Raw life, raw films

New Delhi's last date with the international film festival at Siri Fort will, sadly, continue to be overshadowed by the rape that occurred i...

New Delhi8217;s last date with the international film festival at Siri Fort will, sadly, continue to be overshadowed by the rape that occurred in its precincts. Reality has an ugly way of intruding. A rape, in many ways, represents a breakdown, not just of 8220;law and order8221;, but of human relationships, of values built on social consensus. Ironically enough, breakdown of societies, traditional norms, established ways of life, was a constantly recurring theme in the many brilliant films on offer at the festival. This is as it should be. As Jean-Luc Godard famously observed, cinema is truth twenty-four times a second.

To state that the world is changing is to state the obvious. Even the pristine quality of a Scottish village in Lars Von Trier8217;s Breaking the Waves, or the Iranian one captured by an Abbas Kiarostami, can appear fragile. As a child in Kiarostami8217;s film, Le Vent Nous Emportera, observes, houses don8217;t grow, boys do. The change may be presaged in political developments 8212; the partition of the subcontinent in Pinjar, the breaking down of the Berlin Wall in Goodbye, Lenin, the despair and anger of the Gaza Strip, the post-war Afghanistan of Five in the Afternoon. Or it may be seen in the collapsing walls of the family. In the Greek film, Matchbox a complete and shrieking anarchy reigns over Dimitris8217; family, in Jorge Furtado8217;s Two Summers, romance and babies grow out of a hooker8217;s trick, in the French film, Petits Preres, children on the street make their own rules, while family neurosis floods a Zagreb boarding house in Fine Dead Girls. In the post-industrial world, it seems, childhood is at its end, sexual angst crawls out of the skin and drugs and violence are just a block away.

There is still space though for a tribute, however tenuous, to the human spirit. The slum boys of Radio Favela still get to make the air waves their own and the story of three aboriginal girls escaping from servitude in Rabbit Proof Fence, the film that ends the festival tomorrow, will continue to inspire long after the lights in the hall are switched off. Festivals of this kind then remind us that cinema is still the best medium to capture a world in ferment and pain, but a world in which hope still has a look in.