Tathagata Ghosh’s Dhulo is a daring retelling of feminine awakening amid bigotry

Like the world in Satyajit Ray’s Ashani Sanket (1973), Tathagata Ghosh tries to create an identical universe in his new brief movie Dhulo (The Scapegoat), the place the resplendent lush, inexperienced village – like an island – hides in its womb, darkish realities. Dhulo opens in a bucolic Bengali village, at daybreak. A lady hurries by means of a area till she stumbles upon a decapitated head of a goat. The horror written on her face not solely tells of her familiarity with the lifeless animal, it’s a foreshadowing of what’s to come back.
Dhulo was proven on the massive display screen at Cine Lumiere, London, and nearly, within the Satyajit Ray Short Film competitors, with some nice contenders, as a part of the London Indian Film Festival, which is on until July 4. The pageant’s line-up is a “love letter to India”. And, love letters scratch open wounds.
Ghosh, whose movies have a political scaffolding, is out to unsettle. Born of anger and chaos, Dhulo compels us to introspect. Its modifying is tight and fast, color filters intensify the atmospheric image-making and sound is generally strings, save for the climax’s dhaak beats – will the shakti-roopen goddess eradicate the mahishasur (demon)? Dhulo is a Brechtian singing of the darkish occasions – not simply of the current, however one with out starting or finish. Dhulo works as a double invoice together with his brief Mangsho (The Meat), although made later, in the course of the pandemic final 12 months, on the migrant disaster. The legacy of intolerance finds fruition in Dhulo (which interprets to mud). If meat indicators flesh and physique as websites of oppression, dhulo is the mud to which our bodies return. Each character is a scapegoat, a sufferer of his or her circumstance, and the movie strikes by distilling their reactions.
Payel Rakshit in a nonetheless from the brief movie Dhulo.
When he was taking pictures this movie final 12 months, the Delhi riots have been occurring. It was “unsettling, very disturbing” for the director, who was recreating the violence and disturbance within the movie. A palpable worry stalked the crew within the 4 days of the shoot, particularly these from the minority group — and it displays with conviction within the movie, when the second male lead, Ali (Ali Akram) says, “Musholmaan maanei ki koshai er jaat? (Does being a Muslim make us all butchers?)” He and Shimli Basu, who performs his spouse, are noteworthy of their debut roles, and whereas the lead Bimal Giri delivers a blood-curdling, chilling punch as a muscle-flexing prototype, the true scene stealer is his screen-wife and the feminine lead, performed by Payel Rakshit.
Dhulo is Ghosh’s backhand stroke at non secular and gender discrimination. The diminutive Rakshit has outdone herself, with a deadpan face and a restrained efficiency, she lifts others, too. She takes us again to the ’70s-’80s period, when Indian cinema had room for the mofussil and the provincial girl. Not solely does her vengeance remind one in every of Smita Patil from Ketan Mehta’s Mirch Masala (1987), her standing up for her buddy (Basu) harks again to the middle-class Arati (Madhabi Mukherjee), who, regardless of being in dire straits, quits her job in response to the injustice meted out to her colleague-friend Edith in Mahanagar (1963) – feminine sacrifices, sorority and solidarity are not often championed in movie scripts. True emancipation can’t be a egocentric one, it must raise, empower and mobilise others.
Bimal Giri’s nonetheless from Dhulo.
In Jeo Baby’s Great Indian Kitchen, the matriarch tells her new daughter-in-law (Nimisha Sajayan), “it’s normal, this is how things happen”. One has heard this oftentimes, what’s unsettling is when a lady coaching at a Durga Vahini camp, Prachi, in Nisha Pahuja’s documentary The World Before Her (2013), justifies her father’s beatings by saying that no less than he gave her life, didn’t kill her at start. Shot in Ghosh’s ancestral village, Amta, in Bengal’s Howrah district, the 24-minute Dhulo displays the gender disparity and home violence that the village girls have internalised and normalised. Like in Mrinal Sen’s Akaler Sandhane (1980), in Dhulo, too, the village girls have been moved to see their lives being performed out in a pivotal scene with Rakshit.

“We were shooting, creating a reality/world of our own, but in that creation, we had to manipulate the reality. It’s quite dark in retrospect. There are pockets in the village that are either BJP or TMC heavy. In one such pocket panned out the scene with Bimal on the bike, by looking at his demeanour and dialogues, they thought we were campaigning for the BJP, making an ad film, perhaps, in the run up to the West Bengal election this year. We agreed with how they perceived us to get our job done. The political climate was boiling at the time, people were consuming WhatsApp forwards and fake news on social media, it was uncomfortable to see, but we had to complete our film,” says Ghosh, who was chosen as a Berlinale Talent (an up-and-coming younger filmmaker) on the Berlin Film Festival this 12 months, and who made a brief documentary collection, Beyond the Dust (on YouTube), talking to those villagers, in the course of the Bengal election.
Ghosh makes no bones about calling a spade a spade, and, not like his idol, German filmmaker Werner Herzog, believes “films might not change the world, but can make a person feel something. If one understands, she will go tell three.”