People’s Film Fest to screen tales of resilience from immigrants’ lives

KOLKATA: Narratives of immigrant lives will take centre stage at the forthcoming 12th edition of the Kolkata People's Film Festival (KPFF) that begins on Jan 23. It will feature accounts of Bengali migrants in Kerala, Bangladeshi immigrants in the US, and even a Rohingya girl's fight for her right to education in the world's largest refugee camp. The resilience of these communities constitutes the central theme of 10 out of the 39 films, scheduled for screening at the festival.Kasturi Basu, who is one of the founder members of People's Film Collective and part of the programming team, told TOI that the 10 films have "very strong statements about the lives of migrants and immigrants”. “During the process of curation, we found strong commonalities in the stories of migrants from the South Asian communities. Their narrative show how they are powerfully reclaiming their histories in a globally anti-immigrant climate,” Basu said.The films to be screened are Ambarien Alqadar's ‘Land of Dreams', Vivek Bald and Allaudin Ullah's ‘In Search of Bengali Harlem', Kesang Tseten's ‘The Lama's Son', Debarun Dutta's ‘The Delivery Guy', Saw Alvin Tun's ‘A Waiting Room', Rishabh Raj Jain's ‘A Dream Called Khushi', Prabodh Bhajni's ‘My Home Yeh Mera Ghar', Dipin Chenayil's ‘See Me When You Leave', Tommaso Cotronei's ‘Myanmar Resistance', and Shekh Al Mamun's ‘Drained by Dreams'. Made in Rohingya and English, ‘A Dream Called Khushi' follows a Rohingya girl's struggle to secure her right to education. While ‘The Delivery Guy' traces the experiences of two South Asian immigrants, who arrived in Berlin as students and worked in the food delivery sector, Tun's ‘A Waiting Room' shows the consequences of Ko Naing's flight from Myanmar to evade compulsory military service, and his struggles and the irresponsible actions of his own people abroad during his resettlement in Bangkok. The trilingual film —‘See Me, When You Leave' (in Malayalam, Hindi, and Bengali) — follows the lives of migrant workers Shahjahan, Salam, Mohammad, Israel, Mafas, Ali, and Naseer Khan as they travel from Murshidabad to Perumbavur in Kerala, using sound design as a central device to examine displacement and belonging. The film opens with a worker listening to an audio training guide to learn Malayalam and closes with four workers in a karaoke session singing a song from ‘Amar Songi’, framing their experience through listening, language, and shared performance. Chenayil has stayed away from home and worked in Delhi. “I have been preoccupied with questions about how individuals process loss when compelled to leave home and adapt to unfamiliar surroundings. I sought an experiential soundscape that enables audiences to hear how workers build belonging in a new place and reclaim a sense of self. This is my debut film as a director and I am waiting to screen it in Kolkata along with the other films on the theme of migration,” Chenayil said.