Screen saver

Aguerrilla resistance movement armed with LCD screens and DVDs is hard to suppress. While Nakul Singh Sawhney's awardwinning film "Muzaffarnagar Baaqi Hai, a documentary on the 2013 communal riots, has been screened over 80 times across India at various venues in response to COR's nationwide call for screenings". The sudden explosion of screenings of this film, set in the aftermath of the communal riots two years ago, has nothing to do with corporate sponsorship or government funding.It has much to do with the ingenuity of a little-known group called Cinema of Resistance (COR), which was born out of a desire to take progressive films to the masses.
While elite venues are the hallmark of high-profile film festivals in metropolitan India, COR began in small-town Uttar Pradesh, holding its first fest at a defunct auditorium in Gorakhpur University in 2006. Film-maker and writer Sanjay Joshi was one of four people who pitched in with Rs 15,000 to organize the festival, putting together the requisite technology on a shoestring budget.
"We shut all windows, put up black curtains, and turned it into a cinema hall," says Joshi. "We couldn't afford a projector or film reels, so we used DVDs, instead. I carried two DVDs with me. In the middle of a film, one stopped working so I switched to the other. At another point in the film, the second DVD stopped short, so I switched back to the first. That's how we got through the film," says Joshi, now national convener of COR.
The first film screened was the 1925 Russian classic, Battleship Potemkin, about a rebellion triggered by sailors who were served rotten meat on a ship. Over the last decade, COR has held film festivals across northern India, from Patna to Kolkata and Nainital to Azamgarh. Iranian films were a huge hit, particularly the Majid Majidi classic, Children of Heaven, about a little boy, his sister and a pair of shoes.
But how did the audience appreciate films in a language alien to them? COR created Hindi voice-overs for the films. Sometimes, they even had live voice-overs, while the original sound-track was lowered. They did so for regional cinema, too. COR screened Amudhan RP's Shit on Dalit sanitation workers in Madurai for the sanitation workers of Bhilai, Chhattisgarh, creating a Hindi voice-over for the Tamil film.
Anand Patwardhan's searing documentaries on communalism, the MS Sathyu classic, Garam Hava on Partition and Sanjay Kak's Jashn-e-Azadi on Kashmir found their way into COR screenings. Kak's film questioning notions of nationalism and India's version of history, saw heated arguments among students when it screened in Jabalpur. "I later overheard the students talking of how they had, hitherto, only been exposed to the views expressed in mainstream newspapers, and were hearing a different opinion for the first time. They felt it was worth listening to," says Joshi. At an Indore screening of the film, an elderly man in the audience tried disrupting the film. "It was not the organizers but the rest of the audience that cut him short because they wanted to see it," says Joshi.
It comes as no surprise that a movement showcasing films on the poor and marginalized, challenging the establishment, calls itself Cinema of Resistance. But the word 'resistance' is nuanced by the fact that the group vociferously resists government and corporate sponsorship. COR's screenings are crowd-funded, with donations coming from people passionate about their cause. One such donation of Rs 7,000 came from the girlfriend of a Brazilian film-maker who was to fly to India for a COR screening of his film on Brazil's land struggles.
"When a Gorakhpur audience watched a Brazilian film on a disease that killed 30,000, they asked why we weren't making a film on encephalitis afflicting UP. We actually went ahead and made the film with contributions from people in the region," says Joshi. "We are much more than an event management company," he adds, pointing to the way the movement involved its audience.
This is precisely the philosophy that saw Muzaffarnagar Baaqi Hai screened across India. The disruptions, most notably by ABVP, the student wing of the Sangh Parivar, convinced COR of the need to resist its unofficial censorship. "We were yet to figure a day for the screenings, when film-maker Shubhradeep Chakravorty's wife reminded us that it was his first death anniversary on August 25. He and his wife had made a film on the Muzaffarnagar riots which was censored by the government. Calling for screenings of another film on the same riot, on his death anniversary, was a fitting tribute," says Kasturi Basu, Kolkata convener of COR.