A view Twinkling lights.
a good part of twinkling lightsA documentary directed by Anirban Dutta and Anupama Srinivasan takes place at night. Some of these are of the people of the remote village of Tora in Manipur trying to live their normal lives in a place without electricity, while others are photos of a group practicing Christmas singing inside a room lit by torches.
Tora village, located on the Indo-Myanmar border, has been waiting for electricity for so long that the announcement that electricity has finally arrived in the village has been viewed with both skepticism and hope by most people. The documentary, which is being screened in the Long Documentary Competition category at the 16th International Documentary and Short Film Festival of Kerala (IDSFFK), conveys to the audience the experience of the villagers living without electricity through its visual choices.
hope for a star
twinkling lights It is the result of more than seven years of hard work, including spending many months living in a remote village, nearly cut off from civilization, and earning the villagers’ trust so that they would ignore the crew’s presence in their everyday lives. When no progress had been made several months after the pillars were laid, one old woman expressed hope that perhaps she would be able to light a star next Christmas.
The political backdrop of the documentary is based on the Naga Peace Accord signed between the Central government and the National Socialist Council of Nagaland (NSCN) in 2015, which ended insurgency in these areas, resulting in a flurry of state-run development projects, of which the electrification project is a part. A tired old man, who was a militant in his younger days, accepts all the changes calmly. A woman saves money from all possible sources to buy a refrigerator to sell ice cream in her shop when electricity comes to the village. The arrival of the refrigerator is a dramatic moment in itself, with all the children of the area crowding around her.
very real
The whole theme of a village waiting for electricity reminds one of G. Aravindan’s 1986 film OridathuThis documentary set in the 1950s is a humorous look at how people deal with modernity. Unlike the fictional film, the concerns of the villagers in this documentary about the coming of age known as Digital India are very real. The arrival of electricity and the reactions of the villagers are worth enjoying.
Dutta and Srinivasan then worked hard to film another documentary in a remote village. NocturneA project related to kites in Arunachal Pradesh also received praise at the Sundance Film Festival.
