Movies Moving BRICS: Joint productions and film festivals foster emotional connections

Madhur Bhandarkar was shocked to find an email in his inbox from internationally acclaimed Chinese director Jia Zhangke, who wrote him with an unusual proposal.

Jia asked Bhandarkar, a successful film director in India’s Bollywood, if he would be interested in making a short film as part of a five-story anthology. Jia planned on making one of his own and recruiting directors from the other three BRICS countries (Brazil, Russia, South Africa) for the others.

Bhandarkar agreed without hesitation and less than a year later, the anthology, Where Has Time Gone?, premiered at the Second BRICS Film Festival in Chengdu, Sichuan Province, in June.

“This was the first time I participated in a collaborative project in my life,” admitted Jia, whose film Still Life, a tale of the self-destruction of a city as the Three Gorges Dam was under construction, won the Golden Lion at the 2006 Venice Film Festival. “We [the five BRICS nations] share social similarities and profound civilizations, but we have different ways of dealing with challenges. The five short films in the anthology represent five diverse cultures on a common theme – time and how our lives have been changing so fast with it.”

The first seeds of the collaborative BRICS film project were sown at the summit of BRICS leaders in Goa, India, in 2016. After Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi proposed a BRICS Film Festival in 2015, Chinese President Xi Jinping suggested producing a collective BRICS film, and Jia was contacted to coordinate.

Where Has Time Gone? also includes When the Earth Trembles by Brazilian director Walter Salles, whose Motorcycle Diaries based on Ernesto Che Guevara’s work was nominated for two Oscars, I Am Your Time Now by Russian director Alexey Fodorchenko and Stillborn, South African director Jahmil Qubeka’s apocalyptic sci-fi film set 10,000 years in the future, which is populated by robots.

Jia Zhangke’s contribution, Revive, uses the two-child policy announced by the Communist Party of China in 2015 to weave a poignant story about a long-married couple whose lives were becoming predictable, cleverly tapping Chinese history, culture and martial arts. It begins with a ferocious fight to death between two adversaries and the empress emerging from her royal chamber to be greeted by loyal subjects. But everything turns out to be a gimmick to promote tourism. The warriors and empress are all costumed employees to give tourists more photo opportunities.

Bhandarkar’s Mumbai Mist deals with the issue of an aging population that is perplexed by modern technology and isolated from younger people who are immersed in their own lives and mobile phones. Such a story could easily be set in China or any other part of the world.

“It’s cliché to say cinema is a universal language but it is!” Qubeka exclaimed. “In 108 minutes, we traveled around the globe. While we are different in some ways, we have the same basic values and experience the same emotions. As a film director, I am more fascinated by what makes us the same than what makes us different.”

Both the collaborative film and the other films shown at the festival highlighted connections between the five countries. Fodorchenko’s drama about a young woman attempting to keep her lover alive by improvising a breathing device after an accident leaves him paralyzed and unable to breathe was inspired by a Chinese story he found during a visit to China. “It was about a family trying to help a son with a lung problem survive,” he explained. “The countries are different, but the emotions — love and sorrow — are universal.”

Alok Rajwade, the star of Kaasav (Turtle) by Indian directors Sumitra Bhave and Sunil Sukthankar, won the best actor award for his portrayal of a suicidal young man in a film addressing another universal trend.

“Depression and suicide are major universal problems,” remarked Mohan Agashe, producer of the film. “The highest suicide rates in the world are in China, India and Japan. Realizing the severity of the situation, the World Health Organization has declared 2017 the year to ‘Fight Depression.’ We wanted to address this issue in a positive manner and chose film as the medium because it is a universal language.”

Where Has Time Gone? will screen again at the BRICS Summit in Xiamen in September. Jia noted that it will also be shown at film festivals around the world. Four more BRICS co-productions are expected to be released by 2022.

The current situation is creating huge opportunities for BRICS filmmakers, especially considering the massive size of the Chinese and Indian domestic film markets. As Han Sanping, chairman of China Film Group Corporation, pointed out, “Any film screened in China is guaranteed tens of thousands of viewers.”

In 2016, China’s box-office revenue reached 49.2 billion yuan (US$7.2 billion) thanks to over 70 million moviegoers. By May 2017, China had more than 45,000 screens nationwide, an exponential jump from the modest 1,845 in 2002. Today, the Chinese film industry is financed by nearly 2,000 investors in over 500 venture capital firms.

Loktak Lairembee (Lady of the Lake), a 2016 film directed by India’s Haobam Paban Kumar that was inspired by Still Life, enjoyed a boom of new interest and viewership after the Chengdu film festival. Although Kumar has been rising through the ranks of global filmmaking, he remains hardly known in his own country. One reason is that his films are in the Manipuri language, which is spoken only in the tiny northeastern state of Manipur which has a population of only 3 million or so. Although Loktak has English subtitles and won many awards, its performance was paltry compared to Bollywood’s blockbusters.

“Small films don’t get access to large markets,” Sankhajit Biswas, editor of the film, said. “How can we introduce small films to other countries? This film festival is a wonderful platform to reach a larger audience.”

Along with enlarging markets, BRICS films and film festivals are also creating people-to-people contacts, one of the primary objectives of the bloc.

“Everyone knows that China is a big movie country,” noted Biswas during his first trip to China. “What we don’t see from outside are cultural exchange and human contact. We came to Chengdu, talked with people, shared food and made emotional connections. This will enhance our creativity and foster better communication and fellowship in filmmaking.”

Author Sudeshna Sarkar is an editorial consultant with the Beijing Review weekly. Author Xia Yuanyuan is a reporter with the ChinAfrica magazine.