International politics found a platform at Biffes 2020

Movies that emerged out of a charged political background made it to B’luru this time

Film festivals have traditionally been havens for filmmakers who are too rebellious for their own countries.

And while the Bengaluru International Film festival (BIFFes) has largely stayed out of the politics associated with cinema, this year there are filmmakers whose work emerged out of a charged political background.

One of them is the Kazakhstani filmmaker Rustem Abdrashev, who is here with his new film ‘The Golden Throne’. Rustem was a familiar sight at BIFFes even for those who did not catch his film. He was the short, portly man who was extremely happy with the bright red kurta he had brought in Bengaluru. He told Metrolife that he liked it because it made him feel like a “Maharaja”.

His film is a period piece, the likes of which the industry could not have produced about quarter of a century ago, when freedom of expression was curtailed and Kazakhstan hadn’t gained independence from the Soviet Union.

Films like his are part of a cultural resurrection in the country, where filmmakers take the nation and its formation as subject matter.

“As a filmmaker, I do it for our culture and our nation. Unlike before, I can now show how we became a nation. We can show our mistakes,” said Rustem through Madina Yesmanova, who is Rustem’s much taller wife, the star of his movie and his translator while in India.

Asked whether he would say that Kazakhstan filmmakers have the freedom to say what they want, he says, “We were under the Soviet Union. And now we are a democracy, but freedom doesn’t come all at once. It comes bit by bit. That’s what’s happening now.”

He adds that though his film is set centuries ago, it was made for the present. “Parallels and allegories were carefully constructed in the film to reflect the present.”

Another filmmaker from the former Soviet Union who was at BIFFes was the Ukranian filmmaker Tymur Yashchenko, whose relationship with the Russians is bloodier and more recent than Rustem’s.

Tymur’s film ‘U311 Cherkasy’ touched on the invasion of Crimea by Russia. He was part of a press conference with Kannada filmmaker Girish Kasaravalli, and the two men couldn’t look more different.

Kasaravalli was dressed formally, even with his shirt tucked in, while Tymur sat relaxed in a white t-shirt, aqua blue chinos and flip flops.

Tymur’s film had not managed to gain a huge audience at Bifees despite its topicality.

He looked visibly disappointed when he asked if anyone at the press conference had watched his film and not a single hand went up.

Responding to a question from Metrolife about whether film festivals outside one’s own country help bring international attention to crises in a region, he spoke about how the atrocities by Russia had helped many Ukrainians create their own sense of identity.

“I used to support Russia in the Olympics a couple of years ago. And then they attacked us. Earlier, we used to speak Russian freely, but now we speak Ukrainian. In a sense, they have helped us create our sense of identity. We feel more genetically Ukrainian now,” he said. Tymur said that though the war with Russia was bloody and he had lost friends, “the last six years have been amazing”. He said that since the revolution in 2014, the Ukrainian film industry has had a “reboot”. One more film at BIFFes that is the product of a torn political climate is ‘Marighella’ by Wagner Moura. Many best know Moura as the actor who played Colombian drug lord Pablo Escobar in the Netflix series ‘Narcos’.

‘Marighella’ is the biopic of Brazilian revolutionary Carlos Marighella, whose legacy flies in the face of the country’s incumbent president Jair Bolsonaro, best known in the international media for his part in last year’s Amazon fires and his disrespect for women.

Indians may remember him as our most recent Republic Day chief guest. While Moura has not been able to make it to Bengaluru, his film about freedom, which has multiple screenings at BIFFes, is being screened multiple screenings.