182. Indian director Anand Gandhi's debut film “Ship of Theseus” (2012): A remarkable thought-provoking, non-commercial film from India

The ship wherein Theseus and the youth of Athens returned from Crete had 30 oars, and was preserved by the Athenians, for they took away the old planks as they decayed, putting in new and stronger timber in their places, in so much that this ship became a standing example among the philosophers, for the logical question of things that grow; one side holding that the ship remained the same, and the other contending that it was not the same.

-- Plutarch (Greek historian, 45-120 A.D.)

Ship of Theseus is an unusual and a philosophical film from India. It deals with an interesting philosophical subject that Plato and Socrates debated, philosopher John Locke postulated replacing the ship with a torn sock, and Jules Verne used in his story Dr Ox’s Experiment.

It is unusual for several reasons.

First, much of the film Ship of Theseus is in English and, that too, in good spoken English, and represents visuals of mostly emerging urban India.  

Second, it is not a big budget film (made with less than the equivalent of US$ 0.19 million as per IMDB, a fraction of what it takes to make a commercial Indian film in Bollywood) and yet has good technical quality--quality that earned it international awards. The sound design  is credited to a talented Hungarian duo who did sound design of British director Peter Strickland’s Katalin Varga (2009) and two of the Hungarian director Bela Tarr’s films The Turin Horse (2011) and Werckmeister Harmonies (2000). 

Third, one segment of the movie has as an actress Aida El-Kashef, an Egyptian filmmaker, who filmed the famous Tahrir Square protests in her country. Her performance in Ship of Theseus won her the Best Actress award at the Dubai International Film Festival, and the Best Supporting Actress Award at the 61^st Indian National Film Awards.  

Fourth, the film, which does not have any commercial trappings, was released briefly in major theatres in India and subsequently won the country’s top national award, the Golden Lotus, in 2014 for the best feature film of the year. The film also picked up awards for the Best Film at the Transylvania film festival. A dream achievement indeed for a debut filmmaker from India! 

And finally, Ship of Theseus is a rare work of cinema that highlights ancient Jainism as a religion that sprouted in India and continues to be a way of life of millions, even to this day.

Plutarch’s conundrum is placed before the viewer by director Anand Gandhi, and his two co-scriptwriters Khusboo Ranka and Pankaj Kumar, by presenting three disconnected modern tales on human organ replacement to extend the concept of aging parts of the fabled ship of Theseus being replaced with new parts until all its original parts are replaced . Each of the three segments of the film Ship of Theseusapproaches the effects of the physical replacement with different perspectives. 

The blind photographer (Aida El-Kashef) capturing urban India
on camera aided by sounds 

In the first  segment, an almost blind photographer (Aida El-Kashef) clicks away with her camera, using intuition, touch and sounds to come up interesting photographs that are eventuially exhibited as art. On regaining her sight, the photographer reviews her blind work. The concept of “good creative“ art, once applauded, is reassessed by its creator, post her critical organ transplant.

Barefoot Jain monks meditating on the sea front captured against the backdrop
of a recently constructed  bridge in Mumbai 

In the second  segment of the film, a well-educated, well-read Jain monk Maitreya (played by theatre actor Neeraj Kabi) spearheads a legal war against the torture of animals for the benefits of medical research of the pharmaceutical industry. The very same medical world points out that Maitreya’s liver has cirrhosis and needs to be treated with drugs or even replaced. As with most Jain monks, for whom the concept of “Santhara” or fasting to death is an option, Maitreya has to choose between what his religion, which he has practised over decades promotes, and an option of modern medication combined with organ transplants. (The concept of “Santhara” has been in the news in recent days as an Indian court ruled it to be similar to abetment of suicide, provoking Jains to point out that it conflicted with their fundamental freedom guaranteed by the Indian Constitution.) The option before Maitreya is not a Hobson’s choice. However, Maitreya’s  final decision in the film makes one rethink about all our own moral stands, not just his. What director Gandhi’s film asks is if a critical organ transplant can change the views of a well-read, ethical person as well.

