FICUNAM 2021: A RIFLE AND A BAG, A COMBATIVE AND LOVING DOCUMENTARY
A Rifle and a Bag documentary from FICUNAM 2021 explores the tender and heartbreaking experiences of a family of ex-guerrillas in India.
The NoCut collective, made up of Cristina Hanes (Romania), Arya Rothe (India) and Isabella Rinaldi (Italy), are presenting their first feature film at FICUNAM after winning several awards around the world (including a Special mention in the Bright Future Competition of the Rotterdam Festival). The documentary A Rifle and a Bag is the intimate portrait of a Naxalite family who surrendered to the Indian state and live in a situation of segregation, marginalization and poverty. The violence of their condition, evidently, makes them rethink the decision to leave the Marxist guerrilla to join a state that does not want them, does not defend them and, above all, subjects them to capitalist, bureaucratic and authoritarian policies against the ones they fought so long.
As soon as they graduated from the postgraduate DocNomads, the three filmmakers decided to setup a collective to continue producing, with a unique collaboration in terms, their idea of the guerrilla documentary. Minimum crew, horizontal responsibilities, complementarity of all departments: these are the foundations of the NoCut Film Collective.
A couple of years ago, the three directors set out on a trip to India to research the subject of their first feature film. After months of traveling through the country-continent, they found an ex-Naxalite named Somi who immediately captivated them. Months later, they returned to look for her, they met her family, they heard her story and, with her, they decided to create this documentary.
A Rifle and a Bag is a documentary guided by a protagonist of unusual strength and temper. Somi wants to show her life because she wants to continue a fight that was taken from her. As she will explain herself, at one point in the film, she joined the Naxalite combat to take revenge on a despotic village chief. Nothing more. There, little by little, she read the communist writings translated from Chinese and Russian and decided that the world was unjust and that this cause was necessary. Later, she fell in love with Sukhram and they decided to surrender together to rejoin the Indian society and have a family. When they left the guerrilla, however, the injustices did not end. This film is, then, a way for Somi to continue a fight against injustice and denounce the living conditions of the outcasts.
And yet Somi, through Hanes, Rothe and Rinaldi, does not try to make an apology for Naxalite life. Not at all. She is not making a pamphlet to prevent the Naxalites from leaving the jungle. What she is showing is the truncated promise of the Indian state; a promise that leads more people into armed struggle than it dissuades. Because those who abandon the guerrillas become ghosts between worlds: abandoned by the state, repudiated by society, persecuted by the rebels.
The life of this family, around campfire conversations, shows an always restless flame, always warm, always present. In this oppressive environment, of claustrophobic fear, Somi's greatest strength, and the greatest strength of her message, is in the love she professes. Somi, guide and teacher, never fails to show tenderness. For this reason, more than a film about geopolitics, this is a film about micropolitics: an intimate, tender and overwhelming portrait of the emotional, bodily, and sensitive responsibility of a mother.
The touch with the children, the way to bathe them, the desire to have a girl in a deeply misogynistic country, the strength of her teachings and the mocking, stubborn, loving relationship she has with Sukhram, her husband, show the possibility of happiness beyond injustices: of a life worth fighting for. What Somi, Hanes, Rothe and Rinaldi transmit is not just the hopelessness, fear and bureaucratic horror that ex-Naxalites have to go through, but the strength of a woman who finds space for tenderness and affection beyond the injustices and horrors of this life.
A particularly powerful moment in the film, illustrates well Somi's tender pedagogy. The oldest son goes to school. There, he does not speak the same language as all the other students. De facto, he lives as an outcast.
In a couple of heartbreaking sequences, we see the children participating in a collective meditation. They all seem united, in unison, in the humming that concentrates them. But soon, we see the little cracks that isolate them. The loneliness of Somi's son, the horror of social distance, turn into a desire to mitigate the distances that separate him from the other children. In a painful scene, we hear the teacher chant nationalist slogans to convince six-year-olds of the importance of joining the Indian army (the fourth largest in the world). Somi's son does not understand everything that is said, nor does he sing, or repeat. But he observes the social dynamics of enthusiasm. Later, with an evident desire to belong, he tells his mother that he wants to be a soldier.
Somi patiently tells her his story. He explains that she knows how to use a weapon, that she knows how to kill and that she dedicated herself to fighting soldiers. She never imposes her desires on him, nor does she make him feel guilty. Somi shows, affectionately, with humor, another aspect of things. Unlike the school teachers, Somi does not indoctrinate. Somi shows a critical alternative: she is not looking for acolytes, she is looking for a dialogue. And the speech towards the son is a speech towards all those who observe it on the screen.
Somi's pedagogy crosses the screen to show us that a conflict like this, between the guerrillas and the state, like so many others we have seen in Latin America, does not have winners and losers. In these previously lost wars, there are only dead, displaced and the constant reality of broken promises and perennial injustice.
Review by Nicolás Ruiz
Published in Televisa News, Mexic
The original version can be found here.