Children inside a car, going to school. The elder one starts clapping and singing. The rest join her. They look outside the window and start shouting, “Look, we have grass – it exists”, clap clap. They are now looking far away, “Look we have mountain – it exists” clap clap. Their glance is now fixed on a small coop in front of them, they shout with glee, “We have a chicken house – it exists!”

We may wonder, why are they so excited about the existence of the things that are naturally around us?  

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A man on the top of a hill is fixing an antenna. It seems that a football match is going to happen in the evening and he is in charge of all management. Looking just at this scene, you won’t be able to tell that the village has just been ravaged by an earthquake. The few who have survived are living in a refugee camp, just like this man. A car pulls up on the dusty road, an elderly man behind the wheel. He comes from outside and he is curious, how can they celebrate around a football match, isn’t it a time for mourning? The antenna-man replies with a sigh and a smile on his face, “I’m also mourning, I lost my little sister and three nieces and nephews. But what can we do? The World Cup comes once every four years and life goes on…”

We wonder, how can he think that way in the face of such harrowing trauma?

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A filmmaker is seen in an unusual position, not behind the camera, but talking straight to it. It seems that he has been restricted from making films, giving interviews and traveling for 20 years. For a filmmaker, nothing can go more wrong than this. Yet, what unfolds before us is extraordinary. Instead of retreating, he steps into the frame and turns his own predicament into a film. He mocks his own condition while his friend handles the camera. He says “cut” but his friend reminds him that saying “cut” means directing which is an offence for him according to law. “But acting and reading screenplays were not mentioned as an offence” – the filmmaker breathes a sigh of relief. He is indomitable. He moves to the next room while the camera follows him. Instead of directing, he squats on the floor and starts describing his own screenplay with a rolled script and inch-tape in hand. They thought they could silence the filmmaker, but the filmmaker found his way through the restrictions.

A film is being made, anyway. 

The first instance is from No Other Land (2024), a documentary about the Israeli occupation of Palestine. It is set in Masafer Yatta, a village in the West Bank where military violence is a daily routine. Every week, a new house is destroyed, its people evacuated. Every week a new house is made again. Tractors return to destroy them again the next week, and the cycle repeats. Inch by inch, the occupiers take over the land and the villagers are forced into ghettoized camps. The daily life of a Palestinian is caught up in this game of destruction and rebuilding. We must speak of this violence, but we must also recognise the violence in our “looking at” these images over and over again. With time, the image of a bombed house or a lynched kid becomes like any other image, we are no longer shocked. What strikes me most is the liveliness of these spirited children. First, they forced their dad to drive them to schools just after the military aggression on their land. And then they started singing songs pointing out the grass, the rocks, the chicken houses that still exist unlike their own house. Even after losing everything – they somehow celebrate life that still meagerly exists.

The second instance is from Abbas Kiarostami’s And Life Goes On (1992) where a village lays in ruins after an earthquake. They are mourning, at the same time, living their life. Just like the antenna boy in the village – villagers are eager to see the world cup that comes in every four years. In the same film, we will find a couple who got married a day after the earthquake under plastic. Amidst the ruins and the pain of loss, they proclaimed with unwavering strength, “and life goes on”. 

The third instance is from Jafar Panahi’s This is Not a Film (2011). In 2011, the Iranian filmmaker was banned by the government from making films, giving interviews and traveling for 20 years. After a short period of staying behind the bars he was under house arrest. He was being silenced in every possible way. But Panahi found a way. He made a self-reflexive film secretly; named it This is Not a Film – just to make fun of his own situation and managed to smuggle it to the Cannes Film Festival. Nothing could stop him after that. By playfully putting himself in the grey zone of what can and cannot be said under the eye of censors, Panahi developed a uniquely personal style of filmmaking that transformed restriction into an art of storytelling. And he kept on making one film after another within the house-arrest. He started stretching his boundaries from home to a car, a car to a neighbourhood, a neighbourhood to a nearby village. He keeps on celebrating cinema by challenging authoritarian power.