Wrecked and junked cars are a metaphoric backdrop for a converstion on
the illegal human organ trade 

The third segment of the film Ship of Theseus deals with the growing problem in India where the poor and the uneducated are robbed of their organs without their knowledge by a growing organ transplant villains who sell their spoils to unsuspecting rich clients worldwide who need the organ to survive. In this segment, Gandhi’s film questions the ethics and morality among the world of organ recipients, the organ robbers and the amazing evolutionary changes in the views of morality of those who were actually robbed of their critical organs. A young bright stockbroker Navin (Sohum Shah) stumbles on the larger story of unethical human organ transplants and tries to help a poor labourer, who was robbed of an organ unwittingly. But the outcome of his efforts is even more thought provoking.

Young Anand Gandhi brings all the three protagonists of his film Ship of Theseus together reprising what the famous Polish director Krzysztof Kieslowski had done at end of Three Colours Red (his final part of the trilogy, made in 1993-4) by bringing the critical characters of Three Colours Blue, Three Colours Whiteand Three Colours Red briefly by a seeming cosmic coincidence. Kieslowski showed the characters as lucky survivors of a boat tragedy, but Gandhi shows his varied characters as lucky survivors of the organ transplant medical operations in India. In Kieslowski‘s three celebrated films, a key character always cried at the end. In young Gandhi’s film, no one sheds tears as the characters from the three segments watch a film together on caves and the exploration of the unknown, a visual metaphor of the film in itself.

Anand Gandhi and Aida El-Kashef have won accolades at international film festivals for their respective contributions to Ship of Theseus. Equally creditable is the contribution of cinematographer and co-scriptwriter Pankaj Kumar, whose talents are quite evident. Several handheld photographic sequences of the film such as the sequences  involving extremely narrow and winding approaches to the labourer’s living quarters and the exterior shots of the peripatetic monks against modern windmills and electric pylons taken from another high vantage point, ask questions of the viewer the effect on the rapid changes in Indian society on past beliefs and social views that also relate to the same primary Ship of Theseus conundrum. Pankaj Kumar won awards for his contribution as a cinematographer for Ship of Theseus at the Transylvania film festival, the Tokyo International Film festival, and at the Mumbai International Film Festival. The talented Pankaj Kumar has subsequently moved on to commercial mainstream Bollywood cinema working on films such as Haider and Talwar. Ship of Theseus also brought to the limelight a fascinating stage actor Neeraj Kabi, who plays the Jain monk in the middle segment of the film. Kabi, according to reports lost 17 kg in weight, over 5 months, to enact the starving monk. Actors such as Kabi are rare to come by and he was spectacular in his role. 

The movie Ship of Theseus not merely raised the quality of contemporary Indian cinema but proved that good cinema can be made with low budgets, if truly talented people made the film. Most importantly, it is a rare film made in India that forces the viewer to think about philosophy rather than provide escapist entertainment. Such films do not just win international awards but provide quality entertainment for the discerning viewer. Evidently, it was not considered as an Indian entry for the Oscars because the film is in English, which eliminated it from being considered in the foreign film category. Young Anand Gandhi needs to be congratulated for roping in the rich talent from diverse fields to make his remarkable debut film with a limited budget.

P.S. Indian cinema has seen some young filmmakers accomplishing interesting works with limited budgets in recent years. Sudevan’s CR. No. 89 (2013) is one such film made in Malayalam language reviewed earlier on this blog. Another is Praveen Morchale’s Barefoot to Goa (2015) in Hindi, also reviewed earlier on this blog.

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129. Chadean filmmaker Mahamet-Saleh Haroun's “Un Homme Qui Crie” (A Screaming Man) (2010): A subtle perspective from African cinema on an unusual father and son relationship

“Be careful not to cross your arms over your chest, 
 assuming the sterile attitude of a spectator, 
 because life is not a spectacle, 
 a sea of pain is not a proscenium, 
 and a screaming man is not a dancing bear."

