Symposium on 'Cinema Against Communalism' from Aug 12

The partition of the Indian sub-continent may have happened more than six decades ago but the issues raised by it continue to engage filmmakers even today.

Keeping that in mind, a symposium on "Cinema Against Communalism" is being organized by the Pune Film Institute, bringing together some of the leading filmmakers of India, Bangladesh and Sri Lanka who have dealt with communal and ethnic issues in their work, from August 12 to 14.

Veterans Govind Nihalani and M S Sathyu from India, Tanvir Mokammel of Bangladesh and Prasanna Vithanage of Sri Lanka will be sharing their experiences of making feature and documentary films on the subject of communal and ethnic tensions.

Besides, Nihalani's acclaimed TV serial "Tamas", which was also made into a feature film, Sathyu's "Garam Hawa", Mokammel's "Chitra Nadir Parey" (And Quiet Flows the River Chitra) and documentaries The Promised Land and Teardrops of Karnaphuli) and Vithanage's The August Sun will be screened on the occasion.

The different topics of the symposium are Community and Nation State: A Historical Overview, Different Aspects of Communal Violence, The Breaking of Silence and Recent Films and Enduring Myths and Icons of Communalism.

Mokammel's "Chitra Nadir Parey" made in 1999 stars some of Bangladesh's top actors late Momtazuddin Ahmed, Afsana Mimi and Rowshan Jameel, and deals with the plight of a Hindu family whose head, a school teacher, refuses to migrate to India from East Pakistan, unlike lakhs of other Hindus.

His was the first feature film in Bangladesh to grapple with the subject of the Partition.

On the other hand, in 1973, Sathyu had made "Garam Hawa" on the dilemma of a Muslim family whether to shift to Pakistan after the Partition.

Mokammel has encountered problems with making films dealing with the sensitive subjects.

His debut feature film Nadir Nam Madhumati, made in 1994-95 and based on the atrocities by Pakistani troops during Bangladesh's independence war, had run into trouble with the censor board which had insisted on cuts of some of its sequences saying they were "un-Islamic".

Mokammel had refused to comply and moved the high court which later cleared it. The film won three national awards in 1996 -- Best Script, Best Story and Best Music.

"The war of liberation and the Partition and their fall-outs raise important issues relating to the values like secularism. I consider the partition at the root of all political and economic problems," he has said.

Referring to Chitra Nadir Parey, he said "as a committed artiste, I would like to highlight the problems of minorities in Bangladesh. Minorities are at the receiving-end almost all over the world."

The film "offended those who benefited from the Partition and Hindus' exodus from the then East Pakistan," said the director.

"My own feeling is, if an issue, even the most sensitive issues like condition of minorities in Bangaldesh, can be dealt with truthfulness and subtlety and with proper nuances, even the most reactionary forces may find themselves at a loss to pinpoint the reasons to oppose it.

"That's exactly perhaps what happened to Chitra Nadir Pare. Even the most communal forces who did not like the theme of the film at all, did never oppose it openly," Mokammel said.

Mokammel's "Teardrops of Karnaphuli", which deals with the conflict between predominantly Buddhist Chakma tribals in Bangladesh's Chittagong Hill Tracts and Bengali-speaking Muslims who are settled there, was at first not cleared by Bangladesh censor board, forcing the director to move the high court which gave the go-ahead.

Vithanage's 2003 film "The August Sun" is set in the backdrop of the battle between Tamil Tigers and Sri Lankan army and how it affects the life of three different persons --a Sinhalese woman looking for her husband who is an Air Force pilot believed to have been captured by LTTE, a Tamil Muslim boy trying to escape the war and a young soldier who walks into a brothel only to find that his sister is among the sex workers.