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DOCUMENTARY
VOICES: ANAND PATWARDHAN
SAT
OCT 23 2004
7:00 War and Peace
Anand Patwardhan (India, 2002)
Artist in Person
(Jang aur Aman). “The
government is like a mother. If a mother feeds poison to its own
child, what is the child to do?” A man living near the site of
India's 1998 nuclear weapons tests sums up the central question of
this powerful film. The issue is not only the physical poison of
radioactivity, but the social poison of militarism. As India and
Pakistan enter the nuclear age, Patwardhan shows us a wide range of
responses, some of them verging on the surreal. People celebrating
the tests explode fireworks inside a sculpted dove to show that the
bomb is “for peace.” While protesters march across the country
pleading for nonviolence, fervent nationalists sign petitions in
blood, declaring “those who clash with us will be ground to dust.”
Schoolgirls in Pakistan give inflammatory speeches, but afterward
admit they disagree with their own arguments. (For Patwardhan, the
sense of personal goodwill between individual Indians and
Pakistanis, apart from political rhetoric, is “the silver lining in
the mushroom cloud.”) Patwardhan listens to survivors of the blasts
at Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and travels to Washington, D.C., giving a
chilling reminder of the implications of nationalism far beyond the
subcontinent.
Juliet Clark
Written, Photographed by Patwardhan. (130 mins, In
English and Hindi with English subtitles, Color, DV-Cam, >From First
Run/Icarus)
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