A film festival of the people, for the people, by the people 

I am sure of one thing. This is not a film festival. This is something else. I know what you are doing and this is highly appreciable,” said legendary filmmaker Kundan Shah (who made the epic film Jaane Bhi Do Yaaro), after participating in the 5th Gorakhpur Film Festival in 2010 of the ‘Cinema of Resistance’.

Along with him was another iconic director of successful parallel cinema, Saeed Akhtar Mirza, whose low budget films like Albert Pinto Ko Gussa Kyo Ata Hain, Salim Langde Pe Mat Ro and Naseem are legendary. Shah’s words echoe the whole concept of the alternative people’s film festival: the Cinema of Resistance, popular in the Hindi heartland as ‘Pratirodh ka Cinema’.

This is not just another typical metropolitan film appreciation club patronised by the elite. Indeed, viewing cinema is a deeply complex political and intellectual activity in these small town festivals. They are often or mostly held in a make-shift, darkroom in small town India, and the viewers are ordinary folks. The journey of this unique people’s cinema started in 2005 when photography teacher Sanjay Joshi, an alumni of Jamia Millia Islamia, was invited for a Jan Sanskriti Manch (JSM) meeting in Allahabad in 2005 by his former batchmates in JNU.

He was sceptical about the usual pattern of cultural activism, usually confined to reading out academic papers, or just ritualistic affairs. That's when he had a brainwave: holding alternative film festivals across the country, to bring together marginalised people’s movement in small towns and villages, and grassroots including students, farmers, women, middle class professionals, the working class and people in the grassroots. Meanwhile, Delhi-based documentary filmmaker Rahul Roy had gone to Gorakhpur University with his new short film on masculinity: When four friends meet.

The university administration cancelled the permission for the screening at the last minute. Roy approached his journalist friends and activists in Gorakhpur; he asked them to organise a parallel screening at the city’s press club. The screening did not happen. However, it left a thought on the mind of film enthusiasts in Gorakhpur about the need for a parallel festival. Hence, Sanjay was invited to Gorakhpur for conducting the first film festival on March 23, 2006.

It coincided with the 75th anniversary of the martyrdom of Bhagat Singh, the legendary revolutionary freedom fighter. For 12 years, continuously and without a break, Cinema of Resistance has been organising film festivals in Gorakhpur without any corporate sponsorship. This became the first epicentre of this unique feature film and documentary movement, encompassing Indian and world cinema, while spreading across the remote interiors of the north India.

Undoubtedly, this is one of the most unique film festival cultures in the world, with neither glitz nor glamour, but full of content and great cinema. Some of greatest legends in world cinema are showcased: Eisenstein, Fellini, Godard, Tarkovsky, Antonioni, Kurosawa, Satyajit Ray, Ritwick Ghatak among others. It also has a kaleidoscopic genre of short and documentary films including children’s films.

The cinema activists in Gorakhpur are actively involved in addressing public issues. They started the campaign for the establishment of an All India Institute of Medical Science (AIIMS) following the death of 325 children in a government hospital after the hospital's piped oxygen supply ran out.

Drawing his inspiration from the ‘Odessa movement’ in Kerala in the 1980s and non-conformist Malayalam filmmaker John Abraham, whose ‘crowd-funded’ film Amma Ariyan acquired cult status among film students, Sanjay strictly follows the ‘no-funding from corporates or NGOs’ policy.

This film movement runs with individual funding by friends, strangers, sympathisers and film lovers. Said Pranay Srivastava, professor of Hindi literature in Allahabad University, “We wanted something like the cultural movement that, with high ideals, set up the Indian People’s Theatre Association (IPTA) before and after the freedom movement.

The IPTA comprised the greatest filmmakers, playwrights, musicians, singers, writers, artists, lyricists and actors of that time, mixing low, high and popular culture, creating a great idiom of refined language and lyrics, and entering every home across the Indian landscape. It was truly people’s culture.

