It is unfortunate - and telling - that India does not have a single film at the Cannes Film Festival this year
Illustration/Uday Mohite
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It is unfortunate — and telling — that India does not have a single film at the Cannes Film Festival this year. Yet, Afghan director Shahrbanoo Sadat's film Parwareshgah, The Orphanage, has been selected in the Directors' Fortnight section. The fact that she is a filmmaker from tiny, war-torn, neighbouring Afghanistan — a woman from an Islamic nation — to make it to Cannes, is surely something to celebrate. So, though no Indian film has been selected, Bollywood has made a backdoor entry into the festival, as one of Sadat's protagonists, 15-year-old Qodrat, sells Bollywood movie tickets in black in Kabul. He is a big Bollywood fan, and likes to daydream himself into scenes from his favourite movies. In fact, the film is produced by another woman, Katja Adomeit, as a Danish-Afghan-French co-production.
Sadat's achievements are remarkable. She was born in Tehran to Afghan refugee parents, who returned to Afghanistan after 9/11. Yet, at around 28 years, she has quite a history with Cannes already. The Orphanage is her third film in the Directors' Fortnight section. Her short fiction, Vice Versa One, was presented there in 2011. Her debut feature, Wolf and Sheep, won the Art Cinema Award in the same section in 2016. Earlier, she had studied documentary filmmaking at the Atelier Varan Kabul, a French workshop. Later, she developed her project for Wolf and Sheep at the Cannes Cinéfondation Residence in 2010, when she was just 20, one of the youngest to be selected. In some ways, the journey of this filmmaker, whose family comes from Bamyan, has something in common with Rima Das, who comes from Chhaygaon, near Guwahati, Assam: plucky women from small, overlooked Asian towns, inscribing their destinies into the headlines of the world.
A sequel to Wolf and Sheep, The Orphanage is set in the late '80s in Kabul, when the Soviet-Afghan war has greatly increased the number of orphans. Certain ethnic backgrounds get priority admission at orphanages, so most of the children make up fake identities. The film is based on true events described in the diaries of Sadat's friend Anwar, who, through tragic circumstances, had ended up in an orphanage.
Anwar became Sadat's best friend at the TV station for which they worked, and in a Bollywood twist, she realised that he was her cousin, and that her sister was married to his brother.
"I live in Kabul and every day there is a risk of being killed, suicide attacks happen everywhere," Sadat told the press. "I have nothing to do with this war. I am just stuck in the middle… Women's rights, the election and bombings were all on my blacklist. I wanted a local to see [my film] and say, 'That's my life.'"
And then she says something about Afghans that sounds uncannily like us Indians: "Afghans depend on ethnicity and religion; they cannot talk or do anything without taking a side. They do not want to accept we all are in the same shit… It is only us, who have the power to stop it. I stay because I hate my country so much… I want to bring changes with making films... I want to make people dream again."
Meenakshi Shedde is South Asia Consultant to the Berlin Film Festival, award-winning critic, curator to festivals worldwide and journalist. Reach her at meenakshishedde@gmail.com.
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