‘Child of Empires’, VR docu-drama getting its world premiere at Sundance 2022, immerses audiences in some of the horrors of forced migration
“God was a little late that day,” says Iqbal-ud-din Ahmed, before describing how the terror of Partition claimed the soul of his village (Ropar in eastern Punjab), terror in the air around There was a faint feeling. Burned houses and dreams sank forever.
Ahmed’s character has been voiced by actor Salman Shahid. kingdom childThe docu-drama, directed by Delhi-based Sparsh Ahuja (24) and London-based Irfan Sadati (27), premiered at the ongoing Sundance Film Festival.
In the 17-minute immersive animated virtual reality (VR) film, two men of the Partition generation – Ishar Das Arora (voiced by Adil Hussain), an Indian Hindu who migrated from Pakistan to India, and Ahmed, a Pakistani Muslim who made it. Opposite Journey – Share your childhood memories while playing board games. And that goes straight for the hug, sticking to the facts of the split.
Says Ahuja, “Our original plan was not to go the animated route. “But when Covid hit, we were left with no choice.” However, Ahuja and team would realize that the animated format was a blessing in disguise: it was far better at depicting the horrors of Partition.
The film was produced by Project Dastaan – a peace building initiative that reunites displaced persons with their native villages through VR during the 1947 Partition – in association with Anzo Films. “It is immersive, immediate, haunting, moving and unsettling; we live exactly as refugees fleeing, fleeing, witnessing massacres and losses in 1947,” says oral historian and author Aanchal Malhotra They say (Remnants of a Separation: The History of the Separation Through Physical Memory), one of the project’s consultants. “It is one thing to be a listener of such stories, but kingdom child The closest may be to imagining what millions of people experienced and who lived.”
Another advisor, historian William Dalrymple, says that he was both “shocked and amazed” by the power of the medium and the material. His son, Sam Dalrymple, is a co-producer.
broken life
The Project Dastaan team had an ambitious goal in front of them: to complete 75 interviews (in five languages in Britain, India and Pakistan) of partition survivors on the eve of the 75th year of India’s independence. However, the Covid-19 delay meant only 35 could be completed. “When we were scrutinizing the recordings, I was biased towards my maternal grandfather’s experience,” says Ahuja.
In the documentary, Arora’s characters – based on the experiences of Ahuja’s maternal grandfather, Ishar Das Arora (who moved from Bela to Tilak Nagar, New Delhi, a village in West Punjab’s Attock tehsil) – and Ahmed – are jointly based on memories. The latter are the latter (who moved from Ropar, East Punjab to Lahore) and Jagdish Chandra Ahuja (Ahuja’s grandfather, who moved from Dera Ghazi Khan in West Punjab to Tilak Nagar, New Delhi) – telling stories of bowing down to the seat of a damp There are trains in the form of a crowd, with pictures of villages breaking out on it with candles changing.
More than anything, the two share how each was saved by a member of the other religion. For Ahuja, it spoke of a major political change in his own family. “My maternal grandfather was saved by a Muslim man, but many in my family, who have now become ardent nationalists, had no idea this was the case,” he says.
separating fact from fiction
- It was challenging to go through many stories. Ahuja says that some interview subjects made up stories based on what they thought, even though there was no historical evidence to support their stories. For example, one woman claimed that Nathuram Godse taught her to ride a bike! There were also real stories, more so than rumours. Another survivor told the team that she had not come to Karachi from Lucknow for security or religious reasons, but because her boyfriend was in Pakistan and could not live in another country. An upbeat story came from a man who joined the Quit India Movement of 1940, when he saw two British officers beating up an Indian man on the streets. He was later imprisoned in a Peshawar cell along with Abdul Ghaffar Khan, better known as Frontier Gandhi.
Last year Sparsh and the team of Project Dastaan actually got a rare opportunity to visit Pakistan. And he managed to trace the family of the Muslim man who saved his grandfather’s life. “It was in a small village run by Bella,” he recounts. “The man passed away a while back, but his family was overjoyed to see me.” He recorded the entire experience in VR format to experience his grandfather’s return home. “They wanted me to stay there for at least a week and even attend their cousin’s wedding. I collected some pebbles from the village to make them into wearable jewellery.”
But at the heart of this experience was a surprising revelation: The Ahujas would soon understand that this Pakistani family, like their own, had sympathy for the extremists in their country – despite being happy for each other. “It is strange and ironic how history plays out. In a different world, we would be a single entity.”
through IYes of a child
Almost every frame of the docu-drama features a child—either crouching under a train seat, running away from a frantic crowd, or simply sitting next to a burning pyre. It appears that their presence is a metaphor for the many children that have literally been lost to us and a serious allegation of how unfair it was that they were witnesses to the darkest place in our country.
Ahuja believes that if we remove the two central storytellers, kingdom child Inevitably a single, tragic migration would parallel the story. “It is important to note that both the narrators are Punjabis,” he says. “He has internalized the political changes of his time, which is reflected in the way he tells his stories. When he recalled his experiences in the interview, you could see the shock in his eyes. This is the experience we want our audience to come closer to.”
The way Arora sees it, to the uninvited viewer, kingdom child It provides the perfect context to understand how multifaceted the experience of Partition was. “The fact that the two characters have a lot in common helps. We wanted the most moving and human stories from over two dozen interviews to make a place in the film. ,
At the end of the documentary, a soulful rendition of Shubh-e-Azadi – Originally written by Pakistani revolutionary poet Faiz Ahmed Faiz, composed by Vasundhara Gupta, and sung by Amira Gill – draws audiences to contemplate the human cost of one of the biggest and bloodiest escapes in modern history ; And that’s the price of freedom.
kingdom child “New Frontier” is currently screening on-demand at sundance.org, as part of its programming slate, Which works at the intersection of film, art and technology. This year, their ‘Spaceship’ program allows viewers to experience the movies teleporting Dress yourself up for the festival using virtual avatars.
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