III Smoking Barrels

Three stylistically diverse stories from an India far removed from the glittery world of Bollywood. They are directed with the edginess of documentaries and play in a cinematically hitherto underrepresented region of the country, the Northwest of the subcontinent, that is to say Assam, Meghalaya and Manipur, the border-regions close to Bangladesh. The collective title of the episodes hints at explosive themes: powder kegs in the current political climate.The first, which comes across as a thriller, but soon turns into a melodrama, neo-realistically portrays Janice, a fourteen-year-old girl, who has been abducted and taken to a terror camp. She manages to escape, and now forces a driver to take her to Guwahati, near the Bangladesh border, at gunpoint. She is intent on putting as much distance as possible between herself and her tormentors. Finally, she takes leave of her driver, whose daughter she could be, in tears and disappears into the city’s night. An insert informs us that girls like Janice do not officially exist in India. And yet they exist in the hundreds, abused as child-soldiers in armed conflicts. In the second episode, we are still in Guwahati, Assam. It chronicles drug dealer Donnie’s life and violent death. He and his partner are involved in smuggling drugs around the border to Myanmar, and otherwise he drifts through local discos, and lives at home with his mother. The third episode confronts us with elephant hunter Mukthar, who, in his quest for the precious ebony tusks, is trying to make ends meet for his pregnant wife and himself. His struggle for survival ends in his wife´s death. Their child survives. Will it have a brighter future? Even this courageous and taboo-defying film cannot provide an answer to that conundrum. (Internationales Filmfestival Mannheim-Heidelberg)