Hence, we did not want to create propaganda. We wanted authentic and sensitive cinema for ordinary people, the best in world and Indian cinema.” This film movement is rooted in the complex and kaleidoscopic realism of everyday life, the life and times of ordinary people, exploring the human and social conditions, defying the political establishment, and creating a new idiom and language of liberation, aligned with humanism, freedom, equality and secularism.

Filmmaker Saba Dewan said, “In Delhi, we get regular filmgoers, who are smart and know their film criticism. Here you are faced with totally eclectic and honest responses and feedback: a completely different kind of audience. It is impossible to get such a sensitive and wonderful audience in any big city. I can’t show my films everywhere. Hence, I am grateful that this festival movement carries my films in the remotest of towns among new audiences who are indeed intellectually very sharp and refined.” Said eminent filmmaker Sanjay Kak,

“They have been able to hold these festivals for almost two decades with no corporate funding. This is an extraordinary achievement.” For instance, after the screening of Sanjay Mattoo’s movie, Apni Dhunmein Kabootari, a film on the great Kumaoni folk singer Kabootari Devi, in the 6th Udaipur film festival held in December 2018, Sanjay took the mike to explain about the routine struggles of the filmmaker: “Everybody is appreciating the film and discussing the technicalities regarding the film. But, nobody is asking as to how much money has been spent on making the movie. Movies don’t come out of the blue.”

After his cryptic announcement, the audience donated Rs 4,000 to the filmmaker. Similar techniques were used by film activists during the Odessa movement. They went door to door in north Kerala to convince people to fund for their collective so that they can make meaningful cinema.

“You needn't be ashamed of begging for a genuine cause. But you need to be ashamed if you approach big corporates for funding,” Sanjay said. ‘Against hate crimes and mob lynching’; ‘In support of the Me Too movement’; ‘Dedicated to the marginalised’: There are multiple banners at the registration desk of the 6th Udaipur Film Festival in this beautiful lake city.

The festival showcased the films which focused on marginalised societies and people’s resistance. “I have been to many festivals, but this seems unique. In all other festivals, people watch a movie and appreciate it. But here, after watching the movies and participating in the discussions, our minds change.

This festival educates us on various issues. We can relate to the invisible stories from the ground,” said mass communication student Akash Tiwari who hails from MP's Chhindwara. Fatima Nizaruddin’s Nuclear Hallucination, a satire on the Kudankulam nuclear power project in Tamil Nadu, was screened followed by discussions. By comparing the difference on how this spoofy documentary and Bollywood flick Parmaanu treated the same subject, a viewer pointed out that this is what happens if the camera does not follow the clichés of the establishment.

Sanjay Mattoo’s documentary portrays the extraordinary elements embedded in ordinary lives. Nithin Pamnani’s Vidrohi shows the life of revolutionary poet Vidrohi, who spent his life by breaking the conventional norms inside JNU campus. The festival also premiered Punjabi filmmaker Randeep Maddoke’s moving film, Landless, which discusses casteism and atrocities on Dalits by Jat Sikhs and the land-owning castes in Punjab.

Although Cinema of Resistance uses film as a tool for political activity, the organisers don’t believe that that they can transform the society with movie screenings. The festival, rather, acts as a conversation-starter in small towns of north India; people talk, debate, discuss, and argue.

There is exchange of ideas and feelings. Old conventions and clichés are broken, new concepts are discovered, old prejudices are dropped. The audience might not be sophisticated or academically refined, but the locals here contextualise films and their messages within their own historical, geographical and social contexts. The film idiom finds a new meaning, text and language in the ordinary discourse of the ordinary lives of ordinary people.

The modest, original and unique initiative, which the organisers termed as an “elastic and democratic platform”, has organised 67 film festivals and 300 film screenings in cities and towns across India, including in Patna, Nainital, Allahabad, Varanasi, Lucknow, Azamgarh, Chittorgarh, Udaipur, Nagpur, Indore and Rohtak. “I was a BJP supporter. Some of the films really helped me in changing my perspective. They opened my mind. They made me think about the ‘other’ community, their suffering and despair.

