VERDICT: Sound and images captured during several years of documentary making form the basis for this haunting essayistic meditation on fear and its effects.
Composed of archival materials collected over the past decade of making documentaries in her home state of Odisha, Lipika Singh Darai’s Night and Fear receives its world premiere in the Ammodo Tiger Short Competition in Rotterdam. An evocative personal essay, it ruminates on darkness and the kinds of fear that inhabit and are inspired by it. Imagined as a letter to her grand-aunt in the same vein as her 2014 film Dragonfly and Snake, Darai’s new film mediates her own footage to reshape it in the wake of recollections and relationships she has since observed. Recurring in the margins of these other productions are moments of physical and spiritual darkness that coalesce into an enigmatic, disquieting but transfixing reverie.
For much of its runtime, Night and Fear adopts the use of split screens. Darai has referred to this as a way of representing the letter format cinematically – and the notion of the images being in a fluid kind of dialogue is a useful one to hold onto. Sometimes they appear to be a single frame, but the slight waver of the camera on one side gives away that they are two connected. On occasion, the visuals clearly contrast – one shows a light daytime sky, the other the darkening dusk – at other points there genuinely seems to be a single image, but it is bisected with a murky filter overlaying half. These all serve to create quiet interactions, shifting perception, folding time, and overlaying meaning in a way that isn’t necessarily immediately quantifiable, but which accumulates over the course of the film.
One of the elements that repeats are stories and memories about women branded as witches in rural villages and the fate they suffered as a result. Some of these women appear in interviews, telling their stories to the camera while Darai’s own childhood memories of such details provide a quietly haunting perspective. Such narrative ingredients serve to colour footage that would otherwise seem innocuous. One woman explains that when she paraded through the streets naked for her witchcraft it was like a celebration – now clips of festivals and fetes take on a less palatable aura. Even just an image of the blackening forest as the sun sets can be set against whoops and hollers, or shimmering figures suggesting double exposure, that cast it in a new light. “So many nights, so many forms of darkness, so many kinds of fear.”
Director, screenwriter, editor, sound design: Lipika Singh Darai
Producer: Subhravanu Das
Cinematography: Indraneel Lahiri
Venue: International Film Festival Rotterdam (Ammodo Tiger Short Competition)
In Oriya
28 minutes