           (Extract from Aimé Césaire's poem
            Notebook of a Return to the Native Land, 1939,
            quoted at the end of the film)

Mahamet-Saleh Haroun’s A Screaming Man marks a definite improvement in style and content to his earlier work, the 2006 film Daratt (Dry Season). A Screaming Man is not just well crafted cinema, it offers an unusual tale that can make you reflect on the behaviours of people. It is not surprising that A Screaming Man won the Jury’s Prize for the Best Film at Cannes Film Festival, the Silver Hugo for the Best Film and Best Screenplay at the Chicago Film Festival and the Muhr for Best Film, Best Actor, and the Best Editor at the Dubai film Festival, all in 2010.

While Daratt won accolades at the Venice Film Festival for its ability to capture the political and economic conditions in Chad, often called the 'Dead Heart of Africa,' crippled by a 40-year civil war and more recently the economic onslaught of the Darfur refugees from Sudan, A Screaming Man takes the viewer closer to the heart of an ordinary African and his family values—with the ubiquitous political turmoil of Chad taking a back seat. A Screaming Man is an inward looking essay on film, while Daratt relied considerably on the external actions for the viewer to get inside the minds of its characters such as a young man, who is proud enough to refuse charity, even when hungry and penniless. The outstanding quality of the latest two Haroun films is that both are rewarding experiences for a reflective viewer with A Screaming Man likely to have more universal appeal than Daratt, which spun around the arms–related violence associated with civil strife.

Haroun’s A Screaming Man is an interesting and subtle study of the male mind in its winter years confronted with the world of his own seed blooming in the spring of youth. A loving father, who is aging, can grow jealous of his own progeny’s success at times though this is not a common occurrence. However, this unusual situation is not particular to Chad or to Africa—the tale could be universal. Adam, the father, is a former national swimming champ, a former hero in this 'Dead Heart of Africa.' He is now reduced to eke out a living as swimming pool supervisor in the swanky hotel catering to expatriates. Haroun captures the economic turmoil in the country by the subtle takeover of the hotel by a Chinese corporate house. Haroun opens his film with the 55-year old ‘Champ’ beaten in the ability to stay underwater longer by his own 20-something-year old son, Abdel, in the hotel pool. Both are employees of the hotel employed to take care of the pool and the guests who choose to swim there. Adam loves his job and is understandably jolted when the management, in an effort to trim costs, reassigns him to a lesser job of manning the gates of the hotel, while his son continues his work at the poolside.

A Screaming Man is a film that puts the allure of the pool and swimming in the forefront for none other than a former Central African swimming champ over the bleak prospect of seeing his own son enjoying the pool each day, while he has to scamper to his feet every time a vehicle comes to the gate far away from his first love, swimming, which had once made him a regional hero. Adam truly loves his only son Abdel. The film is about the aging Adam having to consider his own son as an adversary pushing him away from what he loves most, to swim and be the pool supervisor, a job that gives him a meagre salary, pride and sweet memories of what he had achieved in life. The film also focuses on how for a poor man in a developing nation a comfortable job in a posh surroundings can gradually make him oblivious of the real life dangers for his family living outside the hotel’s insular security and cleanliness. Even the economic and political turmoil in the country seem to be distant when you have such an employment.

That is merely the preface of the movie. Can a 55-year old, who made his name as a swimming champion be forced to stay away from the attractive waters of the pool? Would a father do a sinister act to get back to the pool at the cost of his son’s life? The rebel forces are closing in on the town and the father has to either contribute financially to a warring faction or permit his son, presently enjoying good life at the poolside, to be drafted against the son’s will into the armed forces of one of the warring factions. Haroun’s film provides us with visual clues that Adam, who spends each day at the hotel, returns each evening, to a modest living quarters, indicating that he is not rich enough to contribute to the war as he is socially expected to do.

Haroun’s latest film provides glimpses of the private life of the poorer sections of the Chadean Muslim household where the wife cooks for the father and son, where the father regularly compliments his wife for her cooking and when he does not do so the wife knows that something is amiss (and that it need not be related to her cooking!). The communion at meals is a time for family bonding and we see husband and wife about to enjoy a watermelon slice, when the intimate partaking of food is interrupted by a neighbour seeking to borrow some provision. Haroun does not show us the neighbour on two such interruptions in the film, but the camera concentrates on Adam’s family and their reactions to the interruptions. Haroun’s priorities are clear—develop the characters of Adam, Adam’s wife, and Abdel—not that of the peripheral neighbour. The Chicago Film Festival got it right—it is indeed a mature and well conceptualized screenplay.

