How Xogun and What’s Your Story tackle two methods of storytelling

Everybody loves a very good story, however to what extent would you go to inform yours? Xogun and What’s Your Story? – to be screened just about at New York Indian Film Festival (NYIFF) 2021, June 4-13 – by two National Award-winning administrators Utpal Borpujari and OP Srivastava, respectively, work as a double invoice. If one talks concerning the size one can stoop to in order to promote one’s story, the opposite grapples with the query of what it takes to inform one’s story. While Borpujari, a former scribe, takes a dig at journalism, Srivastava, a former banker, asks fellow unbiased filmmakers on what drives them to remain on observe.
To be screened within the competition’s Shorts: ‘Come Undone – Bleak Realities’ part, Xogun (which means vulture in Assamese) was shot in January 2020 in Agia, close to Assam’s Goalpara. The 16-minute quick fiction opens with a close-up of tribal boys digging out tubers and cuts to a protracted shot of the forest whereby cadavers sign a thriller but to unfold. The movie’s title works by metaphor, for which the filmmaker duly apologises to the critically endangered Indian vulture Gyps indicus in the long run credit. Through caricatures, the movie pokes questions at journalistic ethics, faux and paid information. An detached veteran who’d courted fame by “covering riots, war, violence” refuses to intervene, a photojournalist exploiting the scenario for an award-winning “full impact” photograph – a shot a minimum of “the Syrian kid lying on the beach”, a reference to drowned Alan Kurdi in 2015, to an aghast younger rookie protesting to an assault on his “idealism”.
“I know of scribes who’ve manipulated situations to get a photograph/reaction/tears for a certain effect. Many on regional TV ask manipulating questions, show names and visuals of family members of the dead, or a rape victim, twist facts — these are beyond journalistic ethics,” says Borpujari, 54. “Earlier, one had never heard of paid or fake news, there was wrong reporting but deliberately reporting wrong things never happened. A lot of reportage has now become blatantly pro-communal, especially on broadcast media, it’s lost the ethics of objectivity and distance,” he says.
Having mentioned that, he’s not writing off the career. “Media and Bollywood/cinema are soft targets, it’s easy to put the blame on them instead of introspecting on what we are doing. The media can’t and shouldn’t be seen in isolation. It reflects overall societal behaviour. Because of the internet and social media, now every person thinks he can be a journalist. That’s not how it works. Facts need to be checked, corroborated and legitimate sources attributed before abusing these platforms for spreading mis/disinformation. People blindly forward false/unverified videos because it aligns with their ideology. We are the biggest consumers of sensationalism. The same technology (nuclear) used for medicines to treat cancer also makes atomic bombs,” he says.
“Maybe, subconsciously, I, too, may have signaled my cameraman to keep rolling an emotional moment in my documentary films,” he says. But the leeway one medium affords can turn into the crime of one other. As Jean-Luc Godard had as soon as mentioned “Cinema is the most beautiful fraud in the world”, and journalism needs to be the other of fraud.
Indie filmmaker Devashish Makhija within the documentary ‘What’s Your Story?’ says, “I want to put politics in my stories, because I don’t have the stamina to be an on-the-field activist”.
Sixty-one-year-old Srivastava’s What’s Your Story?, made in the course of the lockdown, is an hour-long video-calls/e-meets with unbiased filmmakers interlaced with scenes from their movies. Movies don’t essentially should be storytelling, says filmmaker Sanal Kumar Sasidharan (Sexy Durga, 2017, A’hr/Kayattam, 2020) in Srivastava’s documentary. “A film is an audio-visual experience. We went to shoot Ozhivudivasathe Kali (2015) without even a script,” Sasidharan provides. Amartya Bhattacharyya (Benares, 2014, Khyanikaa, 2017, Adieu Godard, 2021) says, a movie “should hit me, stimulate me…if it doesn’t make me feel uncomfortable, it has not taken me into new territories.”
Teena Kaur Pasricha, a Sikh born in Rajasthan, made 1984, When the Sun Didn’t Rise (2017) as a result of historical past books didn’t inform her concerning the “violent, gory massacre” her individuals confronted. “What did the government do after killing 5,000 men? What did they do to the dead bodies? We neither found nor burnt the corpses,” says one of many ladies in her documentary.
“The country, audiences, producers, distribution network, they don’t want such films, because these films don’t make people feel good about themselves,” says Devashish Makhija within the movie, whose Ajji (2017) launched in 35-36 halls for per week, to a most capability of eight individuals at a time. Makhija shifted to Mumbai from Kolkata in 2005-06, “it took me 16 years to make two feature films: Ajji and Bhonsle (the latter was possible only because Manoj Bajpayee, who plays the titular role and brought in the producers).” He was to make a Lion King-like animation movie for Pixar Disney’s India tie-up with Yash Raj Films, however their first outing (Roadside Romeo) tanked they usually shelved Makhija’s movie in 2009, after three-and-a-half years in manufacturing. He felt misplaced. He was studying about developmental politics within the Adivasi areas on the identical time, the Naxalite scenario, civil strife which wasn’t getting reported in mainstream information. He spent 5 weeks in Andhra and south Odisha to grasp the grass-root realities and “never came back from there, mentally and emotionally,” he says within the movie, “Now, I want to tell only these kinds of stories, to put politics in my stories, because I don’t have the stamina or wherewithal to be an on-the-field activist.”