Filming isolation, from AIIMS to NY

We know that movies offer an escape from our daily, humdrum reality. But can movies save us as well?

Director Crystal Moselle’s documentary, The Wolfpack, offers a definitive answer to that question.

The Wolfpack, which won the US grand jury prize at Sundance, is the story of six Angulo brothers from Lower East Side Manhattan, New York, who, now ranging in age from 16 to 23 years, were not allowed to leave their four-bedroom apartment by their Peruvian father Oscar. A Hare Krishna follower, Oscar’s fear of New York crime mixed with some lofty ideals led to a cussed, feudal instinct to control the lives and destinies of his children. The boys were home-schooled by their meek American mother Susanne.

Moselle met the six brothers about four years ago, on one of their exploratory outings into the world outside their apartment. She followed them, talked to them and convinced them to let her film their story. Talking and listening to them with a hand-held camera in their four-bedroom apartment for over four years led to the 84-minute long documentary that’s as disturbing as it is heartwarming. The Wolfpack, culled from over 500 hours of recording and some footage from home videos, is hypnotic and haunting. It’s sad, strange and yet reassuring about the human spirit’s dogged attempts to be free.

“Sometimes we’d go out nine times a year, sometimes once. In one particular year we never got out at all.”

Bhagavan, Govinda, Mukunda, Narayana, Krsna and Jagadisa open up slowly, about how they’ve lived their lives, and in their expressions, silences we read and sense many things — the love they have for each other, their resilience, and what’s left unsaid but implied — abuse. We also see, at times, in the margins of the frames, their sister Visnu who is mentally unstable, and, their unemployed and drunk father. Oscar and Visnu tug at the film disturbingly. Though their mother talks, explains, we never quite get answers to the questions we have, Visnu and Oscar never quite leave our disturbing thoughts.

The boys, reed-thin and with flowing long hair, are surprisingly bright, funny, expressive, charming, very decent and delightfully androgynous. Denying them access to computers or cell phones, and no one but each other for entertainment, the only window to the world their father opened, was via the VHS tapes of Hollywood films.

The brothers developed an obsessive love and need for movies. Not just watching them, but enacting them very seriously. It became, as if, their own sub cult, in rebellion to their father’s. They’d transcribe the dialogue of Francis Ford Coppola, Quentin Tarantino and superhero flicks word for word, type them out, learn the lines, fashion costumes, including cardboard guns, and then enact The Dark Knight, for example, with the Batman costume created from yoga mats and cereal boxes.

15-year-old Mukunda was the first one to venture out. Wearing a mask from the Halloween movie, he wandered on the streets around his house for a bit before he was picked up by the cops and sent to a mental hospital.

That daring, without any serious repercussions, meant that they all started venturing out, into that loud, bright, crowded place outside their apartment building. They went out first to the movies, at night, and then, slowly, to the beach. We watch six boys emerge from a theatre late at night, having watched David O Russell’s The Fighter. They are not just dressed in black suits and glasses, but even walk in slo-mo Reservoir Dogs swagger. But they can’t stop giggling with excitement at watching a film in a cinema hall.

The Wolfpack could have been a very different kind of documentary —exploitative, or a heavy interrogation of the evil, immigrant father (a word that’s used in almost every review of the film by American critics). It’s not.

Moselle stands back, refusing to probe, determined to be, as far as possible, just an observer. But she’s not, of course. She’s very important to the story of the Angulo brothers. She is their first major link to the aliens outside – guiding, helping, acclimatizing the six brothers to the world outside their apartment.

Isolation, in a sense, was the theme of this year’s Dharamshala International Film Festival. Now in its fifth year, the festival, as always, had an impressive line up, though not all films were as exhilarating and stunning as they’ve been in the previous years.

A few stood out, of course, like Bhaskar Hazarika’s Assamese feature film Kothanodi and Gurvinder Singh’s Chauthi Koot.

Adapted from Grandma’s Tales, the film tells four stories about four mothers and their relationship with their children, one of whom is an outenga (elephant apple) and another who is married off to a python. There’s magic realism, superstition, the dark arts, and more, all pirouetting on one emotion — a child’s desperate need for mother’s love.

Singh’s Chauthi Koot (The Fourth Direction), set in Punjab in 1984, is based on the short stories of Waryam Singh Sandhu. It tells two seemingly unconnected stories — about two men trying to catch a train to Amritsar, and a farmer who is told by pro-Khalistani militants to kill his dog as his barking threatens to alert the Army to their presence.

Apart from the almost enforced pursed-lipped, hushed solemnity Singh brings to his films, and the jarring, long, Mani Kaul-esque shots which, sadly, in his movies are not meditative pauses but feel as if he left the camera running and wandered off, Chauthi Koot is a beautifully gentle oblique comment on the madness that engulfed Punjab in the 1980s.

Isolation is also the topic of Abhay Kumar’s 96-minute long documentary Placebo.