Adam’s wife Mariam is developed by Haroun as the steadfast and unbending force in the family. She cooks well and expects to be complimented and thanked at the end of each meal she provides her family. She is able to criticize her husband on the right occasions. She believes in helping her neighbours who she knows will not return her favours. Like a true mother, she is unhappy at her son being drafted against his will. Like a good “mother-in-law” she welcomes her son’s lover, who not from Chad but from neighbouring Mali, into her house in his absence without a question. (This appears to be a subtle subtext in the film that Haroun introduces on the social churning in Chad with Malian and Sudanese populations living in Chad adding to the economic burden). It is Mariam who wants the family to leave town for their safety while Adam initially seems magnetically pulled towards his job at the swimming pool brushing aside the looming dangers of the civil war closing in on his doorstep.

Now Chad has both a Muslim and a Christian population of consequence. Haroun, who has written the screenplay himself, introduces David, the cook at the hotel, into the tale. David is the Christian element in the tale though no obvious religious symbol or action invades the film. David and Adam are friends and colleagues. Both feed a stray dog when they get a quiet moment to themselves. But the new Chinese owners of the hotel decide not just to move Adam from the swimming pool to the front gate but to replace David with someone else as the hotel’s cook. An unforgettable line spoken by David to the taciturn Adam at the turn of events is “David is not going to beat Goliath this time.” Goliath could be death knocking at the door of the laid-off and now sick cook. The smart screenplay of Haroun describes the replacement of David with two the simple but brief scenes that are evocative on the screen—David’s replacement refuses to feed the stray dog and the bench that used to carry the weight of David easily breaks under the weight of the new man! Haroun, however, does develop the character of David—the downsized cook. David states to Adam rather philosophically “Life continues.. but the problem is that we put our destinies in God’s hands.” David believes in God but that statement, when spoken by David as he seems to lose faith as an unemployed and sick man, is evocative, especially in the ears of Adam and ours as discerning viewers, who can view the predicament of Chad, not merely that of Adam and David.

The interesting aspect of Haroun’s development of Adam’s character is initially as a sounding board of his wife Mariam and his Christian colleague, David. Adam listens to both and ingests their views almost silently. Initially in the film, Adam does come through as the ‘’dancing bear” of the Aimé Césaire poem.

The transformation of the “dancing bear” into “a screaming man” of the poem, follows two interesting sequences in the film. One is the arrival of the pregnant Malian singer, Djeneba, who claims to be carrying the child of Abdel and is received into the household of Adam and Mariam without questions. The second is sequence when Adam returns home and sees all the town fleeing in the opposite direction. It is then that Adam speaks one of his rare lines “It is not me, it is the world that has changed.”

The last part of the film (presenting some fine outdoor camerawork of cinematographer Laurent Brunet, comparing well with his commendable indoor photography earlier in the film) delves on the actions resulting from changes in Adam's mindset and what he could do to redeem his past mistakes. And as the film began, it ends with Adam and Abdel immersed in water, albeit under different circumstances. It allows the viewer an unusual perspective of external forces that decide how you balance varied duties to your family, your profession, your religion, and your country. Ultimately the movie suggests that it is not the external forces that ought to prevail, but one's own convictions that decide one's priorities. And that development of the plot is what makes this a very decent and sophisticated African film worth viewing.


P.S.  Mahamet-Saleh Haroun's Daratt (Dry Season) was earlier reviewed on this blog. A rarely viewed film from India on a similar relationship, which is historically true, is Feroz Abbas Khan's Gandhi, My Father, also earlier reviewed on this blog.

