Since I first had the chance to explore and screen the work of Anand Patwardhan, as we were programming DOX BOX back home, I found it to be deeply moving, provoking, and singular in the way it weaves together a serious and committed political analysis, dialectic, with strong, obstinate, underlying personal faith in a possible Better. In his films, you cannot miss Patwardhan’s anger, he is personally offended by a status quo that can/could be different. Patwardhan’s work has always been complex, and this what I know of India itself, of India’s history, culture, dance, cuisine… The notion of “simplifying complexity”, that is almost defining of a common Western understanding of film, does not work here, it is not useful. Here, it is exposed as pretentious and commercial. Where “commercial” means “not serious”. I cannot think of the work of Patwardhan and only think of the films themselves… He, and his body of work, forces one to think about the totality, about the larger context within which such work lives, and affects lives.

Reality, experience, of the individual and the collective, are complex in so many different ways, and that complex diversity is, and ought to be, sacred. The work of Patwardhan is unique in its disloyalty to facile, ready-made, filmmaking rules. Sometimes it is seemingly chaotic, mixing styles and presenting no obvious structure to isolate and hold on to as a viewer. A contemporary viewer have been forced into years of training to wait for, and consume, one definition of film, a “mono-form” as Peter Watkins calls it, a paradigm of “storytelling” that follows the Aristotelian tradition and has absolute consensus in major parts of the world markets. But the work of Patwardhan is certainly neither chaotic nor lacking structure. It just replaces a common, mainstream, definition of that by a different one, which is particularly holding on to an internal thread of faith, of an untamed and untameable socio-political commitment. Patwardhan’s work is deeply personal, although he is never really a character in his films. It is personal in its deeper drive, in its unwavering love of the people, and its almost childish lack of cynicism. Patwardhan protected his entire filmography from compromise, at the expense of his own comfort, no doubt. He kept on being independent to the extent of never getting funded, let alone putting his films into the usual pipeline of the film industry’s deeply questionable attempt to “help” Southern filmmakers reach a so-called “international audience”. Patwardhan is as wild as his films, and that spirit of his rippled into a new generation of Indian filmmakers. They, in turn, will go the next mile, and will have to take their choices, what to compromise, how to compromise, to compromise or not to compromise. When “Reason”, with its multi-layered complex architecture and four hours duration, won the main award of IDFA 2018, it was a a sign of a world that is starting to look differently, a world that is capable of humility. Just a first sign!

I have always heard the same comment on many Indian documentary works, it went like this: “I can’t follow, too many things, too many names, maybe they made it for their own audience, not for an international audience”. Such comments need to be studied, as examples of what we need to grow beyond, to never think this way again. What do you think a viewer from Asia or Africa “understands” when they see an American film for the first time? Cultural codes? Slang? Clothing? References? Quotes? Names? None of that! We watch more and more films until we start to decode the signs, to the best of our abilities. The price for being respected in the richer countries should not be betrayal of the people of the South. That is to say: simplification is not an acceptable term. The complexity of the world needs to be examined for what it is.

For simplification IS populism, and is a colonial privilege. We are invited today to acknowledge that the other’s expression cannot be forced into our own terms (it should speak our language, the style we are used to, be simply enjoyable, not too tough, not too long, clear and easy to follow and preferably it should end up leaving us uplifted). Taming the other, their language, is a profoundly colonial dream. Growing beyond the colonial paradigm of expression should not mean giving the job of making the films we want made to a person from a formerly colonized region or group. It is not about the “job”. It is about the right to be oneself. Patwardhan’s examination of his beloved India is one essential example of that. This call, at its core, is a call to stop searching for films that we can sell easily within the habitual, the status quo, but for films that can contribute, within all the limitations we know, to slowly changing that status. The neo-liberal paradigm of the film world requires films to fit the audience’s expectations, and this conformism feeds the same cycle again and again, prevents change/progress no matter if the “message” of a film is radical or not. Conformism on the level of artistic expression, film language(s), originality, takes away any real value from its proclaimed “message”. Patwardhan’s work is one of the greatest examples of this, they are his works and only his, as singular as the man himself… and this is where his works take me, and not only me.

We hear a lot of talk about “diversity”, and then, here it is: a pluralistic universe is massively larger than our knowledge or capabilities, it requires us to turn on those instincts that go beyond our habits and norms. This needs humility. Without that, there is no diversity, there is only a colonization of the concept of diversity.

There is much more to say about this … but what brought me here? Well, this is my way of congratulating the team of Hot Docs Canadian International Documentary Festival for their tribute to Anand Patwardhan next week. Furthermore, as always, hat down to Anand, the eternally stubborn lover of India, of all the other wretched of this earth, and of cinema.