Film South Asia 2003 began with sobriety and ended with heartburn. This was the fourth edition of the Kathmandu-based biennial festival of South Asian documentary films, a routine and robust fixture on the festival calendar since its inception in 1997. Sobriety is a virtue that the documentary medium has steadfastly clung on to, when all the other media have succumbed to flippancy in their haste to capture the market. The mood of the opening was therefore entirely in keeping with the spirit of the medium.
Documentary filmmakers from cities from all over the Subcontinent like Bombay, Karachi, Dhaka, Colombo and from smaller corners like Peshawar, Jharkhand and the Maldives were present in strength, reflecting the festival's reach. Another sign of the extent to which the fixture has evolved as an institution is the transformation it has wrought in Kathmandu. For a city whose cinematic tradition is incipient at best, the documentaries on show attracted an extraordinary degree of interest. Despite all that is sometimes said about the documentary's lack of dramatic appeal, the ticket booths at the Russian Cultural Centre at Kamalpokhari in Kathmandu, where FSA '03 was screened from September 25 to 28, almost always had a 'SOLD OUT' sign at the box office.
"The increasing popularity of documentaries not only with audiences but also with the filmmakers can be measured from the fact that in 1997 when the first festival was held we had 135 film entries and in 2003 the entries climbed to 203", said Manesh Shreshta, the Director of Film South Asia (FSA). An experiment started by a group of print journalists associated with the magazine Himal in 1997 to create this special space for South Asian documentary filmmakers had worked!
Though the festival began with a dash of Bollywood, which normally evokes scorn in the documentary world, this time it was Bollywood making all the appropriate noises. A director known for his outspoken views and unconventional images, Mahesh Bhatt, opened the festival with his key-note address and said what documentary filmmakers like to hear: "I am hopeful for the documentary because essentially those that work with me in the dream machine feed from the same reality that the documentary portrays". He recounted his own encounter with the true power of the documentary while working with OXFAM after the cyclone in Orissa in 1999. He realised at that point how dramatic and powerful the imagery of real life situations could be. "There needs to be dynamism in story telling and presentation and a major investment in creating a viable market for it", Bhatt pointed out.