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125. Turkish director Nuri Bilge Ceylan’s “Bir Zamanlar Anadolu’da” (Once Upon a Time in Anatolia) (2011): Truth buried alive--a tale seldom told, in a manner rarely employed

Turkish cinema made an impact on the world map in the early Eighties essentially because the honest nationalist realism of the Kurd actor/screenplay-writer/director Yilmaz Güney was blooming and gaining world attention. Güney, like many outstanding Iranian filmmakers today, was imprisoned in Turkey again and again, as he was perceived to be an inconvenient threat to the government until he died in 1984 in exile. With his passing, there seemed to be no one who could fill Güney’s boots for two decades. Eventually, two Turkish directors Nuri Bilge Ceylan and Semih Kaplanoglu have emerged and raised Turkey’s profile once again in contemporary world cinema as no other, with achievements that shadow each other. Both have already made film trilogies: Ceylan, a trilogy referred to as ‘the provincial trilogy’, and Kaplanoglu the ‘Yusuf’ trilogy. Ceylan (born in 1959) is some 4 years older to Kaplanoglu (born in 1963).  Both have made about five to six feature films. Both began as photographers/cameramen, graduating to becoming the toast of major film festivals such as Cannes and Berlin as film directors. Both cast their own family members as actors and crew in their films. Both have not just proved their abilities as filmmakers but have in their films indirectly promoted the natural splendours of the Turkish landscape to the world audiences to devour.

This is a perspective that a viewer of Nuri Bilge Ceylan’s latest work Once Upon a Time in Anatolia ought not to ignore. Ostensibly a long feature film on the investigation of a murder, the cinematic work offers much more to an attentive and patient viewer. Ceylan’s interest in photography is probably most evident when he collaborates with his cinematographer, Gökhan Tiryaki, in his past three feature films. The visually rich Turkish film Once Upon a Time in Anatolia demands a lot from its viewer as the visuals compete for attention of the viewer as much as the narrative. Viewers, unfamiliar with Turkey, would wonder where Anatolia is on the modern global map. When the Italian filmmaker Sergio Leone made films with similar titles, his “West” and his “America” were not difficult to pinpoint. When the Mexican filmmaker Robert Rodriguez reprised the phrase in his 2003 film with “Mexico,” once again the geography was easy to pinpoint and unambiguous. Not so with Anatolia.

Anatolia is an ancient name for much of modern Turkey. It is the name associated with much of Turkey from the days of Alexander the Great. What is important for the viewer to note and reflect on is that Ceylan chose the term Anatolia rather than Turkey, when the tale he presents is of modern day Turkey, of individuals and mindsets that are not historical but contemporary. Perhaps for Ceylan and co-sciptwriters (comprising his wife Ebru Ceylan and Ercan Kasal, the very same team that wrote the brilliant Three Monkeys) the mindset and values have not changed with time and  perhaps for them modern Turkey is no different from Anatolia of the ages past.

The viewer is presented a murder story that begins in the night. By the end of the film, the truth behind the murder is unravelled, with visuals bathed in sunlight. The journey from darkness to light reveals a lot more than the solving of a murder. The tale is one that goes beyond the story of any one individual but of many individuals, powerful individuals, less powerful mortals on the fringes of society, individuals living in towns and individuals living in the villages, individuals educated and not so educated. Some individuals murder human beings, others murder truth. The title of the film suggests that the viewer is being told an old fable, but the viewer will soon realize the film is a contemporary tale, a melancholy one that suggests more than what is obvious on a casual viewing.

A prosecutor dictates a report that will have legal muscle, which is essentially his own parochial view, without any real questioning or discussions. A doctor conducts an autopsy without touching the corpse. A village elder passionately demands a morgue in a village which has poor electrical connections rather than ask for any other modern amenity one associates with progress. Ceylan’s film is crowded with male characters, with only two female characters appearing briefly on screen, and one (the prosecutor’s dead wife) who never appears physically but is discussed at length. In the middle of the cinematic investigation of the murder of a man someone suggests “Look for the woman.” The film develops into an autopsy of male minds rather than of a male corpse. The irony that the script gradually develops gets further underscored by the scientifically rigid doctor, who is a votary of autopsies to investigate abnormal deaths, deciding to doctor the autopsy at hand, after looking out of the window at a woman.

Once Upon a Time in Anatolia, the viewer will realize, is less about the investigation of a murder than an investigation of a social psyche of a people who have not changed over the ages. Ceylan makes you wonder if truth was ever documented in the region but buried alive because it was convenient.

