Abu Dhabi Dispatch. 2.

With the huge number of Indians working in Abu Dhabi - doing everything from building the endless number of new towers 24 hours a day to arranging shipments of money earned by those many workers back to the subcontinent - you would think that there would be a growing market here for Indian films, especially since there are unprecedented funds in India to produce and promote them.

Not yet, says Basant Kumar Patil, the Bangalore-based businessman and actor who produced Galubi Talkies, which saw its first screening outside India at the Middle East International Film Festival in Abu Dhabi this week. Perhaps the Indians here are too busy working. There are film clubs, Patil said, but it's a long way from a commercial market, although Abu Dhabi seems determined to change that - not just for Indian films but for cinema in general. Like so much in this place where cranes hover all over the metamorphosing landscape and the noise of earthmoving equipment can be heard throughout the night, it is a work in progress.

Yet Galubi Talkies was one of a number of discoveries at MEIFF, not least because the story by the feminist writer Vaidehi adapted for the screen in this film by Girish Kasaravalli takes on a case history involving the effects of the rising global role of the Arabian Gulf (and places like Abu Dhabi). Kasaravalli's film tells a modern moral tale, set in a fishing community on the southwestern coast about a decade ago, at a time when India and Pakistan went to war, in an old-fashioned visual style that you could find in regional Indian films 30 years ago, or even before.

Galubi, which means "rose," is a Muslim mid-wife in a mostly Hindu village. Her job brings her into the most intimate contact with the women whom she serves. They trust her with their children, the most treasured things in their lives. Yet when conflicts arise over a threat to fishing posed by a ship funded by "Gulf money" that can operate in deeper water than the simple local boats, Galubi becomes a ready target of hostility from young Hindu men whom she literally brought into the world. It makes you think of Yugoslavia, although the few village battles in Galubi Talkies don't rise to the level of violence that you saw in the Balkans or in the vicious anti-Muslim massacres in Danny Boyle's Slum Dog Millionaire. This is more than a story about the persecution of minorities. You could say it's also about the persecution of the majority in India: women.

Calm, warmhearted Galubi (veteran actress Umashree, in an endearingly natural peformance ) is a film fan, so much so that her husband Moosa has left and taken up with another woman. Galubi solution is a get a television and bring it back to her isolated village. (In fact, the isolation of the place is indicated by the language in the film, Kannada, which is only spoken in a small section of the coast. The recently released film is showing in India with English subtitles.)

The television, which draws the women and children of the village to watch with Galubi (and brings back her husband), takes on an odd unexpected role, but a logical one, given the story's circumstances. It's not the stultifying idiot box that the boob tube has become in the US, western Europe, and so many other places. Nor is it the numbing destroyer of community. It helps bring people together - to a point. Villagers who have never traveled see a broader world. Women who live in virtual slavery with their husbands become aware of other opportunities out there. In Galubi Talkies, television doesn't change the world, but it does bring parts of the world to uneducated people who are locked into village life.

Kasaravalli's film takes the story far beyond the village, as fishermen who work for one boat-owner are lured away by another contractor, a Muslim whose better far-ranging boat has been bought with money earned by workers in the Gulf. The solution to the conflict, which has economic and environmental consequences, is to blame it on the Muslims. Clearly the film shows the pointlessness of rallying communities against each other - the Muslim characters tend to be fatalistic about local resentment. Is the message here that the Hindu men might not have acted so rashly if they only watched more television with their wives?

The film is long, more than two hours, with a deliberate pace that will feel slow to viewers accustomed to Bollywood's Hindi musicals from Mumbai or to the internationalization of India at the throbbing sensaround decibel-level by Danny Boyle and the many who are likely to follow his example once Slumdog Millionaire cracks the western market, as many expect it to. Cinematography by S Ramachandra goes for the tactile village scale rather than anything panoramic. You see immediately that this is a coastline that couldn't be farther away from Club Med, but one that's confronting globalization nonetheless.

-David D'Arcy

Posted by dwhudson at October 19, 2008 5:37 AM