/ARTS WEEKLY/FILM: Top Award for an Unusual Mix

By Sanjay Suri Reprint | | Print |

Sanjay Suri

LONDON, Sep 9 2003 (IPS) - -‘Khamosh Pani’ (Silent Waters) became the first Pakistani film to bag the Golden Leopard award in Switzerland this year. But that was not the only first.

This is an unusual Pakistani-French-German film in which an Indian actress plays a lead role, for which she shared the best actress award.

It is also an unusual subject. The story is set against the partition of India into India and Pakistan in 1947. But the story in the film begins in 1979, and it is about the birth of someone who would be called ‘terrorist’.

A bold first feature film from Sabiha Sumar, born in Karachi in Pakistan in 1961. She studied film-making and political science at the Sarah Lawrence College in New York from 1980 to 1983.

Sabiha has produced documentaries for Channel 4 television. This film was shot in Pakistan in spring 2002, and had its world premiere at the 56th Locarno film festival in Switzerland last month.

It tells the story of Ayesha, a middle-aged woman whose life centres around her son Saleem, a gentle, dreamy 18-year-old, in love with Zubeida. They live in a village in Punjab in Pakistan.

But in 1979 Pakistan is ruled by Gen Zia-ul-Haq, and the country is on the road to Islamisation. Saleem becomes intensely involved with a group of Islamic fundamentalists, and leaves Zubeida.

That is when the partition begins to kick in, and stories begin to criss-cross the lives of the young, stories of people from the parents’ generation who were abducted, and whose lives had to be rebuilt, in a fashion, on the other side of the divide. The truth that finally dawns on Saleem shatters his life, and throws village life into chaos.

The story draws on historical facts. By official estimates 50,000 Muslim women and 33,000 Sikh and Hindu women were abducted during the partition. The actual number is believed to be much higher. But once the truth was revealed about a woman’s background, it was partition once again.

Ayesha is played by Kirron Kher, wife of the legendry Indian actor Anupam Kher. For the first time in the Locarno festival’s 56-year history, the prize for best actress was split in three, between Holly Hunter (‘Thirteen’), Diana Dumbrava (‘Maria’) and Kirron Kher.

"It is a unique film," Kher told IPS in London. "It was a great experience to have worked in a film like this."

The film was made with the support of the Filmboard Berlin-Brandebourg and the Medien-und Filmgesellschaft Baden-Wurttemberg (MFG) in Germany, the Fonds Sud Cinema of the culture ministry and the Communaute urbaine de Strasbourg in France, and other institutions in Sweden and the Netherlands.

Sumar did most of her research through meetings with members of the Recovery Team that was set up after 1947 to return women to their rightful homes. Members of the team "told horrific tales," Sumar says in a statement released with the film.

But the film is not just a critique of religious fundamentalism, she says.

"Fundamentalists also have the right of free speech and are entitled to occupy their due place in society," she says. "Rather in my film, I want to stress the consequences of the vast majority of the people and their political leadership abdicating power to the minority religious forces."

But through the Zia period, she says, "Islamisation seeped in like smoke through crevices and over the years that followed we saw Pakistani society change slowly – from a more liberal open society to a more conservative, restrictive society."

In ‘Khamosh Pani’, Saleem encapsulates this change.

The film has won recognition, but finding a distributor to give it wide viewing is expected to be a problem within Pakistan. Nor has the film yet made it to a wide enough audience through the international distribution network.

The story the film tells is a disturbing one, which means also that it is one everyone wants to forget. Like so many others, this is a story worth telling, but one that is short of audience enough.