I was against reservation and believed that it is against equal opportunities for some of us. But, after watching films here, I realised that there are Dalits in some parts of the country who need empowerment,” said Lakshit, 22, from Jaipur. Now he wants to help organise more such film screenings in Jaipur. The initiative ensures the participation of youngsters and students in the festivals. “I have faith in youth. The films are not merely for appreciation.

We want the youth and students to understand the parallel universe of struggles and resistance,” said Himanshu Pandey, an organiser of the Udaipur Film Festival. On the second row of the auditorium inside Gokul Adithi Bhawan in Gorakhpur Civil lines, sat 14-year-old Sidhanth, his eyes glued to the screen. A close shot of a lady whose son committed suicide was playing on the screen. After the screening, Sidhanth said, “This is the second time I am coming for the festival. I have watched movies on Dalits, unemployment, child labour and mob-lynching. I liked the movie Gubbare. These films make me aware about issues which are absent from the movies which I usually watch in cinema halls or TV.”

Apart from festivals and screenings, Cinema of Resistance conducted its first ‘documentary viewing workshop’ at the Sambhaavna Institute in Kandbari village in Palampur, Himachal Pradesh, on December 7-9, 2018. Almost 35 participants, including social activists, film enthusiasts and students participated in the workshop.

“This workshop is not meant to teach filmmaking. It is being conducted to create awareness about meaningful cinema and how to do film screenings in various places,” Cinema of Resistance volunteer Saurabh Verma said. On the first day, there were discussions regarding film curation.

The session stressed that no matter what message the filmmaker wanted to send, it all finally depended on how the audience perceived it. Indeed, the audience becomes the open-ended horizon of all film experience. The organisers shared their experience when they showed Tamil filmmaker RP Amudhan’s Shit and Divya Bharti’s Kakkoos to a urban middle class audience. Both movies deal with the terrible degradation and plight of manual scavengers in Tamil Nadu.

A majority of the middle class audience found it difficult to see the extreme close shots of human excreta and the filth all around even as manual scavengers went through the ritual of another day’s horrible ordeal. In contrast, when the same documentaries were screened among sanitation workers in Bhilai in Chhattisgarh, the entire audience watched the movie in pindrop silence, even when they had difficulties in understanding Tamil. Volunteers narrated the film in Hindi while it was screened. After the premiere of Ho Gayi Hai Pir Parvat Si by Subrat Kumat Sahu at Sambhaavna, in Palampur, Himachal Pradesh, the audience welcomed it with slogans like, ‘Kisan Mukti Zindabad’ (Long live farmers' freedom).

The film depicted how the fragile mountains of the Himalayas and its pristine landscape in the upper Himachal Pradesh are being ravaged by hydro-power projects despite peaceful and protracted protests by the locals. “It took eight years to make the film,” said Subrat. On the final day of the Palampur workshop, while packing their luggage, most of the participants were thinking about starting an independent film collective in their own towns, cities and villages.

“It’s possible. To create a new film culture at the grassroots,” said a young participant from Andhra Pradesh. Cinema of Resistance also aids filmmakers in their fight against censorship imposed by governments or vested interests. On August 1, 2015, the screening of Nakul Singh Sawhney’s famous Muzaffarnagar Baaqi Hai was forcibly stopped by ABVP activists in Kirori Mal College in Delhi University. In protest, Sanjay and his team collaborated with the director and organised screenings in at least 60 locations in the Hindi heartland on August 27, 2015. “We reject all kinds of censorship. Our aim is to break structures and hierarchies hitherto set up by big-time film festivals. We don't believe in any kind of genre or time duration categories.

There have been many instances where we have shown unedited footage of films,” said Sanjay. Sanjay Joshi and his team believe in disseminating cinema in the distant nooks and corner of the country. He has proposed a new idea called ‘Cinema Rucksack’. “Carry two-three pair of clothes, a laptop, a set of hard disks, a white piece of cloth and a small projector in your rucksack. Your ‘Cinema Rucksack’ is ready,” he said. “If we can manage to get 20 youngsters excited enough to travel across the country with the rucksack, at least for a year, massive changes can happen at the grassroots and in terms of social consciousness. Cinema is a perfect medium for cultural transformation.