yourself (as if you were an android or, worse, Android) is the key to survival. To return to the caste metaphor, Lathe Joshi divides the world into two kinds of people: tech-savvy (and thereby relevant, like Joshi’s son, who repairs laptops for a living) and obsolete (like Joshi himself).

Without his tool, Joshi is marooned like a painter without his favourite brush. In fact, throughout most of the first half, he barely has any lines at all. Such is Giri’s artistry that you only notice this by the intermission. His character is a unique mixture of perseverance, melancholy and long-suffering silence. He does not protest so much as gently point out the error of the world’s ways. In his hour of need, he turns to Shinde, a colleague he had trained and who is now the only worker from the workshop to have successfully shifted to the CNC machines. When Shinde offers Joshi a cup of machine-made tea, the latter declines politely: the flavour that comes with manual labour just does not migrate. Some churches have to be built with hands.

This theme returns in the story of Joshi’s wife, who runs a one-woman catering business, which begins to take off at the same time he loses his job. When she is taking orders for 5-10 people at a time, she makes puran poli (a kind of jaggery-filled roti) with her hands. But when she starts getting bulk orders, she has to buy a food processor and forego grinding the jaggery manually — the secret of the puran poli ’s taste, apparently. The lathe vs CNC binary is thus recreated perfectly, highlighting other binaries perfectly: ghare-baire (domestic vs public sphere machines), masculine and feminine (the lathe is a ‘masculine’ tool, the food processor a ‘feminine’ one), science and art (the ‘progress’ promised by the CNC vs the art of Joshi’s lathe accuracy) and so on.

However, Lathe Joshi also questions the formation of these binaries. Giri told me: “There are a lot of scenes in the film where the focus is on the characters’ hands. Handmade tea is preferred, handmade dough is preferred. But the story does not characterise machines as necessarily in opposition to art.” Indeed, one of the only moments in the film where Joshi cracks a smile is when the wife of his old employer addresses him as “ Lathe Joshi ” on the phone, the first time he is called that in the film, well into the second half. Giri, a native “Hindi- bhaashi ” (Hindi speaker), also mentioned that his wife Ashwini (who plays his wife in the film) taught him all the Marathi he needed for this film — a staggering fact when you consider the quality of his performance.

DIFF’s closing night film, Visaranai (The Interrogation) , provides the logical extrapolation of Mod ’s hyper-masculine projections and Lathe Joshi ’s tech dystopia: when you have a society built on a solid foundation of male rage and tech-driven plutocracy, bigotry and the untrammelled abuse of authority will follow. And that is exactly what Visaranai offers its viewers: a scarcely believable spectacle of custodial abuse and torture. This grim, violent and exceptionally edited film takes place mostly in a Guntur (a town in Andhra Pradesh) police station, where a group of poor Tamil immigrants are unlawfully detained by the police and tortured till they agree to confess to a crime they did not commit. Again and again, they are taunted for not speaking Telugu well. At one point, a police officer blurts out “All Tamil are LTTE”, referring to the erstwhile Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam.

Roland Barthes once wrote: “What the photograph reproduces to infinity has occurred only once: the photograph mechanically repeats what could never be repeated existentially.” Watching Visaranai reminds one of the wisdom of these words: long after the migrants’ nightmare ends and they fall into a wholly different soup altogether, the images of their brutal torture remain seared onto our brains. Bamboo sticks, whips, even a “lucky rod” with an outrageous pink string handle, are the stars of the film: they certainly get a lot of footage in the first half, at any rate. The cinematography and the sound mixing are crucial, and maintain the deadly seriousness without descending into the fetishisation of violence, Ram Gopal Varma style. The soundtrack that you take away from the film is neither string nor wind instrument: it is the awful sonorous thwack of wood and leather against naked flesh.

This, then, is the country that we live in today — and with Donald Trump becoming president of the USA in January, the world we live in today. It’s a place where professors and activists who dare to tell the truth, like Nandini Sundar, are charged with murder, while megalomaniac racist sexist ignoramuses are made commander-in-chief.

But for the duration of DIFF, these concerns did not matter a whole lot, as the audience huddled closer for warmth, kept calm and gorged on quality cinema. To be sure, some things did go awry at times — like they do in most large-scale events. For instance, the opening night screening of Raam Reddy’s Thithi was delayed by problems with the audio-video synchronisation.

But you wouldn’t know it looking at the 27-year-old director, who kept the audience in splits with his hijinks, at one point heel-clicking his way across the stage. Reddy’s joie de vivre exemplified the spirit of the people — especially the volunteers — who brought this festival together.

Cinema, like heel-clicks, will not necessarily solve a whole lot of problems by itself. But it can, and ought to, pose the problem in the most relevant terms possible. These three films at DIFF— Mod , Lathe Joshi , and Visaranai — certainly did.

Published on November 11, 2016