Shot in Delhi’s All-India Institute of Medical Sciences, without the authorisation of the AIIMS bosses, Placebo is in a stealth documentary that’s trying to understand why the brightest amongst us — MIT’s acceptance rate, the film announces at the start, is 9 per cent, while AIIMS’ acceptance rate is 0.7 — who get here against all odds, often fall by the wayside, never deliberately, never without crying out for help.

After his brother, a student at AIIMS, hurt himself and has to deal with the possibility of never becoming a doctor, Kumar decided to “embed” himself in the boys’ dorm to take a closer look at life in AIIMS. Four students agreed to be interviewed and stalked.

The 96-minute long documentary chronicles their student lives over many evenings, some delightful bursts of high jinx, while others are contemplative sessions seeking answers to angsty, existential questions. Or, simply, watches and listens to boys and their obscene banter.

Using animation, director’s ominous voiceover, Kumar’s film asks whether an anti-ragging move by the authorities has actually led to isolation of these kids, leaving them without any support and seniors to reach out to. The film delves into the minds and lives of these kids who make it through cut-throat competition, but then can’t deal with the pressure, the isolation, leading to, at times, suicide of classmates no one remembers ever meeting.

The joy of film festivals lies in the fact that of hundreds of films made across the world, the best are picked up and curated. Tastes differ, of course. And I do have a quibble or two about the films Ritu Sarin and Tenzing Sonam decided to open and close this year’s festival with (the recently released Titli and the much feted and fawned over Masaan), but in their politics I have full faith. Only they’d dare to show Joshua Oppenheimer’s documentary diptych — The Act of Killing (2012), and The Look of Silence (2014).

The Act of Killing, which was nominated for an Oscar, tells the story of the slaughter of about 1 million “communists” in Indonesia in 1965-1966, following an attempted coup that led to the ouster of President Sukarno.

The story of the systematic, state-supported massacre is told through reenactment by the killers. They take us to the places where they did the killing, and show us how they tortured and killed, and how they kept honing, improving their slaughter techniques. Reliving those heady days when they were kings, they recall how they drank, how they danced, boast of how they killed, how many they killed, and how that one bled all over the place and made a mess. Also about their clout, their connection to the top, about how their former bosses became rich and powerful and are now in government.

Most of the killers we meet were black marketers, small-time thugs, and they keep saying, “We were gangsters. Gangster means ‘free men’.”

They miss those days. The Act of Killing was an audacious film that got the better of them. It tricked them into revealing all — encouraged by the Army, the free booze, marijuana, the West’s sanction of the carnage and help.

The Look of Silence, which came later, trains the camera on one man, Adi Rukun, an optometrist in his 40s, who is searching out the people responsible for the particularly gruesome murder of his brother, Ramli.

This film shows what it means when the state keeps quiet, when there is no apology, no punishments, and what it means to live amidst families who, over 50 years ago, killed their neighbours.

The Look of Silence watches Adi watching the boasts of men from the celebrated killer squads in The Act of Killing, cutting to Adi’s aged parents — his blind and senile father and still grieving and angry mother.

Adi is seeking something. An acknowledgement, an admission, some truth, some regret perhaps. What Adi encounters again and again, with horrifying regularity, is the same look – the look of silence. He sits through long moments of devastating silences, waiting to see if the steely gaze will give way to something else. At times it does.

The Look of Silence is a serious and honourable film. It is also profoundly shattering because many men who spilt blood remember what it tasted like. Stay for the credits to see how many Indonesians who worked and collaborated on the documentary are listed as “anonymous”. They’ve heard their neighbours say that human blood is salty and sweet.

He uses the excuse of free eye examinations, of giving aged killers glasses, and to casually ask, while doing so, what happened, if they remember a man called Ramli. If they remember how and why he was killed.

Most say there were too many men. And when Adi tells them it’s brother he’s asking about, a brother who was killed before he was born, none expresses regret.

What Adi encounters again and again, with horrifying regularity, is the same look – the look of silence. He sits through long moments of devastating silences, waiting to see if the steely gaze will give way to something else. At times it does.

One man tells him how he drank the blood of the communists he killed. He had to, to stay sane. It also gives way to anger, threats. A former leader of an anti-communist paramilitary group, now the speaker of a regional legislature, tells Adi after listening to his questions, “If you make an issue of it, it will happen again.”

It’s heartbreaking to hear these men say the same things — “forget the past,” “move on,” “Why are you talking politics?” — when Adi seeks so little.

Eventually, as Oppenheimer tracks down and meets the two men who actually killed Ramli, they happily go to the site of the murder, by the Snake river, and reenact it.

The lush, green, rain-washed setting is in violent contrast to the bloodletting they are reliving with relish.

The Look of Silence is a serious and honourable film. It is also profoundly shattering because many men who spilt blood remember what it tasted like.

Stay for the credits to see how many Indonesians who worked and collaborated on the documentary are listed as “anonymous”. They’ve heard their neighbours say that human blood is salty and sweet.