The festival crowd at Nandan. Picture by Aranya Sen

Calcutta’s much-loved annual event, the international film festival, wrapped up on Saturday with its mixed baggage of cinematic gifts, surprises and disappointments. The “culturally-inclined” home audience stood up to its label by running across shows amidst traffic, drizzles, and cyclone threats.

While the international selection comprised mostly average films with rare dazzles of cinematic talent, the audience savoured the works of eminent, political filmmakers like Fernando Solanas, Glauber Rocha, Ken Loach, Karel Kachyna and Jean Luc Godard. Hidden among the sizeable package one also came across recent works by celebrated artists such as Istvan Szabo, Claude Chabrol, Vera Chytilova and Sixth Generation Chinese filmmaker Zhang-Ke Jia.

The more exciting angle was the encounter with cinema of more contemporary artists like Amos Gitai, Abbas Kiarostami and new Turkish auteur Nuri Bilge Ceylan, all of whose five films were screened.

Despite the culturally rich and diverse package, the festival was engulfed by broader political events that transformed it into a contested democratic platform and opened up unforeseen ethical dilemmas for its audience. This year’s festival kicked off with a morbid montage of the controlled, illuminated atmosphere of festivity where the highest officials of the state and police were inaugurating the event, and the murky, lawless violence at Nandigram where the ruling party’s armed workers were recapturing lost territory from Opposition forces.

The spectators’ critical eye noticed an ironic double stance of the organisers as films like Solanas’s The Cloud or Fransisco Quevedo’s The Violin dramatised the problems of modernisation and political censorship, reminding many of similar situations at the local front. The political turmoil and its repercussions and the protest meetings and demonstrations around the festival premises culminated in a bandh on November 12 followed by one of the largest protest rallies in recent times without an explicit political banner on November 14, drawing over 60,000 citizens, including many prominent figures from the creative world of Bengal.

The crises assumed the stature of public outrage following the police harassment and arrest of more than 60 citizens from a peaceful protest march organised by artists and students outside Academy and Nandan premises. As the festivities rolled on, the political crises led to reopening of ethical controversies over the role of the state, civil rights and raison d’etre of cultural festivals. Enraged over the officially “unfortunate” turn of events coupled with authoritarian and insensitive statements issued by Left Front leaders, noted artists and intellectuals, including explicitly or implicitly Left-leaning ones, voiced their anguish, many of whom publicly declined the official festival invitation in a gesture of protest.

While a section of faithful cinephiles expressed their disapproval by abstaining from the festival, many others stayed on paying tribute to serious cinema as a source of critical education and inspiration. The overall climate took its toll on the festival, which had a thinner attendance compared to earlier years. On the other hand, the city’s cinephilia proved its own point as one heard a section of participants confessing about the way they ignored the bandh to attend the festival or dutifully divided their time between protest demonstrations and rare gems of world cinema. Unlike other years, discussions and debates about films and festival scheduling progressed under a looming shadow of discomfort.

While effective cultural tutelage and democratic ideals inspired ordinary urban citizens to denounce, walk or sing in defence of civil rights, what eludes us forever are the critical perspectives of those exploited subjects, whose lives have been led in the shadow of poverty, displacement and political treachery for decades to facilitate political gains of various undemocratic forces. As a few onlookers at the November 14 rally commented, the so-called poor, uncultured, “not yet citizens” are teaching their self-appointed representatives a lesson in politics. The lesson could perhaps be even more effective when the resentful citizen could become as sensitive to the concrete crises of democratic politics as he is to the threat to his own privileges as a citizen.

(The author teaches film studies at Jadavpur University)