Three-day event highlight issues ignored by the mainstream press
It is a group as diverse as that- their interests range from journalism to religious preaching, but a common factor binds them all – protecting life and livelihoods. Journalist Fredrick Noronha and his friends which included a Roman Catholic priest came together on one platform at the three-day Goan People’s Film Festival (GPFF).
The GPFF was all about social activism at the grass root levels and highlighting the issues which the mainstream media – both visual and print – have effectively ignored.
If the 12-day India International Film Festival (IIFF) which ended on December 2, was all about glamour, big stars and the red carpet being rolled over, here was another film festival which was be fret of all the mega publicity and the associated glitz.
Goa simultaneously hosted a parallel three-day film festival from November 23 to 25 -GPFF-a people’s initiative, ‘Celebrating Life and Livelihoods’ as they preferred to call it.
The film festival featured digital narratives and award-winning documentaries not from just Goa but from around India and Bangladesh. The Film festival featured documentary and short films, which touched many a diverse topics.
Untouchabliity, mining and its fallouts, Special Economic zone, Mega-housing projects, Right to Information, panchayat affairs ( local self-governing bodies) nomadic tribes of India, tribal issues, tourism side effects, garbage and child sex abuse.
“Goa’s people are being corralled into a narrow and short-sighted set of beliefs about livelihoods. The government-industry combination is advocating a very limited notion of socio-economic well-being. This notion keeps out entirely the self-sustaining and symbiotic living rhythms of Goa’s tribal communities, and dangerously erodes the strengths of Goa’s traditional agri-fishing communities. The results are forced dispossession of homelands, internal migration and recurring poverty. Ignored by ‘official’ and industry-sponsored policies, tribal Goa is being forced into a low-grade parallel economy, the organizers said.
Why are Goan villagers angry – was the topic of Father Bismark Dias film, a Roman Catholic priest from Goa, who takes a bold stance in supporting the villagers’ movements in various parts of the fast-urbanising (and land-speculating driven) central coast. He explains what are the issues involved, and why more concrete won’t help the villagers there.
The film festival also documented Goa’s fight against mining – 127 operational mining leases over 8% of Goa’s surface threaten livelihoods and water sustainability of the hinterland.
The assault on tribal livelihoods was also featured – tribal Goa is being forced into a low-grade parallel economy. Speculative real-estate development was also in the focus- conversion of agricultural land to speculative real estate.
The struggle for participatory democracy against corruption was also on film.
In, Rape of Goa, a photo documentary, is filled with images of violence done to the ecology and people of Goa . It documents the violence done to the earth, as hills are cut and forests ‘shaved’ off. It speaks of the violence done to local inhabitants, as concrete apartments rise and threatens the security and life-styles of these older residents.
In Bhaile (Outsider) an attempt was also made to illustrate the occurrence of tourism-related child sex abuse in India. It speaks to a cross-section of Goa to comprehensively discuss the issues involved. Its driving force is the innocence of the child.
The real goa lives in the villages and the film festival brought that in full force in -Celebrating Goa: Alternate Images of a Tourist Destination.
“Goa is many-layered, and only one of these layers is tourism as the consumer knows it. A combination of economic need and marketing overkill has given Goa a brand personality that it does not at all deserve. Despite the state being ‘consumed’ by tourists, it has many lives outside and away from this narrow and noisy sector. Village Goa remains intimate, cooperative, concerned about human and environment, and small-scale. The people of village Goa are local patriots and it is their care and effort, when taken together, that maintains the ideology of life and livelihood that we call Goa, ” the organizers of the film festival said.
If many Goans are looking to the Western World for greener pastures, Mario Fernandes, a former Leicester City based Goenkar returned back to his roots some twelve years back. In two films, he talks about what Goa needs and what Expats and residents Goa can do for Goa.
Fernandes returned back from England to settle in Goa, and took on a number of local initiatives, he talks about what Goa really needs — developing people’s skills. In another film he depicts what locals and Expats can do for their village.
Change in Goa’s Villages (SEZ, Mega-Projects, Tourism) – looks at how no village, panchayat or communidade (age-old community based system of land holdings) space was ever designed to host the intrusions of an economically charged India.
“From 2000, Goa’s village ecosystems have been under siege. The struggle is waged not only over the theft of land and commons and its replacement by structures that are alien to the Goan village; it is also about an idea of development that is utterly out of synch with Goa’s community structures. Goa’s villages have resisted the imposition of the urban, and the metropolis, scale but not always successfully, says Jason Keith Fernandes, a law graduate and a social activist who was part film festival organizing team.
Striking silver from Saligao village, Journalist Fredrick Noronha highlights the story of the boxers fighting it out to gain glory in the sport. Other issues highlighted are villagers fight against a garbage dump atop a hillock in Saligao- fallout of tourism.
In topics from elsewhere of the country, India Untouched Stories of a People Apart. By director Stalin K took a comprehensive look at untouchability ever undertaken on film, which is still being practiced in India, although it is officially banned in the country.