A film only truly begins to breathe and live in the cinema. Cinema, and I mean this very special place where the collective experience of a film in front of the big screen, dreaming, crying and laughing together, might be in the process of vanishing, at least it is endangered like never before in its 130 years long history. In all its periods, the history film has always originated very special talents until today. In a time where the film industry already sold itself to different streaming platforms, a filmmaker like Rima Das (for my side one of the finest talents of her generation) appears like a freedom fighter for cinema.
My definition of the filmy by Rima Das as a “Paradise of Cinema” does not mean, her films are even close to what we call a “Feel-Good movie”, neither is the rural landscape and its people an untroubled idyl. In her “Coming of Age”-stories there are always cracks and always signs of changes of the social structure of the villages. Unusually, her newest film Not A Hero begins with Mivan, a quite spoiled boy from the middle class living in a big city. Most of his free time he spends with his smartphone and nerve-racking computer games. He speaks English rather than Hindi or Assamese. The parents who have problems to pay back their loan send him away for two months to a far distant village. He will live with his aunt, the youngest sister of his father. He is thrown into a rural world which is strange to him. Exposed to a hot climate without air conditioning, very basic bathrooms and without the comfort of modern urban middle class, he feels for now exposed and for him it seems to be an expulsion from paradise.
The more the boy gets used to his new environment, his beautiful and independent aunt and some first friendships with the local kids, the more I got this typical feeling I have whenever I see a film by Rima Das. That means just to sit in the right film theater with the right film at the right time. This blend of ethnographic cinema and poetic playfulness touches the child in me and leads me directly to the glory of cinema. The trees, the animals or the places, only children can enchant with their imagination remind me in an utopian sentence in Wim Wenders Tokyo-ga (a homage to Yasujiro Ozu), where he says: If one could film like we see, just seeing without having to proof something.”
Like in Bulbul Can Sing or Village Rockstars 2, there is no cinema in this village but this piece of world, the landscape with its people and with sad and funny moments turns into total cinema itself. Especially in this subgenre “Coming Of Age”, the film history has originated countless masterpieces, but Rima Das´ work with often untrained children actors remind me in its consequence mostly in the children films by Hiroshi Shimizu. Not only because Shimizu admired the freshness of children whose expressions are not imposed but really lived. And there is this almost uncanny empathy, I see as well in the Films by Rima Das. It is like we all become while watching Not A Hero children again, the filmmaker and the spectators at the same time.
There is, for example, the annual fair scene. The kids are totally absorbed by their games. It seems like Rima Das and the whole apparatus of filmmaking withdraw for moment behind that what the camera reveals. It is pure cinema with a nearly unchained poetry like for example in the “kite flying”- scene in Jean Renoir´s The River. To describe this feeling, I remember the first part of Marcel Proust´s A La Recherche Du Temps Perdu (On the Search For The Lost Time). The aging and sickly narrator describes his childhood dreams during his afternoon naps.
There is another twilight scene with a child. The child does actually nothing special. If such moments in the films by Rima Das are not signs of a cinematic paradise than at least a long beautiful and melancholic echo of it. Not only the presence of children but as well the uncanny presence of animals free of any imposed meanings are fascinating. The beauty of her films , they can´t be really specified. But these moments are frail. There is of course a real world with often meaningless regulations and sometimes the children are exposed to representatives of power who are already much too far away from their own childhood. There is a horse, the boy has befriended. It belongs to the father of one of his friends. The father will sell it. For this owner it is just a tool which become useless, for the children it is like a dear and ensouled being. For all these interactions between children and animals, children and landscape, there are no real words. One has to see it on the big screen to enjoy it in all its tenderness.
Anyhow, Not A Hero has as well to do with the eternal longing for freedom and the restrictions that prevent us from it. Between the world of the children and the more restricted world of the adults where every thing is clearly defined, there is this wonderful character of the boy´s aunt, a single and strong woman. She lives in the big house of her late parents and she literally has “a room for herself” like Virginia Woolf demands for woman in her brilliant feministic essay A Room of One´s Own. The world in the films by Rima Das are never black and white but with many transitions. Rima Das is not only a kind of key figure in modern independent cinema but as well a big hope for the future of cinema. But I can´t explain why someone would make such beautiful films in these times. For Not A Hero, as with all films by Rima Das (that I have seen), is this: I only write about them to make sure that these films exist and that I have not just dreamt them.
Rüdiger Tomczak
Further screenings:
15.Feb, 16.00 Zoo Palast 2
16.Feb, 9.45 Filmtheater am Friedrichshain
18.Feb, 15.45 Haus der Kulturen der Welt 1
22.Feb, 10.15 Cubix 6
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