Dharamshala International Film Festival Opens With a Gentle Hymn and a Raised Fist

In the charming, bustling town of McLeodganj that sits in the lap of Himalaya’s Dhauladhar Range and is home to the Dalai Lama and 15,000 Tibetans living in exile, the Dharamshala International Film Festival’s (Diff) 11th edition opened on Thursday evening with a gentle hymn and a raised fist for ‘independent’ films that chronicle lives unseen, battles fought, rights lost and won, and protests gone quiet.

There was a nice 14 degree C chill in the air at the Tibetan Institute of Performing Arts, the festival’s venue, as the four-day Diff began with a full house for the opening film, Ajitpal Singh’s Fire In The Mountains, an intensely-observed, affecting feature film about a family of five in Uttarakhand that is living in limbo. 

Chandra and Dharam, the parents of a wheel-chair-bound young boy, fight over his treatment and the meager income from their one-room ‘Switzerland Homestay.’ The God-fearing father is certain that it’s a curse which will be lifted only when he holds an elaborate religious ceremony, Jagar, to please the family deity. Meanwhile Chandra, who carries her son on her back from her house in the hills to the road and then to physiotherapy, is desperately trying to cling to her savings to pay for his medical treatment. 

In between all this, their daughter, Kanchan, a school topper, is becoming a dancing sensation on a TikTok-like app; Chandra is sacrificing everything to get the promised road constructed that will connect her house to the main road and make her son’s journey to school possible. 

“It is a simple story about complex characters,” writer-director Singh said.  

The film, which premiered in January 2021 at Sundance Film Festival in the US, has travelled to more than 30 festivals, but Singh said that Thursday’s screening of his film at McLeodganj was the first one he was attending with an audience, what with Covid having disrupted proceedings earlier. 

Singh is amongst many of India’s best ‘independent’ film writers and directors who are attending Diff this year. They aren’t just accompanying their films, but are also here to catch up with friends, watch films their peers have made, and interact with an audience that’s a mix of local Tibetans, Buddhist monks, festival programmers, photographers, film producers, writers and cinephiles who have flown in from Mumbai, Kerala or taken the overnight bus from Delhi because there’s a vibe to the Dharamshala International Film Festival that’s unlike any other in India.  

Diff is to India What Sundance is to the World

The love child of filmmakers Ritu Sarin and her Tibetan partner Tenzing Sonam, Diff is to India what, perhaps, Sundance in Utah, the US, is to the world — an independent-spirited film festival that picks films where marginalized lives, taboo topics and contentious politics take centerstage.  

This year’s Diff is special because the festival returns to its physical form after two years of a digital avatar. It is also its biggest and boldest edition.  

Among the 80 films from 32 countries that are being screened at Diff, there is Rintu Thomas and Sushmit Ghosh’s Writing With Fire. The first Indian film to be nominated for Best Documentary at the Oscars last year, it tells the inspiring story of Khabar Lehriya, the only newspaper in India run by Dalit women.  

Then there’s Shaunak Sen’s documentary All That Breathes, which follows two Muslim brothers in Delhi who have made it their life’s mission to tend to and save kites as they fall from the sky. The film premiered at the Sundance Film Festival in January this year where it won the Grand Jury Prize. 

There’s also Payal Kapadia’s lyrical A Night of Knowing Nothing that premiered at Cannes Film Festival’s Directors Fortnight section last year and won the award for best documentary. 

The film, which screened at Diff on Friday morning, uses letters written by a university student to her estranged lover, to tell the story of students’ protests in India over four years and across four universities.  

The film is a surreal montage of footage of students dancing, agitating in campus, with doodles of hands, as a haunting voiceover begins telling the story of the June 2015 protest and strike at the Film and Television Institute of India (FTII). It ends with disturbing CCTV footage of the library of Jamia Millia Islamia University in 2019 as Delhi police launch an unprovoked attack on students.     

Apart from documentaries, the festival has superb short and feature films as well, including Pedro – Natesh Hegde’s Kannada film about a middle-aged electrician who accidentally kills a cow – and Prasun Chatterjee’s Dostojee. Set in a village near the India-Pakistan border against the backdrop of Babri Masjid’s demotion and the bombings in Bombay, Dostojee is the story of two school-going friends – Safikul and Palash – and how insidiously and quickly bigotry travels, singeing neighborhoods and friendships. 

Queuing up for Joyland  

But the film that is the festival’s highlight is the Pakistani feature, Joyland. Director Saim Sadiq’s movie had its world premiere at the Cannes Film Festival in May this year and won the Jury Prize. 

The film, which stars transgender actress Alina Khan as the lead, tells the fictional tale of a middle-class family whose patriarch wants his sons to give him grandsons, but things change when his younger son, Haider, falls in love with a transgender dancer. 

Ritu Sarin joked that several people are planning to queue up hours, or even the night before for Joyland that screens at 5.45 pm on Saturday. It’s one show and, perhaps, the only chance in India to watch the film on a big screen.