Video Formats - Milindo Taid

The importance of Anas Aremeyaw Anas.

Sep 30

The world has not seen the likes of Anas Aremeyaw Anas, and I am not sure there will be another like him in quite a while. A lawyer who disguises as a Saudi Sheikh and camouflages himself as a rock, and no, he is no supporting actor in a television sitcom. Anas, based out of his native Accra, Ghana, encountered rampant societal evils in and around his country, and his response to those evils was to embrace unorthodox undercover investigative journalism. Clearly cutting away from the mainstream, dumbed down, market driven journalistic practices and the hollow promises of highbrow talking head journalism, Anas puts forth simple and lucid principles that govern his kind of journalism, namely: Naming, Shaming and Jailing. Purists may cringe, but I must say, I tend to nod my head in agreement this time, when Anas articulates that the ends justify the means. Anas’s work is governed by a moral compass, so to say, in his relentless pursuit of the unmasking of societal ills and evils and in particular the perpetrators and collaborators of such ills and evils, from human trafficking to human rights violations to corruption in high office, to superstitions and blind beliefs. Read More…

Jeff Nichols: Take Shelter. 2011

Sep 10

“There is a storm coming…like nothing you have ever seen, and not one of you is prepared for it” screams Curtis (played by the very talented Michael Shannon) in American director Jeff Nichols‘ film ‘Take Shelter‘ (2011). I would say nothing quite prepares one for a film like ‘Take Shelter’ as strands of the real and the non-real interweave to create this tapestry of a brooding, melancholic and menacing exploration of notions of anxiety, marriage and commitment, and communication in interpersonal relationships. This is probably one of the few films from that year that made me sit up and take notice of the classic independent cinema. A theme of a married couple with a young child going through difficult and intense times is a theme that has played on screens in darkened halls over decades now, and therein lies Nichols’ genius, for he takes this familiar as a doorbell universal theme, and retells it with a mastery and a quiet restraint far beyond his years. Read More…

Andrew Levine: The Day My God Died (2003)

Jan 16

“The day that I was sold, was the day that my God died” said the child. I first encountered Andrew Levine‘s ‘The Day My God Died‘ in a film festival in Mumbai, India in 2003-04, and it continues to stay with me to this day. Four years in the making, and against all odds, this independent documentary film remains a vital and important work in talking about the tragedy of the child sex trade, of girls sold into sexual slavery – human trafficking that engages in the worst forms of human rights violations. A film graduate of the University of Utah, USA, Levine first visited India and Nepal as a tourist, but came back again, to tell a story of a multi-billion dollar industry with children as a commodity being brought and sold, recruiters who scout them, traffickers who deceive them, the pimps and the brothel keepers who buy them, and the police and custodians of the law with their hands outstretched and their eyes closed. Justice indeed is blind. At the same breath, the film profiles motivated and outstanding activists and abolitionists like Anuradha Koirala (founder director of Maiti Nepal) and her incredible work in the rescue and rehabilitation of the girls sold into sexual slavery. Finally, it is a film about the resilience of the human spirit in the face of unimaginable pain, betrayal, torture, imprisonment, disease, death and loss. Watch. Read More…

Mikio Naruse: Tabi Yakusha (1940)

Sep 27

With a film directing and writing career spanning over four decades (1930-1968), Mikio Naruse, is certainly one of the lesser known figures of the classical Japanese cinema. An unassuming and socially somewhat withdrawn individual, Naruse’s prolific film output from early to mid twentieth century, saw him engage with a diverse range of themes, while consciously remaining rooted in telling stories of the ‘bleak’ everyday. As Japanese film scholar Donald Richie notes “…given Naruse’s skill, devotion, and honesty, the world he creates through film remains both profoundly troubling and deeply moving.” In ‘Tabi Yakusha‘ (Travelling Actors,1940), Naruse places his protagonists (a pair of artists / actors / ‘clowns’ of a travelling theatre group), Hyoroku (Kamatari Fujiwara) and Senpei (Kan Yanagiya), within the context of a performance in a rural area by the ‘distinguished’ visiting kabuki troupe of ‘Kikugoro VI’. In what is apparently a light comedy, Naruse, manages to engage in existential, absurdist queries (in some ways, Hyoroku and Senpei predates Vladimir and Estragon‘s ‘wait’), while tackling issues of the role of the artist in society, of truth/reality and imitation, of human and animal. Watch.

Jafar Panahi: Badkonake Sefid (The White Balloon). 1995

Jun 27

Emerging out of the shadows of the much venerated Abbas Kiarostami, Iranian director Jafar Panahi‘s emphatic debut feature won him many accolades over the years, and deservedly so. A collaboration of scriptwriter Kiarostami and writer-director Panahi, ‘Badkonake Sefid‘ (The White Balloon, 1995) holds on dearly to the cinematic realism of Panahi’s larger oeuvre, along with the mise-en-scene sensibilities central to a certain tendency in the Iranian ‘new wave’ cinema. In telling the story of a 7 year old girl’s (Razieh) longing for ownership of a chubby gold fish around the Iranian New Year, Panahi masterfully controls his material, absorbing the audience entirely into his heroine’s delicate, innocent, enquiring world, playing it out on the often unkind streets of Tehran. With the narrative hinged around the loss (and subsequent regaining) of the means of purchase of an object of desire, Panahi chooses to bring a cinematic style of subtlety and remarkable human detail. Watch. Read More…

