Glimpses of India at Rotterdam 2009 news
Status
Apart from our Indian greats from the current lot: Adoor Gopalakrishnan's ‘˜Climate for Change', Girish Kasaravalli's ‘˜Gulabi Talkies' and Satish Manwar's ‘˜Gabhricha Paus'(The Damned Rain), India can be peeked at and enjoyed with two Dutch efforts at the '09 Rotterdam Film Festival. Two young film-makers present the mundane and the sublime with a feature film and a documentary film respectively.
While Diederik Van Rooijen's ‘˜Bollywood Hero' presents the vision of a well bred young Dutchman's efforts in trying to change India for the better, Jiska Rickels presents quaint rural India with its beliefs and clairvoyance in her documentary, ‘˜Babaji, An Indian Love Story'. Between them they travel from Mumbai and its film industry to a mystic healer in rural India.
Van Rooijen presents the wrongful notions of foreigners who come to our vast country and think that education and expert medical attention would change our country into what can rightfully be called a developed and civilized land. They fail to understand the layers of cultural and ethnic fabrics that are woven into all the aspects of our lives. And that is where, the protagonist in Bollywood Hero goes overboard. A nice debut attempt in giving an objective POV about the cultural idiosyncrasies that divide the east and west into ‘˜they' and ‘˜us', Bollywood Hero also creates dimensions to the main protagonists's character with his video diaries to his father, who is turning senile. Temporarily stationed in a land that needs his wits to unravel its mysteries, he has these one-way conversations with his father on video asking the latter to be proud of him.
In ‘˜Babaji, An Indian Love Story' the name is kind of self-explanatory, because the film revolves around a mystic healer who has broken all norms of custom and religion to bury his beloved wife in his yard and has his own grave standing ready next to his wife's. Nobody knows the exact age of Babaji, with villagers declaring that he might be 107 years old.. The story is pieced together with folk love ballads, villagers' interviews and the observation of the various rituals that keep the village and its people ticking day after day. For love...made with love..
