THIRUVANANTHAPURAM: Refugees found a place at the 10th International Documentary and Short Film festival of Kerala (IDSFFK) that concluded on Tuesday in the capital city with a number of films looking at the issue of displaced people.
The highlights were two films by Palestinian filmmaker Mai Masri who focuses on Palestinians living in Lebanese refugee camps.
Her Beirut Diaries: Truth, Lies & Videos is the story of young Lebanese students who occupied Beirut’s city centre following the assassination of Prime Minister Refik Hariri in 2005.
Masri’s Frontiers of Dreams and Fears follows two Palestine girls, Mona from Shatila refugee camp in Lebanon and Manar from Dheisheh camp in Palestine. The 2001 documentary gives the youngsters’ view of the turbulent displacement by looking at how the duo manage to communicate with each other in the two camps which are miles apart.
Himalayan Refugee, a 27-minute Urdu/English short documentary by Nikhil Singh Rajputt, features asylum-seeking Pakistani Ahmadis in Nepal. They are an Islamic sect deemed non-Muslim by the Pakistani constitution. And Nepal doesn’t regard them as refugees. The documentary talks about the 350 asylum seekers in limbo.
Son of Kali, a 16-minute fiction piece by Amit Agarwal, is about Probir who reaches India in the middle of a Hindu festival, fleeing a genocide against Hindus in Bangladesh.
Siberian Love, a non-fiction work by Olga Delane, also has elements of refugee mindset. After living in Berlin for 20 years, the director goes back to her roots in a small Siberian village and finds people have a very traditional view of life and love.