Conflict Zone

But,before his trip to Patna,the filmmaker presented Delhi with one of his favourite subjects — films on the Middle-East,a region whose politics faze most Indians.

“Just because there is one conflict after another in the region,we cannot pretend it is not going on. The festival is a crash course on what’s happening in the Middle-East,” he says. The festival,“Zone of Conflict: Contemporary Documentaries on Cultural and Politics in the Middle-East” comprised eight films,all being screened in India for the first time.

“Even in the drama of political upheaval,there are emotions like power,ambition and betrayal,” says Mitchell. Like the intriguing The Oath by American director Laura Poitras,which was screened on November 19. It tells the true story of Abu Jandal,the former bodyguard of Osama bin Laden and Salim Hamdan,a prisoner at Guantanamo Bay,Cuba. “It is also a tale about loyalty,” explains Mitchell. Chou Sar? (What Happened?) is fraught with trauma as Lebanese director De Gaulle Eid talks about how his parents,youngest sister and 11 other family members were gunned down. And the wittily named Fix Me is another autobiography — director Raed Andoni has a headache. It is splitting and he cannot work. Incidentally,he is Palestinian and the film reveals the internal terrain of displacement and alienation that mimics the lives of thousands of Palentinians — a sociopolitical headache. “Any good documentary shows universal human emotions,” adds Mitchell.

Thus as he reconstructed the story of Hariri’s assassination in Murder in Beirut,the audience watched rivetted. When one of Hariri’s closest ministers talks about how his car too,was subsequently bombed and how he survived,it was a story not many remembered from the newspapers. “It was an important story and nobody had told it in film yet,” says Mitchell.