On a large makeshift screen and a hired projection system,Kohima plays host to a film festival for the first timeKohima doesnt have a single cinema hall. If you ask people,they furrow their brow and recall an early 70s period,no date,when a theatre called Ruby was closed down after a mysterious bomb blast. No one died,but several people were injured. No one knows who was responsible,but old timers recall that it was the noisy start of the insurgency in Nagaland. There was another theatre,part of the local army garrison,which became out of bounds for civilians soon after the unrest heightened. That was the end of all cinema-going activity in the town. The three-day Indian Panorama film festival,the first of its kind in Kohima,is run on a large makeshift screen at the state academy hall,and a hired projection system from Dimapur,two hours by winding mountainous road,with killer hairpin bends. Dimapur is the bigger town,has the airport,and the nearest railhead. It takes us 10 hours to reach Kohima from Delhi,with two changes of planes,and a tiring road transit: you realise just how far away and difficult it is to get to,when you make the journey.The data card doesnt show any signs of life through all the time Im there,rendering my heavy laptop useless. Connectivity,it seems,is reliant on the weather. If it rains and storms,like it does when we are there,there wont be any electricity either. Our rooms in Hotel Japfu,the only one in the heart of town,are plunged into darkness in the middle of one night. Power returns only the next evening. Its hard to believe that Kohima is a state capital.Its an intriguing proposition,to try doing a film festival in a place as infrastructurally-challenged as this. (The fest was kickstarted in Shillong last year; next year it will travel to another northeastern state). Thats the whole point of the festival,according to the organisers,the Delhi-based Directorate of Film Festivals (DFF): to introduce the kind of pan-Indian cinema that people here may never have encountered ,and to revive movie-going in a place which has forgotten the joys of a big screen. Unlike Assam and Manipur,which have had a long tradition of film production,Nagaland has none,and Im curious to see how the films,so far removed in place and situation,will be received. The rapt faces in the auditorium are answer enough.The inaugural film is Anurag Kashyaps Dev.D. He was supposed to be here,but couldnt make it. So was Dibakar Banerjee,for his Oye Lucky,Lucky Oye,which shows the next day. As it turns out,with one exception (Prashant Pethe,producer of Marathi film Gabricha Paus) ,none of the other people connected with feature films are here. The non-feature and the documentary films are better represented. In fact,that turns out to be the more rewarding part of the festival,as I catch up with a superb documentary on the veterans of World War II,many of whom still survive,and live in and around Kohima. The remoteness of the North East is accentuated not just by the inordinately long time it takes to get there (it takes less time and effort to reach London from Delhi). Its also got to do with the shameful paucity of detailed,accurate information on the region. Yes,there was the famous Battle of Kohima in which the British-led Allies bested the Japanese,which caused the death of thousands of British and Indian soldiers. But only when you visit the cemetery,the best kept in the world according to those in the know,do you internalise the extent of the devastation that must have taken place in the first few months of that year1944. Metevinuo Ate Sakhrie,co-director of World War II, As I Remember talks of the labour that went into the making of the film. To hunt down the veterans was a tough task; even harder was to leave out the hours and hours of footage to keep it to the 30 minutes run time. The ex-soldiers,all over 80 (the oldest is 106 years) look at least 20 years younger and are terrific raconteurs: like all ancients,they recall events that happened years ago as if they happened yesterday. The affable Aselie Meyase,whos been attached to us from the moment we landed at the quaint Dimapur airport (we fly to Kolkata in a 404 seater Airbus,and switch to what looks like a toy plane with 44 seats),talks of how the Japanese soldiers had practically razed the town to the ground. What we see today has been re-built,and theres an industrial feel to the main town of Kohima overrun with buses,trucks and motorcycles with army men astride. An army wife we meet at an official dinner that evening says that when she steps out for grocery,she has an armed guard with her: a Dimapur-based TV journalist (a proud Naga lass) I recount this tale to,sniffs,and calls it an exaggerated threat perception. DFFs Bhupendra Kainthola tells us that on a recce visit earlier in the month,when he met college kids to talk up the film festival,he was struck by just how much they were like their counterparts in Delhi: the clothes are as smart,and the hair-styles,if anything,are spiffier. The young are ardent Bollywood watchers (pirated CDs and DVDs hit the market as soon as films release). So are serials on Star Plus and Zee TV. But what beats everything hands down is Korean TV channel Arirang: Korean movies are also wildly popular. We watch them without subtitles too, says Meyase,in a conversation which ranges from which Hindi movies hes seen (he remembers a film that had Neetu Singh,but not the name,and of course,he remembers having seen Sholay),as we wend our way to his village,Konoma,an hour out of Kohima. Konoma is a model green village,where hunting and felling have been banned. As we enter by gracious invitation,single file,into the dwelling places of the people who live there,a feeling of timelessness descends upon us. They live in the same manner,using the same implements as they have,for hundreds of years: the strong ties and traditions of their tribal culture evident in each utilitarian utensil they use,and the food they eat,which comes out of the ground around them. Everything is green and beautiful. The trees are tall,the wind is strong,and we huddle into our shawls,reveling in the weather. The three days pass by rapidly : back-to-back movies and celebratory dinners that stretch late into the night have a way of making time vanish. A quick excursion to the market results in bags of the worlds hottest red chillies (bhut jolokia),fragrant dried mushrooms and colourful slip-ons,smuggled in from Thailand (a lot of stuff from China and Korea is visible on the shelves). As well as some pretty bead necklaces.On the last evening,documentary filmmaker Baniprakash Das who has already shown what a fab hand he is with old Hindi film music,is on song again. Rehene do, chhodo naa, jaane do yaar..Kishore Kumar in Kohima. Great send-off.(The Indian Panorama film festival ended last week in Kohima)
