Review by Eric Volmer of Calgary Herald

7 Oct 2011
Calgary Herald
ERIC VOLMERS
CALGARY HERALD EVOLMERS@CALGARYHERALD.COM

Slice of Life at film festival

The Hidden Gems Film Festival runs Oct. 7, 8, 14 and 15 at the Cardel theatre and Oct. 9 and 16 at the Plaza Theatre. Life Goes on screens Oct. 16 at 6:30 at the Plaza.

Afilmmaker aiming for universality could do worse than borrow from Shakespeare.

Director Sangeeta Datta loosely based her fiction debut, Life Goes On, on King Lear, the Bard’s potent tragedy about a vain father’s disastrous relationships with his three daughters.

It may seem a natural exercise for Datta, who teaches both film and literature at the University of London. But, as with many universal stories, it’s told through a fairly specific cultural lens that reflects the reality of India’s expat community in the U.K. “The test of any classic is to see whether it has any resonance in contemporary times, or in a different cultural context,” Datta said, from her home in London. “The story of a father and three daughters and a father who loves the youngest daughter the most and has the greatest conflict with the daughter he loves the most is a story you would see and hear around you anyway. I wanted to see if a Shakespearean model could be reworked or reshaped in the Indian diaspora in England.”

Which certainly places Datta in a group of Indian filmmakers determined to show the world that their cinema consists of much more than Bollywood, that strange and massive subculture of flighty song-and-dance films that tends to overwhelm most people’s perception of India’s celluloid output.

Which makes events such as Calgary’s third annual Hidden Gems festival, which launches today, valuable to Datta and others who operate with more of an arthouse bent. Datta will be on hand for a screening of Life Goes On when the festival comes to close Sunday. Oct. 16 at the Plaza.

“In India, there has been a phase of Bengal cinema, or alternative cinema in the late 1970s and 1980s where there seemed to be a space for that alternative definition,” says Datta. “There was a women’s movement, there was a sort of class movement and an identity movement. All of that cumulatively defined a different kind of a cinema. But since then, for the past two decades I think, Bollywood is threatening to swamp over any other definition of cinema.”

Datta’s film is about a griefstricken father dealing both with his wife’s sudden death and the news that his youngest daughter is dating a Muslim, which bring out his prejudices and haunting memories of the partition of India when he was a child.

“After 9/11, I certainly felt that one had to make a statement about the growing Islamicphobia one saw and felt around us,” Datta says. “Of course, it’s been much more palpable in America, but here in England it was no less. Telling a story about a Hindu patriarch who has great prejudice against the Islamic community and raising that as a conflict between two generations was something that needed to be said quite urgently.”

The title of Life Goes On is inspired by the opening lines of a Neil Diamond song. It takes place in London, is based on Shakespeare and has a soundtrack that covers everything from classical Indian music, to French hip-hop, to western jazz and blues, to references to classical Indian poets such as Rumi and Tagore. In short, it’s a mishmash of sounds, influences and traditions that directly relates to the film’s themes.



“I really wanted to look at the issues of identity and generational conflict, which is true of a migrant society anywhere in the world, not just here,” Datta says. “There are many families here who have come in as working class and then their children have struggled and grown and achieved much more in their generation and they are also trying to become part of a multicultural society. That conflict between tradition, between what your parents uphold and what you would like to do to be part of the mainstream, are real living experiences.”