Entertainment
Land where people once danced
Midway towards the discussion revolving around the documentary film A Walnut Tree, which was screened at the latest edition of Sunday Cinema, the conversation between journalists Narayan Wagle and Narayan Amrit steered towards the moral duty of an artist.Timothy Aryal
Midway towards the discussion revolving around the documentary film A Walnut Tree, which was screened at the latest edition of Sunday Cinema, the conversation between journalists Narayan Wagle and Narayan Amrit steered towards the moral duty of an artist. In one of the scenes of the documentary, a toddler draws water from a muddy lake, and drinks it from his bottle. “What is your take on that scene?” Amrit asked. Wagle likened the case with the iconic photograph The Vulture and the Little Girl. The photograph, taken in 1993 in famine-stricken Sudan, has as its subject a vulture patiently stalking an emaciated, dying refugee child. After the photograph became a sensation, the photographer, Kevin Carter, allegedly out of moral crisis, killed himself.
“Although less controversial than that photo, the case is similar. This particular shot in the documentary comes at a pivotal moment when the entire narration of the story shifts. The scene highlights the inhumane conditions the displaced are compelled to live in,” said Wagle, who was one of the jury members at 2015 Film South Asia where the film won the Ram Bahadur Trophy for Best Film. “It’s a profoundly moving document of the human condition. The subject the filmmakers chose was a looking glass at the then situation of the Pakistani society as a whole, and the film, although short on technical faculties, compelled us to award it the Best Film.”
Directed by Pakistani filmmaker Ammar Aziz, A Walnut Tree revolves around the story of a family, displaced by the Taliban War, residing in a refugee camp. The film’s main subject, an aged teacher who devoted a major portion of his life to teaching (“I had been offered many lucrative jobs, but I was determined in my mission to transform the kids into able citizens,” he says) wants to return to his distant hometown in rural Pakistan, which is now a battleground for the Taliban forces and the Pakistani military. Upon contemplating his return with his friend in the camp, he asks, “Do you think we might get killed?” “What difference does it make?” his friend replies. The nostalgia-stricken elderly leaves the camp, without informing anyone, leaving his son and family behind. The son, caught now in a catch-22 situation, feels it to be his moral duty to go search for the missing father; he leaves the camp, without his wife’s consent.
“The fact that the plight of the son is strikingly similar to the filmmaker’s own backstory gives the documentary all the more depth and emotional gravitas,” said Wagle.
Towards the end of the film, the son recalls an episode his father once told him. Whatever happens, his father had said, preserve this walnut tree, the tree standing in the vicinity of their home. “This tree will provide fruits for my children and shade to my gradchildren,” he had said. One thing the documentary doesn’t disclose is if the tree is still alive, or the aged-teacher, for that matter.
In an interview, filmmaker Aziz has said, “He becomes a metaphor of a cultured past which has been demolished because of proxy wars... It reflects the entire blood-stricken land where once people danced and sang poems.”
Concluding the discussion at the Union House in Anamnagar, where the documentary was screened, Wagle said that it is documentary like this one that have fueled his zeal for the storytelling medium. “During the early days I began to watch documentary I was not that enthused regarding the medium. But documentary remains a powerful medium of storytelling and, like reporting, uncovers the stories that are unheard of. The fact that A Walnut Tree was a collaboration between Pakistani and Indian film professionals makes the film all the more appealing, for it underscores that art defies boundaries.”