Docu turns camera on Goa’s dark spots

Devika Sequeira
When he came to Goa on holiday in 2012, Massimiliano Mazzotta - Maxi to friends - hadn’t in the least expected to find material for his next documentary. The subject presented itself when he learnt from Antonio dal Negro (a former Italian consular representative) of the Italian connection to Goa’s mining. Sesa Goa, now owned by Anil Agarwal of Vedanta, was once an Italian company.How on earth had an Italian hand turned up in Goa’s mining?
Mazzotta’s curiosity was piqued all the more as soon as he learnt that the ownership of Sesa, started in 1955 by Baron Ludovic Toeplitz, was once linked to companies run by former Italian prime minister Romano Prodi. The tantalising leads brought him back here two years later to shoot ‘Goa The Land of Shiva’.
Currently artistic director of Life After Oil International Film Festival - into its third year in Sardinia - environmental and social issues have defined the focus of Mazzotta’s camera across the body of his work. The 74-minute Goa film is his 15^th documentary. It moves seamlessly from interview to interview, interspersed with clips of Goa’s wildlife, shots of the state’s interiors and an explanation of the origins of MDMA - such a big part of the Goa psychedelic life.
But it is the focus on mining that truly gives the film its edge. And Mazzotta was fortunate to be here post the M B Shah Commission findings. Though the filmmaker does not venture an opinion in the matter, allowing those interviewed - Claude Alvares of Goa Foundation, activist Ramesh Gauns, Fomento head Auduth Timblo, former chief minister Manohar Parrikar and a handful of journalists among many others - to make their case, it’s easy to see where his sympathies lie.
“Foreigners who come to Goa live only on the coast. They never go to the interiors to see the mining,” he says. There was also a sense of shared indignation that a handful of people could have profited so much from what ethically belongs to all. He has seen something similar happen in Italy too with the fracking (hydraulic fracturing to recover gas and oil from shale rock) by Norwegian companies. “That is like taking something that belongs to us - the people.”
Mazzotta has steered clear of the usual clichés, the “western point of view” of Goa. No whitewashed churches, green fields and swaying palms or ferries gravitating through serene waters. Not even white bodies picking up a tan in the sun. His camera reels in scenes of Goa’s Hindu heritage. The 44-year-old filmmaker admits to being an India fan after numerous journeys to this country, camera at the ready.
Why do foreign journalists delve so easily into Goa’s narcotic-hazed underworld peopled by junkies, big-time peddlers and such-like? It is a question that both intrigues and annoys. Massimiliano Mazzotta’s Goa The Land of Shiva is probably not the first to capture the candid admissions of long-time drug users and pushers who’ve made Goa their home. Yet the footage is revealing. One of them says on camera: “Goa is full of drugs, acid, ecstasy, mescaline, ayahuasca…all drugs come to Goa. How? Simply by magic. Where there is honey...there is money. If there is money, there are drugs.”
Another interviewee points to a house where a few “strong drug dealers” met every so often to play poker. Here it is, the colour and the reality of a subterranean life that remains unshaken because of the deliberate complicity and complacency of the authorities.
Mazzotta’s film is still to be formally released. “I’ve made it for Goans, and I’d like them to be the first to see it,” he says. The documentary is likely to be released in Goa in October-November. If it fails to make it to this year’s International Film Festival of India, the filmmaker is determined to set up public viewings wherever he can in Goa.
For Italian filmmaker Massimiliano Mazzotta, Goa is the land of Shiva. But it is also the land where mining has left scars and where Anjuna reigns as the global capital of psychedelic trance
Massimiliano Mazzotta’s curiosity was piqued all the more as soon as he learnt that the ownership of Sesa, started in 1955 by Baron Ludovic Toeplitz, was once linked to companies run by former Italian prime minister Romano Prodi. The tantalising leads brought him back here two years later to shoot ‘Goa The Land of Shiva’