Though the bulk of the film is talk-heavy, the film’s strength lies in the visuals. The prologue of the film, before title credits, reveal three men talking in a large room in the night,  followed by a shot of that building from the outside, patrolled by a stray dog, and finally that vision is finally cut off by a passing truck. Dogs reappear at critical moments again in Once Upon a Time in Anatolia—once again when the body is found and later at the gates of the village elder. Having visited Turkey on two occasions, this critic finds the role of the dogs in the film surprising, as stray dogs are rare to spot in that country compared to well-fed stray cats. Evidently, Ceylan employs dogs to tell the viewer something; perhaps it is a mere a cinematic punctuation in the tale, perhaps more. This critic does not recall dogs appearing in either Climates (2006) or Three Monkeys (2008), the two preceding Ceylan films.

Visuals continue to be important in this film. At the end of the superb Three Monkeys, dark clouds, a lovely metaphor, loomed over the Marmara Sea. In Once Upon a Time in Anatolia, thunder and lightning are heard and seen but no rain falls on the beautiful weather beaten landscape. In fact, the lightning lights up a carving on the rocky hillside scaring the wits out of a man with much to hide in his life. When the electricity in the village fails, Ceylan and Tiryaki, introduce the village elder’s beautiful daughter’s face illuminated in the dark by lamps and candles for a short sequence as she silently serves tea to the guests. The effect of her appearance and presence is felt by the men on the screen, harking back to the women in their lives. It is a great moment of epiphany. Soon after that the prisoner in the group exclaims aloud as he sees a man who he thought was dead.

And again, much later, it is the final image of the dead man’s wife walking on a lonely path, as seen from the autopsy room, which brings the cinematic tale to a closure.

Ceylan’s film is about women seen through the eyes of men. Somewhere in the film the prosecutor tells the doctor: “Women can sometimes be very ruthless.” Much later in the film, after long exchanges of views with the doctor, the prosecutor concludes himself, that the death of his “gorgeous” wife was not as he had made it out to be all these years. Men cheat on their wives, they kill for the sake of women they love, and yet consider these women to be ruthless even in their stoic silence captured by the film. These are vignettes of Anatolia over the ages, repeated to this day. Ceylan seems to ask the viewer to reassess history in this context.

Ceylan’s use of the camera to track the fall of an apple from a tree, rolling down the slopes and a stream to settle where other such fallen apples are gathered speaks a lot for his metaphoric ability to connect nature and man. Even when a child throws a tomato at his father (not knowing the kinship) the camera focuses on the emotions of the mother and father, and those images unveil a story never directly discussed in the movie.

The remarkable aspect of Nuri Bilge Ceylan’s cinema is that he presents the obvious contradictions in society; he refrains from taking a high moral ground. He leaves it to the viewer to decide every issue each viewer has perceived in his films.

Once Upon a Time in Anatolia won the Grand Prix at Cannes in 2011, the second highest award at the event after the Golden Palm. (Ceylan might have won the Golden Palm if Terrence Malick’s film The Tree of Lifewas not competing with his film.) It has also won the best film award at the Haifa Film Festival, the grand prize of the critics at Sao Paolo Film festival, the Grand Jury Prize at the Asia Pacific Screen awards, and the special jury award at the Dubai film festival. Ceylan’s film can appear to be lengthy and tedious, but the film offers delightful stories within the main story, some said, some unspoken. It is for the alert viewer to pick up the strands such as this comment from the prosecutor: “You don’t know how boys suffer here, without a father. It’s the kids who suffer most in the end, doctor, it’s the kids who pay for the sins of adults.”  The film is in a way the collective, melancholic story of Anatolia over the ages repeating over the many generations. To call the film “Once Upon a Time in Turkey” would have missed the director’s implicit intent.

P.S. Once Upon a Time in Anatolia ranks as one of the 10 best films of 2011 for the author. Ceylan’s Three Monkeys (2008) ranks as one of the 100 best films of the author. Sergio Leone’s Once Upon a Time in America (1968) and Semih Kaplanoglu’s Honey (2010) were reviewed earlier on this blog.

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