VERDICT: History, folklore, and contemporary realities intertwine in Nehal Vyas’ essayistic meditation on national aspiration and how stories become enmeshed in state oppression.
Nehal Vyas’ Amma ki Katha – or My Amma’s Tale – explores the way memory and myth become entangled in political narratives.
The film takes as its structure the fables told by grandmothers such as a creation story in which India is held aloft upon the backs of four giant elephants. Through this form, Vyas creates four chapters in which each of the elephants encounters the next progression in the ongoing saga of the country – from its birth to its current political landscape via the legends that inform some of the populace’s sense of national identity.
The film uses a variety of techniques to examine the different facets of its discourse, from non-fiction montage to stop-motion animation, theatrical performance, and song. Each of the chapters has a slightly different aesthetic flavour that perhaps intimate, in some sense, the different ways in which these chronicles are being presented and portrayed to different ends. After a prologue combining live action and animation, the first chapter presents the viewer with an impressionistic documentary portrait of India accompanied by audio from a radio recitation of the constitution. The inherent hope of that opening, however, is undermined across the remaining three chapters.
A miniature play set against a glittering homemade backdrop recounts – in a childlike, idealistic fashion – part of the Ramayana which builds to the abduction of Sita. Next, a song is sung that suggests a growing bitterness that is being spread in the name of God, before a final sequence watches boats crossing a lake while a dreamlike story is told of India being caught on a boat drifting between the desires of its people and the will of those who deem them unacceptable, never able to disembark.
For Vyas, the folklore passed down to her by her grandmother is being twisted, through various reincarnations and reinterpretations to support the will of the Hindutva state that currently controls India and has been in power since Narendra Modi became Prime Minister in 2014. Here. She presents all four of her different interpretations of a shifting national myth in luminescent imagery and hypnotic audio, making all the more striking how easy it is for agendas to be slipped unnoticed into familiar fables and our heroes to be co-opted by those in power.
Director, screenplay, cinematography, editing: Nehal Vyas
Music: Aahvaan Project
Sound: Aidan Reynolds
Venue: San Sebastian Film Festival (Nest) In Hindi, Urdu
21 minutes
