THG 30: 5 Mind-stretching Films You Should Watch This Festive Season

With Dashain only days away, this year’s festive season is already here in Nepal. India will soon celebrate Diwali. For Christians across the world, Christmas is not far off. Festive holidays are a good opportunity to explore the finest in arts and literature.

In this installment of THG Recommendations, I am bringing to you five outstanding works of cinema from Asia and Africa, all of which you can watch right away for free.

With bloody conflicts raging in Ukraine and in Palestine, I think this moment should prompt us to contemplate over the pathos of human psyche that leads to such a senseless scale of death and destruction.

The last three cinemas I am recommending here, all of them non-fiction ones, deal with the dark underbelly of the violent past in India, Indonesia and Democratic Republic of Congo. The real tragedy: accountability and justice are still elusive in all the three. While the kind of violence depicted in the film is still raging in DRC, the marginalization, coercion and even outright violence against the minorities has now been deeply entrenched in India and Indonesia.

The first two fiction films, directed by veteran Icelandic-Canadian director Sturla Gunnarsson and legendary Indian filmmaker Satyajit Ray respectively, while depicting India in the 1970s and 1980s respectively, have a much more sublime storytelling. These shock and delight you in equal measures.

If entertainment is the only ingredient you look for in a film, I advise you against watching any of these.

But if you believe in cinema as the art form that expands your intellectual horizon, gives new perspectives and stretches your imagination, I’m sure you will enjoy watching all of these despite all the unpleasant things depicted or recorded in these.

If you prefer a summary of each of these in the video format and can understand Nepali, here is a special review of the all five films:

#1. Such a Long Journey (1998) by Sturla Gunnarsson. English. India.

“It’s not often that a film crosses the line between merely being very good, and being a truly great work of cinema. Such A Long Journey not only crosses that line, but makes it look easy … a modern masterpiece.”    John Binns at BRITISH FILM REVIEW

I have embedded this movie here from the director’s website where it is available for watching and screening. Set in 1971 India, this movie is a guide to the tumultuous past of India as a nation as much as a prism through which we can gauge how much (and how little) an Indian family has changed over these five decades. The frosty and often confrontational father-son relationship in the movie that may seem out of touch for a Western viewer very much represents the family dynamics in large parts of India today.

[Cautionary note: this movie contains a brief but shocking footage of male nudity.]

#2. Agantuk by Satyajit Ray. Bengali with English subtitles. India.

This looks to me like one of the most underrated works of the legendary Indian filmmaker Satyajit Ray.

Here is the IMDB blurb for the movie:

A well-off family is paid an unexpected, and rather unwanted, visit by a man claiming to be the woman's long-lost uncle. The initial suspicion with which they greet the man slowly dissolves as he regales them with stories of his travels.

What gripped me the most about the movie is the sheer freshness of the writer/director’s perspective on the indigenous people. In a scene, after a testy exchange about the way of life the tribal people lead, an urban and educated man challenges the long-lost uncle: Is it civilized to eat human meat?

The uncle, an authority on the tribal way of life across continents, fires back: Is it civilized to slaughter millions of people with a touch of a button?

#3. The Act of Killing and The Look of Silence by Joshua Oppenheimer. Indonesian local language with English subtitles. Indonesia.

This 2-part series on the Indonesian genocide led by Suharto is THE most daring act of film-making I have come across so far. After watching both, I tweeted that if you were allowed only two films between now and death, you should watch them.

While the filmmaker starts the first part as a chronicle of the past at risk of being forgotten or whitewashed, he gets unexpected help from the killers themselves. Having never pondered about the accountability and justice part of the equation, the killers are worried that their great contribution to the building of modern Indonesia is about to be forgotten. So, they agree to the director’s proposal to recreate scenes from the genocide as part of a movie project.

While all others remain unfazed throughout the exercise, one elderly man—while re-enacting scenes for the role-play as the victim—suddenly realized the gravity of the pain and suffering they inflicted on others. He is shaken and takes the filmmaking project as an attempt to some form of salvation.

In part two, the director convinces brother of a killed victim to be the part of the project. The young man travels with Oppenheimer and confronts the killers looking at their eyes. The life-threatening ire of the killers at being confronted this way is clearly captured by the camera. Oppenheimer has explained in interviews that they had elaborate escape plans before going for such interviews and the lives of both of them were truly in danger throughout.

After the documentaries were out, Oppenheimer could never again set foot in Indonesia. His protagonist had to move himself permanently to some far corner of the island nation away from the gaze of the killers of his brother.

#4. Mama (A Woman and Her Chimpanzees Heal Together After Trauma) by Pablo de la Chica. Democratic Republic of Congo.

I was so moved by this documentary that I wrote a long piece in Nepali whose title translates to: The Best Ever Love Story for This Valentine’s Day

From The New Yorker’s youtube channel where it is available:

In “Mama,” directed by Pablo de la Chica, Mama Zawadi, a caregiver at a chimpanzee sanctuary, where she and the chimps—both victims of the ongoing conflict in the Democratic Republic of the Congo—help each other heal.

As horrific as the ordeal Mama Zawadi had to go through was, the heart-warming process of recovery that she goes through along with the baby chimps help us to keep hoping even amid all the bloodletting that is going on across the world right now.

#5. The Day India Burned. BBC Documentary on India’s partition

Last broadcasted by BBC in August 2007, this elaborate tale of India’s partition with gut-wrenching testimonies from the witnesses of horrendous crimes has somehow survived in a non-descript youtube channel for years.

The most shocking part of the partition stories in the documentary comes from an elderly Sikh survivor of the violence. While the women from the other communities were routinely treated like a trophy to rape and kill by the rioters in either side, he recalls a story in which the menfolk of his own community culled their own women and girls so as to save them from the disgrace of potential conversion to another faith.