India: Matri Bhumi

A film shot in India. The structure is four episodes. Documentary footage from the streets of Bombay comes between them. The first episode is an elephant keeper. He works in the forest; he catches elephants and trains them for the timber trade. He wants to marry. He meets a woman during a festival. The elephants are in the narrative too. They have their own mating season and their own hierarchy. The second episode is a dam. Thousands of labourers worked for years at Hirakud. The construction is finished. One worker stays and does not want to leave. He has formed a bond with what he built, and the villages the dam has drowned are his villages. The third episode is a forest. An old man and his wife live in one. A mining company comes. The forest is cut and the animals go hungry. A tiger comes near people. The man does not shoot it. The fourth episode is a monkey. Its owner dies and the animal is left alone. It is chained and nobody looks after it. What the narrative is interested in is not a country but shared life: its idea is that people and animals are inside the same economy and that a change in one directly affects the other. The telling is in voiceover. In each episode the person speaks in his own voice, and the sound was added afterwards. The performers are not professionals. All of them live where they were filmed. Roberto Rossellini went to India to make a documentary. Both this film and a television series came out of the trip. The journey caused a large scandal in his private life and that affected the film's distribution too. It did not stay in circulation long and was only restored later. It was shot in colour on sixteen millimetre. Who it is for: anyone who likes Rossellini and films between documentary and fiction. Who it is not for: anyone looking for narrative; there is no link between the episodes and the voiceover is didactic in places.