www.civilsocietyindia.com,www.civilsocietyonline.com

Amit Sengupta
New Delhi

THE genre of documentary cinema or the short film is often the thin line which separates the tenuous threshold of reality and fiction. In that sense, when third rate reality shows of failed actresses dominate the living consciousness of mainstream media and urban drawing rooms, the Asian Women's Documentary Film Festival held in Delhi celebrating Women's Day on March 8 was a brilliant moment of creative revelation amidst all round mediocrity. Because this was a festival of the finest filmmakers in India who are not celebrities on or off entertainment-news television. Filmmakers who enter reality with their cameras and discover revelations: live, living, lived. And quietly, without pretensions or outside fame or money. Take Kavita Joshi's 29 minute painstaking film, Tales from the Margins, shot through months of hard rigour in dangerous and difficult terrain, without funds or patronage, often with her own savings. The film celebrates the amazing resilience of Manipuri women, mothers, daughters, grandmothers, against a faceless, cold-blooded State machinery which often operates like colonisers and occupation armies. The Assam Rifles men picked up young Manorama under the draconian Armed Forces Special Powers Act (AFSPA) on the midnight of July 11, 2004. Her brutalised body was found on the outskirts of Imphal later. She was reportedly gang-raped and shot, with bruise marks all over her body: she was allegedly shot on the genitals to eliminate evidence. The security forces claimed that she was a 'terrorist' who was escaping. Escaping? A tortured young woman in a sarong? From a band of armed men? The protests which erupted in Manipur shook the nation's conscience. Joshi's film recaptures the 'naked protest' by the Mothers of Manipur, where scores of women stripped themselves naked outside the Assam Rifles headquarters with banners saying: Indian Army Come Rape Us.

Irom Sharmila in a scene from Tales from the Margins	Delhi-Mumbai-Delhi is a profile of Mumbai’s bar girls
Q2P explores toilets, gender and the city	Tales from the Margins, celebrates the amazing resilience of Manipuri women, mothers, daughters, grandmothers, against a faceless, coldblooded State machinery.

This was a peaceful protest led by women, who had earlier done extraordinary campaigns against alcoholism and male violence in Manipur. Police atrocities followed. Till date there has been no sign of justice despite Sonia Gandhi's promises, while the beautiful Manipuri landscape and its simple people wait for the dawn which must one day arrive, inside the lens of the camera, and outside. Like Irom Sharmila. Irom, on fast, imprisoned, force-fed nasally since the last six years, protesting against the AFSPA, witness of the epic narratives of other Manoramas and innocents whose names bring alive simmering wounds of a social reality which has to be seen to be believed. What mainstream India turns blind and deaf to, the camera enters that reality stealthily, taking risks, pushing the threshold of truth, time and space till the limits. "We were told don't go out after five," said Joshi. "But we had to go out – because everything would shut down and an eerie silence would stalk the streets after five. We had to capture this reality.

If we were alone in a car traveling through the night through villages and forests, we knew, if we survive, we will be lucky." Her film is a survivor like Irom and Irom is a survivor because she writes poetry, does yoga, practices meditation and she still dreams of a utopia of peace after this protracted Gandhian mode of satyagraha. "One day I will see the dawn of peace, of that I am sure," she says, and Joshi's camera pans onto her mother, an old woman of resilience who has followed her promise to her daughter: she will not make her vulnerable by meeting Irom; she will hold her tears; she too must wait with pain and hope in her heart. Move away from the magnificent and troubled northeastern landscape to the railway tracks of Delhi-Mumbai-Delhi, from the suburban ghettos of the capital to the dancebars of the Mahanagar. So what will young Kulwant Kaur do, now that her husband has thrown her out, after years of beating and torture, forcibly taking away her three children? Her father used to do the same to her broken mother, hardened by poverty, bringing up her daughters like only a mother can, her entire life a story of hard labour, deprivation and sacrifice, like millions of women in this country. So what will Kulwant do to save her family from apocalypse now? She goes to a Mumbai dance bar. Saba Dewan's incredible film, Delhi-Mumbai-Delhi, shot over painstaking months of friendship and persistence, tells you once again, how reality shows can be so different and authentic.

Shot inside a Delhi ghetto and a shared apartment in Mumbai, with beautiful, moving images of life inside a train and outside, real images, not concocted ones, she trains her camera to become an absent object where the subjects unravel their realisms without inhibition. They talk, laugh, cry, put on lipstick, cook, look for water, flirt, dream of marriage, go to the beauty parlour: the dance bar girls, with Kulwant as protagonist. She too, like others, have left their past behind, and want to make it in the world of fame and money; they slip, they are left behind, they can't make it often, but no one can escape the tough trajectory of their hard lives, their steely resolve to hold on, their amazing capacity to adapt and work their way through the labyrinth of alcohol, smoke, sex, sleaze and shadowy creatures. Saba's film sends no moral message accept that these girls from nameless ghettos are like ordinary girls but with a difference: they don't want to carry the baggage of poverty and pain anymore. They want to experiment with their freedoms, with their dreams of a happy married home, with their bodies and minds, like liberated, hard working women who too want to mark a niche in this world. Not all of them can become a Rani Mukherjee, as Kulwant so desperately wants, but they can become their own identities. This itself proves, as the film shows with constant song and dance on a television as backdrop, that the Mumbai box office celluloid is bereft of reality, as is entertainment and news television.

There were some mundane and down to earth documentaries: of girls' schools with no toilets, men pissing all over pavements,teachers holding their bodily fluids because there's no place to go, working girls not even once visiting the filthy public toilets of our big cities. But then there is a flip side to it all: VIP Delhi for instance is spic and span, but go to the underbelly of non-VIP metros, and you feel and see the most subhuman survival amidst incredible dirt, stench, shit, urine, garbage, and 'community toilets' with no water, no electricity, no protection, and girls in burqas standing in queue, waiting for their turn. Outside on the wall, the Shining India Poised prophecy: Mera Bharat Mahan or Cleanliness is next to Godliness. Inside, Paromita Vohra's documentary expose: Q2P, literally queue to pee, explores the dynamics between toilets, gender and the city, raising questions about male andfemale divides, class, caste, urban development and the twisted myths of the global city, the new mythological Shanghais of India. There were other outstanding films: Madsong, Call it Slut – a mini-portrait of a transgender person who is more than a woman, Moustaches Unlimited, exploring masculinity and femaleness through moustaches, Story Maker: Story Taker, about the incredible paintings of the Warli tribe, now reduced to slaves and caricatures by 'outsiders', Between the Lines, the search for Dr Anandi Joshi, India's first woman doctor who went to study abroad, defying feudal, male barriers of her high caste Maharashtrian Brahmin family and community. A society which discriminates against women lives in the medieval era of patriarchy. Between India’s many queues there is a twilight zone which is not shining.