India: The Project Approach
One of the things I really liked about this project was that the approach was very much in line with my own evolving views on how to produce effective documentaries. Instead of bombarding the viewer with shocking statistics and images, the idea was to take them on a journey. We chose six families (fourteen children) who had been left behind by fathers or mothers who had committed suicide. We captured their stories, got a sense of where they were, and then taught them to be activists and took them to Delhi. We rounded out their journey by traveling to Amritsar to see the Golden Temple and there reflect on their experiences.
The Selection Process
Choosing which families and which children would end up part of the project was physically and emotionally taxing. The children were so appealing and their stories so intriguing, and yet each initial interview was over with so quickly. Worse yet, each was immediately followed by a hasty exodus to the little truck and another long, rough ride hunched over my gear in the back. I felt terrible about the people we left, tears in their eyes, vanishing behind us in the dust as we ran from village to village. Gina, our anthropologist, was particularly effected by this procedure and I tried to assure her that once we made our choices we would be able to invest real time.
Dharvinder
It was in one of these early interviews that I met Dharvinder. His father had committed suicide by drinking pesticide a mere month and a half before we walked through his door, cameras in hand. He was the oldest child, somewhere around fourteen to sixteen years old. Most of the people we met had no idea how old they were and birthdays were general markers like, “the mangos were ripe” or, “we were harvesting wheat”. He was quiet and polite during the interview but as we asked questions about his father he began struggling to maintain his composure. Something about the way he stood, trying so hard to be strong, and yet still very clearly a kid, really got to me. I could feel the weight of his new responsibility as he stood beside his mother, grandmother, and adopted sister. At last, against his will, tears made their way out into the open and, after turning away several times, he ran behind a wall to collect himself before returning to try to finish the interview. That image of him stays with me even now: his blue knit hat tight around his head and turned at a slight angle, his back straight, standing firm against the world with only his moist eyes to betray him.
Sher and Salma
In another house we met two children who’s mother had left them after their father had, I believe, hung himself. In this case the mother had not wanted to leave her children. She remarried and, as is the tradition there, went to live with her new family. The family did not want anything to do with her existing children and refused to allow her to see them. She called them on the sly for a while, even making a few trips to see them, but was discovered and stopped in some way that was unclear. This left Sher and Salma alone with their grandmother.
As it turns out, this was one hell of a grandmother. Beeji (grandma) as we called her, was feisty, upbeat and set a tone for these kids that beamed through their smiles and kept their heads high. Like so many of the others we met, they went hungry any number of times and had little more than their tiny two room brick and mud house, but they maintained excellent grades in school, worked hard, and Sher was one of the best English speakers in the group. (I say this because the focus of education there seems to be reading, writing, math, and English.)
This old woman walked a huge distance to the kids’ school every week to speak with their principal and spent her days spinning thread from cotton by hand. She was happy to try to teach me, despite my clumsy fingers, and only laughed at me when she couldn’t help it. I have rarely in my life met someone so truely and vibrantly alive. She said it was because she drank milk.
I want to talk about all of the families, my experiences meeting them and all of our interactions, but it dawns on me that at some point I’d be writing the documentary out shot by shot here in my blog. Suffice it to say that we heard a lot of difficult stories and met some amazing people in the search process alone.
RSS