Albert Camus: The Madness of Sincerity

Apr 29

Like most, my introduction to Albert Camus many years back was via the translated ‘L’Étranger‘ (The Stranger/The Outsider.1942). At that time, and probably more so on re-reads, it became less a parable of the absurd and the existential, and more of a beautiful, fully realized, hallucinatory depiction of living in that heat soaked, summer crazed place. ‘Meursault’, the anarchistic anti-hero, had and still has huge appeal, and is afflicted by what Camus called ‘the madness of sincerity’, a character distinguished by never wanting to say more than he feels. Camus remains one of the most influential writers of the last century, yet the man himself was somewhat of an enigma. In trying to put together the Camus puzzle in 1997, Phares & Balises, the BBC & ARTE came together to actualize this bio-film on Camus, by way of attempting to retrace his life, work and travels. The five women in Camus’ life (who were closest to him) take us on a journey through his times and their recollections interweave through the three chapters Camus himself outlined as the signposts of his literary intentions – the Absurd, Revolt and Happiness. Read More…

Anand Patwardhan: Jai Bhim Comrade. 2011

Mar 03

I first saw and heard Dalit poet and activist, the late Mr. Vilas Ghogre in Patwardhan‘s early ‘cityscape’ “Mumbai, Hamara Shahar / Bombay, Our City” (1985), many years back. The power of Vilas Ghogre’s words and melody stayed with me for a long time only to be rekindled by Patwardhan’s latest ‘Jai Bhim Comrade‘, an elaborate three hour ‘docu-treatise’ of the caste question in contemporary India, ‘narratively’ hinged around the singular brutal instance of state oppression as experienced via the mass slaying of Dalit residents of Ramabai Ambedkar Nagar colony by police forces in Mumbai, India, on the 11th of July, 1997. Crafted over a decade, ‘Jai Bhim Comrade’ is an important addition to Patwardhan’s complete oeuvre of conscientious cinema, where he traces the meandering, complex intermixes of opportunistic politics, resistance and activism, subaltern rationalism, identity and religiosity, movements for humanitarianism and justice in thwarting divisive, violent, repressive social tendencies. In mapping the narrative through Vilas Ghogre’s martyrdom; Bhai Sangare, the outspoken, fiery Dalit leader, succumbing to burns while burning copies of the Manu Smruti; and the new and emerging cultural activism of Dalit consciousness as exemplified by groups like the Kabir Kala Manch (KKM), ‘Jai Bhim Comrade’ elaborates an India that never finds voice in the dominant, vaccuous pop-commercialism of the mainstream media. Watch.

Hannah Arendt: the Language remains. 1964

Jan 31

Hannah Arendt remains one of the leading German-American intellectuals from the last century. In this televised interview with German journalist Günter Gaus from October the 28th, 1964, Arendt (then 58) responds to a wide range of queries centering around philosophy, politics and gender, regarding herself more of a political theorist than a philosopher as she does hint at a ‘disdain’ of sorts for the circle of philosophers. She also reflects on Auschwitz, Germans, Jews and Judaism, assimilation, anti-Semitism, Zionism and Israel, Germany and German. At a particularly telling moment she says “What remains? The Language remains”. For Arendt, history is a chronicle of the exceeding of expectations. As one of Arendt’s formative influences, German philospher Martin Heidegger, stressed, individuals do matter. In this interview Arendt does come across as the charismatic public intellectual that she was, but at the same time, her states of tension over certain contradictions convey themselves as well. Towards the closure, she pays a loving tribute to her mentor, German philosopher and psychiatrist Karl Jaspers, with resonances from her genuinely uplifting work ‘The Human Condition’. Watch.

Ariel Schulman and Henry Joost: Catfish. 2010

Jan 08

I first came across Schulman and Joost’s ‘Catfish‘ a couple of years back, and on revisiting it, I was certainly in a position to appreciate it more. So, what does one have here? A title vaguely hinting at aquatic life of some sort, thrown in with a reluctant, cajoled into participation protagonist, and a Thomson and Thompson constantly urging the unrolling of events in a manner that is worthy of a documentary film. Not quite. Yaniv Schulman, a young Manhattan based photographer, becomes the subject of the cinéma vérité instincts of brother Ariel and friend Henry. What unfolds over the course of film time, and also real time of 8-9 months of the making of it, are concerns of common interest in debates around early 21st century usage of personal and social interactive media. Identity, deception, impersonation and orchestration in the ambit of social engineering on the one hand and loneliness, isolation, pain, love, longing, broken dreams, and friendship in the ambit of the human emotional spectrum, ‘Catfish’ indeed, resonates with a sincerity that is essential to the spirit of cinéma vérité. Like all of the better cinematic achievements of recent times, the film is much about the search for truth. The truth is out there? Maybe not. Watch.

Georg Friedrich Wilhelm Hegel: Dialectic and ‘Geist’

Nov 28

In taking Immanuel Kant‘s mind-ordered world from the human level to the cosmic one, 19th century German philosopher Georg F W Hegel created a ‘total system’ into which all past, present, and future experience and thought fit together rationally in an encompassing dialectic that is constantly evolving toward supreme self-consciousness, or ‘Absolute Spirit’. Here Australian philosopher Peter Singer (in his pre bio-ethics avatar, when he was professor of philosophy at the Monash University) discusses the essentials of Hegelian thought and its influence. Hegel’s writings, are, of course famously, notoriously difficult to decipher – leaning into territory that may distinctly be identified as pedantic, pompous, and obscurantist. By the end of the 19th century, most academic philosophers of any stature were ‘Hegelians’, which is to say they embraced, theoretically, the notion of ‘Change’, accepted ‘Strife’ as essential to ‘Progress’, saw things as ‘Parts of a Whole’ and themselves as characters in the ‘Unfolding of History’, and argued dialectically. Read More…