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Kaleidoscope image reverse12/19/2023 ![]() The heartbreaking irony is that Hedu and Gunu are caught up in a crisis in which they play no part they lack even the basic amenities one would require to produce a carbon footprint. Panda deftly switches the scale of the film from local to global, articulating, with a modest humanism, the insidious magnitude of climate change. While Mahua is ravaged by drought, Gunu Babu’s impoverished hometown in coastal Odisha-where his wife and child live precariously in a thatched hut-is wrecked by torrential rains and cyclones that whisk entire villages into the sea. However, a narrative masterstroke soon reveals Gunu and Hedu as victims of the same forces. Impatient and merciless, concerned only with the “double commission” he gets for recovering loans from debt-ridden regions, Gunu seems, at first glance, like the very embodiment of an indifferent bureaucracy. Desperate to protect his family, he strikes up a clandestine deal with a man known in the village as the “God of Death”: the ruthless loan recovery agent Gunu Babu (Ranvir Shorey), infamous for the trail of suicides he leaves in his wake. ![]() Set in Mahua, a parched district in Central India, Kadvi Hawa centers on Hedu (Sanjay Mishra), a blind old man who fears that his depressed son might soon succumb to the fate that has claimed several other young farmers in the area. Kadvi Hawa begins by taking on another hot-button issue-the “contagious disease,” as one character in the film puts it, of suicides in the country’s famine-stricken regions-but the film reveals itself, with rich and slow-burning pathos, to be much more expansive in scope. Nila Madhab Panda, whose deliberative and devastating Kadvi Hawa ( Dark Wind, pictured above) opens the festival, is known for films sometimes described as “issue-based”: he debuted in 2006 with a documentary short, Climate’s First Orphans, about the devastation wreaked in coastal Odisha by rising sea levels his feature Jalpari (2012) wove an excoriating critique of female foeticide into a children’s adventure film and with Kaun Kitne Paani Mein Hai (2015) he satirized the social consequences of the water shortage crisis in rural India. The India Kaleidoscope Film Festival, now in its second year at the Museum of the Moving Image, captures this emergent moment in Indian film culture: its slim but diverse line-up culls, from all over the country, independent films that render stories of the mofussil with a distinctly regional idiom. In recent years, however, the proliferation of domestic film festivals and the support of the National Film Development Corporation of India have facilitated an increasing number of local, out-of-mainstream spaces for film production and viewership-enabling the rise of regional independent movements like the Marathi and Malayali New Waves. It’s an accusation that independent filmmakers in India still contend with, caught in an unfortunate double-bind where local, social-realist cinema is often sustained by international funding and distribution. ![]() His European-inspired neorealism and scorn for the broad, pan-Indian address of the commercial Bombay film (which he described in the same article as the “perfect formula to entice and amuse the illiterate multitudes”) were often perceived as signs of elitism, catered to the audiences of the foreign festivals where Ray and his contemporaries won acclaim than to the marginalized Indians who formed the subjects of their films. I hope the cinema, at least, retains its purity.” Ironically, the criticism leveled most frequently at Ray in domestic circles was that he pandered to Western sensibilities. In 1967, at the peak of postcolonial India’s Parallel Cinema wave, its poster auteur Satyajit Ray lamented in an op-ed in Film World: “Too much of our arts have been devitalized and shorn of their roots by aping the West. The India Kaleidoscope Film Festival runs from November 9–12, 2017 at Museum of the Moving Image.
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