PORTRAIT OF A REBELLIOUS MOTHER IN THE INDIA OF INJUSTICE
A Rifle and a Bag, the documentary film by Isabella Rinaldi, Cristina Hanes and Arya Rothe was presented at the International Rotterdam Film Festival in the Bright Future Competition. Set in India, the film tells the story of Somi: a former Maoist who rebelled against the injustice of the State, today mother of two children. The directors probe the real and in return they get a portrait of a great female character, not as a defeated but a living invitation to resistance.
Somi is pregnant. She is expecting her second child. She is sure it’s a girl: "When I had the boy, I felt differently", she says. Before we see her, we see a burning fire: the flames rise high against the background of the Indian nature. Shot entirely in India, A Rifle and a Bag is a documentary presented in competition on January 27th at the Rotterdam Film Festival, in the Bright Future Competition.
There is also an Italian talent behind its creation: the three directors, who co-founded the film collective called NoCut are Isabella Rinaldi, Cristina Hanes and Arya Rothe. The protagonist is also a woman: Somi, a former Naxal guerrilla, the Maoist-inspired rebel group (from the village of Naxalbari, in Bengal, where the first revolt broke out in 1967) that is still fighting for the rights of the tribal communities, neglected and discriminated by the central State.
But Somi has surrendered. Together with her husband she chose to leave the militancy and officially surrender to the government: in exchange she got a small compensation and a simple accommodation. She did it for her children, for the serenity of the family, and perhaps also for herself: it is a choice of field, not because she stopped challenging the iniquities of the state - like her ancestors before her -, but because she preferred the domestic nest to a life of opposition that would have affected her offspring.
A Rifle and a Bag - the title of the film already indicates an antithesis, the symbol of fight and femininity gathered here in one figure. The directors, who are respectively Italian (Rinaldi), Romanian (Hanes) and Indian (Rothe), literally followed the story over a long period of time: having gained the trust of the characters, they returned several times in this rural area of India to follow their evolution, as it becomes evident by the chronology: in the first part Somi is pregnant and then we see the baby.
The situation is complex: as a family of ex-Naxalites, Somi and her loved ones are third-degree citizens in a society divided into castes, and they don’t have the "caste certificate" that would allow the eldest son to go to school. To access the education they have to face a dead-end bureaucratic maze.
In 89 minutes the directors tell the story by relying on fixed sequence shots that probe the Indian nature, capturing episodes of the daily life: children, animals, the routine of every day. They never enter the field: they respect the matter represented, they treat it discreetly, they do not intervene but prefer to question the reality that speaks for itself. The wife and the husband talk to each other in front of the camera, their faces lit by the fire, and in the meantime they tell themselves both through the evocation of past events (they met in the commando of the Naxalites) but also through the minutiae of everyday life, such as the difficulties of managing two children.
On one hand they explain what brings the weakest to oppose, on the other hand they go back to the intimate: Somi first goes to the doctor to check on her pregnancy, then bathes the newborn, en plein air in an almost ancestral way, a magnificent scene that the authors manage to capture.
In the background there is the world around them that becomes a social tale: the documentary enters an Indian school, looks at the children, film a numerous classroom where the children sing a national song about the greatness of Mother India. "Who will join the army?" the teacher asks and everyone raises their hand.
At the end we see the mother and her son nestled in the Indian jungle barren and watered by a river, where the woman tells the child the story of the rebels as if it was a fairy tale: "We were at war against the police to help the ordinary people - she says -. The poor should rule the country, democracy is needed. " Militancy is a story to tell, passed on to the offspring, but at the same time a real tale that invites to critical thinking and becomes political education, so that the children will question the established powers of tomorrow.
Rinaldi, Hanes and Rothe bring to us their idea of documentary cinema: different from many documentaries nowadays, which try to instill a judgment in the viewers, underestimating them, they just observe. It’s the school of Wiseman. They capture the everyday, even the obvious and the banal, they take a story and revisit it over time, patient and tenacious, returning to the same place.
This is what research is, this is what an investigation is, away from the speed of the contemporary. With this peculiar "co-production of brains", the six-hands film therefore outlines a memorable female portrait: a woman framed by women, and for once - without resorting to ideologies - the softness in the touch of the directors seems to really affect the result.
Because A Rifle and a Bag tells the twilight of militancy, the renunciation of the idea out of love, the activist who chooses to be a mother despite the injustice persists; but Somi also remains a great character, certainly not defeated, but a rebellious mother who, with the mere act of being and telling herself, makes up a gesture of resistance against the oppressing State.
A review by Emanuele di Nicola
Published on 27th of January 2020 in Bookciak Magazine.
The original version in Italian can be found here.