'Village Rockstars' breaks many stereotypes

A welcome departure from the conventional mode of narration, Rima Das’ Village Rockstars victory at the 65th National Film Awards is a landmark not just for Assamese but also Indian cinema. The film has not only won the coveted the Best Feature Film (Swarna Kamal) award but also bagged awards in the Best Child Artist, Best Audiography and Best Editing categories. The last time an Assamese film won the Best Feature Film award was in 1988 when eminent filmmaker Jahnu barua’s film Halodhia Choraye Baodhan Khai ( The Catastrophe) surmounted the odds to tell a refreshingly original tale.

The Mumbai-based filmmaker does not have any formal training in film-making. “Before going to Mumbai, I was more interested in acting. Even I did acting in my first feature film. It was, by chance, that I became a filmmaker,” says Rima. She is being modest because she has done almost everything single handedly in Village Rockstars – direction, screenwriting, cinematography, editing and production design. In the realm of Assamese cinema, Village Rockstars has emerged as the most travelled film across the globe in prestigious film festivals. In 2009, she made a short film Pratha, and then came her first feature film Man With The Binoculars (Antardrishti) in 2016. Her first film was about the life of a retired geography teacher (played by Bishnu Kharghoria), and it captured the transformation in his perspective and ideology after he gets a pair of binoculars as a gift from his son.

Set in the remote village of Chhayagaon in Assam, Village Rockstars is about a little village girl named Dhunu who dreams to have a real guitar and forms a music band with her friends – Manabendra, (her elder brother), Rinku, Boloram, Bishnu and Bhaskar – in the village. The band members lead a carefree life, climbs up the trees, go for fishing and walk together to school. The film narrates the day to day struggles of common villagers and the way they deal with poverty and natural disasters. In the film, Dhunu’s family that consists of her widowed mother Basanti and her elder brother Manabendra, represents the life of the villagers.

Gender disparity

It also addresses the issue of gender disparity. The representation of women in the film is not stridently feminist. Instead the suggestion of feminine power is carefully imbued into the narrative. Rima’s struggle in Mumbai reflects through the character of Dhunu. “Dhunu is a part of me – my struggle, my dreams, my desires,” says the filmmaker. She paves her own paths in the face of various antagonistic forces. Even the self assertion represented by Dhunu stands as a textual or artistic parallel to Rima's determination to make the film. Dhunu’s determination to have a real guitar; her act of making a guitar from styrofoam and her mother’s promise, in spite of their perpetual state of poverty, to buy a guitar by selling their goat, are suggestive of the deconstruction of the stereotyped images of woman as vulnerable and dependent.

Rima Das with the cast   | Photo Credit: Special arrangement

The film offers a nuanced description of Dhunu’s puberty ceremony. She is adorned with new sari, earrings and red bindi on her forehead that reminds one of Adoor Gopalakrishnan’s film Nizhalkkuthu where the little girl Mallika’s puberty ceremony is shown with minute details. Once the ceremony is over, Dhunu climbs up the trees again with her friends. In a traditional Assamese society, a girl after puberty is expected to lead a confined life. When the village women criticise Dhunu’s carefree life even after her puberty, her mother vehemently tells them “When I lost my husband , I was left alone with my two children. None came to ask me how I was living then. Now, you are coming here to teach my daughter what is right or wrong,” says her mother.

The filmmaker has also meticulously used the metaphor of swimming. For Basanti, swimming is the ability to sustain in a hostile world because Dhunu’s father was drowned in the flood as he did not know how to swim. She teaches her daughter how to swim and to survive. In another scene, soaked in rain, children shout: “We need to ban the flood, Ban the flood! Ban the flood! We need to ban the rain!” This scene is entertaining, but has a satirical tone underneath.

Elements of nature

Rain and wind have played a significant role in the film as if they were human characters. Noted sound designer of the film Amrit Pritam says, “I have used the sound of the natural ambience as an imaginary character like rain has been used as an emotion and as a character to reflect the psychological position of Dhunu. Again, according to the situation, I designed different kinds of winds, sound of thunderclap followed by rain. I tried to hold certain scenes, where there is no background score, with my sound.”

Bhanita Das, the first Assamese child actor to receive the Best Child Artist award, says, “I am delighted to win the National Award. I never did acting in my life. Rima ba (sister) trained us how to face the camera.” Mallika Das, who worked as assistant director, says, “Children of our village are now exposed to the big world and are now aware of what is happening around.”