New Delhi: Documentary filmmaker Anand Patwardhan’s Vasudhaiva Kutumbakam/The World is Family has won the Best Documentary award at the New York Indian Film Festival (NYIFF). Earlier, the film had won the Audience Award at Indie Meme, a South Asian Festival in Austin, Texas.
The film uses footage Patwardhan has shot over the decades of his parents and his family to tell the story of a changing India. The official blurb of the film reads:
“Vasudhaiva Kutumbakam, a Sanskrit phrase meaning “the world is family” is a universalist idea that competes with dominant, exclusivist Hindu notions of caste. Anand grew up in a milieu that questioned the latter. The family’s elders had fought for India’s Independence but rarely spoken about it. ‘Liberty, Equality, Fraternity’, words enshrined in India’s Constitution, were subconsciously internalized. As his parents aged, Anand began to film with whatever equipment was at hand. Soon birthdays and family gatherings gave way to oral history.
AdvertisementRevisiting home movie footage a decade after his parents had passed, was a revelation. Today, self-confessed supremacists whose ideology once inspired the murder of Mahatma Gandhi, are in power. As they rewrite India’s history, memories of the past have become more precious than mere personal nostalgia.”
A review in Variety after the screening at NYIFF reads, “Through his personal study of his family, Patwardhan endears us to the entwined history of Nirmala, Balu, Rau, Achyut, Gandhi and India as a whole. And as he reaches several inevitable crossroads, from personal grief to dismay over the country’s divisive direction, “The World Is Family” becomes a deeply affecting, immensely powerful cinematic lamentation of lost stories and details, and a desperate act of personal and political preservation before time runs out.”
At the award function in New York last week, Patwardhan talked about the ongoing genocide in Palestine and the US’s complicity in it.
