Bharat Mandol, a peasant, lies on the grass gasping for breath as his guts hang loose from a wide gash in his abdomen. There are people rushing about and a hand reaches out, trying to stuff his innards back. It fails and Mandol’s stomach is finally tied up with a cloth.
Those in the audience who manage to sit through this film without turning away respond in horror to the footage from the events of 7 January, when cadres of the Communist Party of India (Marxist)—the leading constituent of the Left Front government in West Bengal—clashed with villagers in Nandigram, where the state government was trying to acquire land for a special economic zone (SEZ).
While forced land acquisition for industrialization in West Bengal has stoked national political ire, it’s also whipped up a creative business for documentary film-makers across the country. Mandol’s images were recorded by Pramod Gupta, and is part of his film Development At Gunpoint.
About seven such films on the strife are criss-crossing the country and being screened in select community halls, foreign high commissions, universities and colleges, and also at the places that are subjects of the films themselves. They capture the blood, gore, the raging debate and the protests that have peppered the year-long crisis rendering landowners landless.
Film-makers Ladly Mukhopadhyay and Ananya Biswas, have two films—Whose Land is It Anyway? on the Singur protests and This Land is Mine—on the Nandigram crisis. They are hoping to recover a part of their Rs4.5 lakh investment in the film with sale of the video and digital compact discs that have been priced at Rs125 and Rs150, respectively.
“We are trying our best to push the sales of the discs and have managed to sell only about 150 of them,” says Mukhopadhyay. But, he says, the “film was made from a position of social commitment, rather than a business proposition”.
Mukhopadhyay and Biswas have shown their films in Kolkata, Mumbai, Delhi, Gorakhpur and Allahabad. Students from Jadavpur University to Delhi university have seen the films. And the duo are sending the films to several international film festivals, including that at Strasbourg and United Nations Association Film Festival to be held at Stanford University, California.
“It was a shaking experience,’’ says Sandip Singh, general secretary, Jawaharlal Nehru University Students’ Union, who has seen about four films on Singur and Nandigram in the past four months. “It is very shocking that Marxist leaders interviewed in the films are talking of compromising their ideology for the sake of development.’’