Saga of displacement

By Saliha Nasline
19 Nov 2008 11:05:00 PM IST

IT takes about 22 hours to travel to Tripura from Guwahati. And a good portion of it is in the company of security forces. But after making this long journey, the film-makers of ‘Yarwng’ finally caught on camera the images that stunned all. “We were a team of 60 including the technical crew and artists. We spent about a month in Tripura, capturing the grim reality of the tribals on camera,” says film director Fr Joseph Pulinthanath.

There is no school beyond class IV, no health centre and not even a tea shop or pan dukan, no electricity and not even a single tin-roofed house.
“Some of the children don’t have a stitch on them. They don’t know what a bath is. It’s shocking,” he says. The crew had to wade through a river with chest-high water for about four hours, with six tons of equipment loaded onto eight buffalo carts.
Interestingly, though the crew was filming a story that occurred in a village in north-east Tripura in 1976 the art director didn’t have to do much to recreate the past. The kerosene lamps in the bamboo huts and the surroundings were all the same as if time had been frozen. Some of them were excited to see the shooting of a film for the first time in their life - because they belonged to the Kokborok community, one of the most neglected tribal communities in the country.

`Yarwng’ which means roots in the local dialect is a 95-minute feature film highlighting the problems of the Kokborok tribe of Tripura, says the director who has been settled in Assam for years now. Besides Pulinthanath, eight Malayalis are associated with the film. The technical crew of the film includes cameraman Kannan, sound recordist Krishna Kumar, associate cameraman Shaji Pattanam, sound mixing Krishnan Unni, editor Sasi Menon and Mahesh Narayanan, associate director Sajiv Pazhoor and producer Fr K Joseph.

“Making a film in Tripura is really a challenge. Lack of technology was a real handicap because most of the equipment had to be brought from outside, the nearest options being Guwahati and Kolkata,” he adds. “ But shooting in a place like Tripura that was synonymous with armed terrorism until very recently was a different experience,” he says.

The feature film depicts the plight of the Kokborok tribes, dislocated from their ancestral home for the last three decades owing to the construction of the Dumbur hydel power project in south Tripura. The film reveals the trauma of displacement and its aftermath. The film evolves through the tender romance between Karmati and Wakhiri (a tribal couple) Just when the romance promises to flower, the hydel project sweeps away their dream and leads to socioeconomic unrest. “It highlights the fact that development is necessary but it should not cause pathos,” says the director.

On the eve of Karmati’s and Wakhirai’s marriage, the newly built dam submerges the entire village and separates the lovers forever."The very touching and dramatic events of the exodus that took place at the time of the dam displacement is caught on film,” says producer Fr Joseph. Yarwng was shot on actual locations like Bolongbasa and adjoining areas and many of the people who act in the film are real life victims of displacement.

`Yarwng’ (roots) is made in the Kokborok language, which rarely happens, as the tribals who speak the language virtually have no access to cinema. The film has been selected as the opening film in panorama section of the International Film Festival of India (IFFI) and International Film Festival of Kerala (IFFK). It has also been selected for screening at the forthcoming Kolkata International Film Festival in November.

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