Last weekend, Shemin Auditorium played host to indigenous rice farmers, victims of HIV and widows struggling to find their place in male-dominated societies.

In feature films and documentaries, students and community residents had a chance over the weekend to witness some of the struggles such people faced and still face in the Indian Subcontinent. The third annual South Asian Human Rights Film Festival screened a total of six films over Friday, Saturday and Sunday; three documentaries and three feature films.

The festival was organized by assistant professor Tula Goenka of the television, radio and film department in conjunction with Mallika Dutt of Breakthrough, a human rights organization, and Shyama Venkateshwar of the Asia Society. Goenka said she had several goals for this year’s event.

‘One (goal) is to showcase South Asian filmmaking, to bring them across the oceans,’ she said. ‘Second is to highlight social justice, human justice issues. I really want people to make connections; that if something is happening in that part of the world it’s also happening here. It’s not easy to examine what’s happening in your own society when you’re living right in it.’

The films were selected by a collaborative effort of Goenka, Dutt and Venkateshwar. The trio scanned the South Asian cinema scene to find award-winning movies and those that dealt with relevant issues, according to Goenka.

Goenka also said that her personal connections through the film industry with many Asian filmmakers facilitated getting their works to campus. She said she had contacted many filmmakers while working on a book she is currently writing, ‘Bollywood and Beyond.’

Adding to the cultural experience, traditional South Asian foods such as samosas, chutneys and vegetable fritters were served before each screening. ‘At any Indian event, there is always a lot of food,’ Goenka said. For those of questionable intestinal fortitude, good old American cookies were also available.

The greatest offerings of the festival were not movies, but the chances to meet and speak with actual directors. Two filmmakers, Dinaz Stafford and Sabiha Sumar, attended the screenings of their films, and each took part in a question and answer session afterward. The directors were thus able to give audience members a clearer understanding of their works and messages.

‘I liked the fact that the director was here to give more information on what she was going for,’ said Matt Fastow, sophomore television, radio and film major, after speaking with Stafford. Fastow attended Stafford’s film, a documentary entitled ‘Still, the Children are Here,’ to see different areas of the world. Documentaries allow you to see through different perspectives, he said.

‘Children’ also attracted the attention of TRF professor Richard Breyer, whose interest was piqued by the geographical origin of the movie.

‘I’ve spent a lot of time in India, so I’m an Indiaphile,’ he said.

The documentary focuses on the plight of the Garo people, indigenous people who live in Meghalaya in north-east India. Their lives revolve around the cultivation of several kinds of rice, an important factor in Stafford’s decision to film the group.

‘I chose a village of rice farmers because one of the greatest boons man has received from indigenous people is the domestication of rice,’ she said.

Stafford used parts of interviews with two village grandmothers as a means of narration, making it seem almost as if the film had been put together by the villagers themselves. The result is an intensely personal production that displays the true humanity of the Garos instead of documenting them as subjects of a study.

The central message of the film is the problem of modernization faced by the Garos, who live by farming rice in the same manner practiced by their people for some 6,000 years. As Christianity and a money-based economy encroach on the Garos’ culture, Stafford’s film questions the benefits of the new influences.

‘People are poorer. Forests are gone. Even though we reap the same as our grandmothers, we are poorer now,’ said one of the grandmothers.

As the film draws to a close, one of the men of the village ponders the new wave of changes and asks, ‘When we are all dead and gone, will they still plant rice in Sadolpara? I wonder … .’

Kavitha Viswanath, a graduate student in media management, believes in the positive power of modernization. ‘It’s OK in some aspects. As long as they preserve the culture, that’s good. They (the Garos) need to welcome the modern culture,’ he said.

Sumar, the other director who accompanied her film to campus, is also a documentarist. The film she provided for the festival, though, was her first feature, ‘Khamosh Pani’ (Silent Waters).

The story told by ‘Khamosh Pani’ is that of Ayesha, a Sikh woman who was kidnapped by Muslims after she refused her father’s command to commit suicide by jumping into a well. Ayesha is forced to marry a Muslim man and convert to Islam. Her husband dies one year later, leaving her with a son, Saleem.

Most of the film’s action takes place in 1979, as General Zia-ul-Haq began to raise the cause of extremist Islamic Nationalism in Pakistan. The strife of religious conflict between the people of Ayesha’s past and present causes her to finally throw herself into the well she once escaped.

‘Movies like this that are entertaining and very insightful and very well-made will educate the American community, and the turnout here is a sign that their message is getting across,’ said Ainsley Bartholomew, a sophomore television, radio and major.

Fellow director Stafford had great praise for the piece. ‘In a lot of the shots and a lot of the camera work you get a real sense of what it’s like to be in a Pakistani village. I was very impressed,’ she said.

The film drew very intense reactions from Alice Aylesworth, a resident of Syracuse, and her son Peter Arneson, a filmmaker from Minneapolis.

‘The lessons in it apply to more than just this time and place. It’s the same thing that happened in Nazi Germany, it’s happening in this country. It’s the universal story,’ said Arneson, who called ‘Khamosh’ ‘the best film I’ve seen in the past year.’

Sumar said her main point in making the film was ‘to say that extremism can have very dire consequences. So I think it would not be good if people saw it as film and said, oh that happened in Pakistan, or that’s happening somewhere else, but to actually be able to connect their own experiences in their own countries with what’s happening in this film.

‘It has to come back to you. It has to hit you. It has to take away your children. It has to have an impact on your life. We have to come full circle and realize that that’s not the path,’ she said.

That message was not lost on Arneson. He learned one very important thing from Sumar’s film: ‘Watch out for extremism.’

Published on April 2, 2005 at 12:00 pm