I wonder, how can one be so full of life when life itself becomes impossible?

§

I have been reading Umar Khalid’s prison letters lately. He writes, “...I have said earlier too, nurturing hope in jail is also a risky business. The higher you hope, the higher is the height from which you come crashing down. Simply put, I am afraid of hope, so I try not to remain hopeful. But, when it comes to this kind of an attitude to survive jail, I am quite an exception. Everyone here is insanely hopeful, even those in the most hopeless situations.”

Let me deviate a little bit from here and travel back to 2020. We were suddenly quarantined. I was in the first year of my Master's course. I had a life in university. Suddenly, it all stopped. My mother was admitted to hospital with COVID pneumonia, and she started struggling between life and death. I was grieving. Even after she came back, the trauma was so raw that I couldn’t get back to normalcy. In addition to that, some grave personal crises jumped into my life. I couldn’t move out of my house to talk with friends or a therapist. The four-walled confinement started swallowing me like a giant. At the same time, social media was flooded with the news of death. Everyday a person whom I knew or were acquainted with or not acquainted with was dying. The earth had opened up into a crevice for new corpses. My crisis was personal and universal.

I started watching Jafar Panahi around this time. Then I realised how a man can live within confinement for years after years without giving up. How can a man smile like a child when his freedom has been taken away? I found out that Panahi too thought of death and went into the sea. But he only came back crying, running away from it and promised himself never to choose death over life. In my darkest of hours, Panahi shows me light. In my darkest of days, I chose to rewatch And Life Goes on to learn resilience over giving it all up. 

What does a term like “hope” mean for a jailed activist, the children of Palestine, the villagers of Koker, or a filmmaker under house arrest? The very act of finding this joy, of hoping when hope itself seems impossible, is resistance. The smallest acts of resistance come together to give birth to resilience. To Umar, to the children of Palestine, to the villagers of Koker, to Jafar Panahi and to hundreds and millions of people of similar condition resilience becomes their voices of resistance.

We are a generation born into an audio-visual landscape of violence. We are watching the gruesome details of an ongoing war on our smartphones, sitting idly on our sofa. We can be far from the battlefield physically, but virtually, it is just happening in front of our eyes. The world is saturated with the images of genocide, rape, murder and communal violence. We can’t stop a war, but we can record its experience. We can’t stop the silencing, but we can keep a journal on it.

Perhaps Bob Dylan said it best:

“And I’ll tell it and think it and speak it and breathe it
And reflect it from the mountain so all souls can see it
Then I’ll stand on the ocean until I start sinkin’
But I’ll know my song well before I start singin'.”

§

These rambling thoughts give birth to the film festival I am curating with the organisational support from NIV Art Centre in Delhi from October 10-12. As a student of cinema, I would always like to think with cinema. So, I called it And Cinema Goes On, borrowing its spirit from Kiarostami’s And Life Goes On. The festival brings together films from India, Iran and Palestine that have faced suppression in some way or the other but above all the filmmakers have chosen to be resilient under the iron grip of the system.

It will open with its namesake, Kiarostami’s And Life Goes On, and move through Jafar Panahi’s films made under house arrest, Sreemoyee Singh’s And Towards Happy Alleys, No Other Land from Palestine, and Dibakar Banerjee’s shelved film Tees. The screenings will be followed by conversations with filmmakers like Dibakar Banerjee and Sreemoyee Singh, critic Saibal Chatterjee, and curator Shuddhabrata Sengupta to foster a dialogue around the theme.

If these questions matter to you and if you want to take part in the dialogue, do register for the event and come visit us. Together, let us find a new path to navigate our stories. 

Labanya Dey is the curator and programmer of the And Cinema Goes On Film Festival. She also runs a Bengali webzine named Counter Shot, dedicated to critical discourse on cinema. Currently based in Delhi, she works as a researcher, writer, and curator on the archival project at Triveni Kala Sangam.

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