Green revolution

A millionaire software engineer finds his life collapsing around him when recession lashes his familiar world.

Filmmaker Pan Nalin is part of a global UN venture on creating eco-awareness

A millionaire software engineer finds his life collapsing around him when recession lashes his familiar world. As a slow traffic winds through streets,he looks out of his car and the dreary landscape throws back an answer kill himself and end the pain? He staggers home and is confronted by a curious sighthis wife and child hugging a tree in their backyard. Curiously,he too reaches out to the bark and branches and a life force seems to flow into him. Called Echo of Eco (picture,above),this two-minute film that stars Harman Baweja as the engineer,is part of a United Nation-sponsored project called Visual Telegrams that aims at creating awareness about the environment through films and has Hollywood actor Leonardo DiCaprio as the brand ambassador.

Fifteen filmmakers from across the world have came together in Visual Telegrams,among them Steven Frears of The Queen fame,Paul Haggis,maker of Crash,and Rashid Bouchareb,director of Days of Glory. The only Indian is Pandya Nalinkumar Ramniklal aka Pan Nalin (picture,inset),the director of Echo of Eco . The film is inspired by the chipko movement and it strikes a chord amongst most Indians as they are familiar with it. I hoped it will inspire others to realize the importance of trees, says 43-year-old Nalin,who is currently in France where music composers are working on the background score of Echo of Eco. The film has starlet Ferena Wazeir as the wife.

Ecology has always motivated Nalins creative impulses. In 2006,he was awarded the Vida Sadana by the Spanish government for his contribution to saving the ecology. My films have not found favour with the Indian masses. I work on projects that are like an emotional journey for me that so far have appealed more to the foreign audience, he says,alluding to his films called Valley of Flowers (2006) and Samsara (2001).

Echo of Eco was screened at the Cannes film festival last month and Nalin was happy with the response,especially since he experimented with the format by not having any dialogues in the film. Efforts are on to get 15 other filmmakers for the project before the worldwide release of the films in September, he adds. Apart from mainstream cinemas,the film will be available online,on TV and mobile phones.

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