An interview with Rima Das.
Generation has the tendency to pull film makers back to Berlin again and again over the years. Sometimes it is for a second film, often they come back as part of the International Jury. For Rima Das it is already her third visit at Berlinale. After presenting her feature film Bulbul Can Sing (review) in the 2019 Generation program and returning as part of the International Jury in 2020, she is now showing her most recent feature film Village Rockstars 2 (review) in the 14Plus competition. The day after the European premier, Liv and I sit down with her and leading actress Bhanita Das at Berlinale Palast for an extended chat.
In 2019 Liv and Carlotta already had the pleasure to interview her about Bulbul Can Sing (read here) and it’s a heartfelt reunion on all sides. It feels less like an interview and more like a conversation between friends and we are lucky that we grabbed Rima’s last interview spot and she is happy to exceed our allotted slot by half an hour.
Family ties
Rima Das, born in Assam, India, lives in Mumbai nowadays, but frequently returns to her home region. After shooting multiple films about her home village, she is „hungry to do something different“. She has decided to write a whole script instead of general outlines for her next feature Malati, My Love, after realising that having no script ends up complicating the editing process. It’s time to take her films out of rural Assam and jump into Mumbai. And another great change: she will move from working with family as crew members to collaborating with new people she is not related to.
The credits of most of her films to date amaze with the overwhelming percentage of Das family members. The best part about working with family? They understand. She is able to ask for a lot without fearing the repercussions. Communication is easy and conflicts can be solved in the aftermath. In the meantime she can ask them to shoot in the early morning hours or during a storm and flood. When she is tough or gets angry, they forgive her.
The worst part: they take her for granted. Working with her brother was particularly challenging, she recalls, but they got out on the other side. The collaboration with Bhanita, who plays Dhunu in Village Rockstars, was easy and intuitive. Sometimes puberty mood swings were a factor. After working together for 10 years, however, Rima knew how to deal with those.
But even though they are a practiced team at this point, Rima wants Bhanita to try new things now and also wants to grow as a filmmaker herself, face new challenges and extend her emotional range. For example, apart from moving the location to Mumbai and working more with non-relatives, she wants to work with professional actors who she can be less worried about than the non-actors she has worked with thus far. With the latter, she always has to be careful with how hard she pushes them so that they won’t regret anything later on in life.
Director Rima Das (right) with actress Bhanita Das (left) ©Liv Thastum
The strength in community
But even though Rima is moving her film-making away from Assam, community will always play an important role in her life. It took her years to realise she cannot – and does not have to – be an activist and social worker and film maker and everything else all at once. But she will always do whatever she can to help the rural communities she grew up in. Giving them space to express their stories is a first step. She also thinks that her duties go beyond shooting the film. Planting trees and organising workshops for the local children to teach them valuable skills instead of simply giving the communities money is a no-brainer for Rima.
But it is not one individual’s task to change the whole world. Instead, every little change will go a long way and she will try to do something good wherever she goes. If out of 50 people who see her films or who she talks to, only one will „rise and shine“, that is a success for her. And one part of helping someone rise is to help them change their mindset to actually have the motivation to change something about their own situation. Rima has often witnessed pain and suffering paired with the inability, but also lacking will to change. Shifting a person’s focus from short-term to long-term benefit is one of the main factors in improving someone else’s life.
The art of subtle observation
Rima is also aware that sometimes all it takes to start a conversation is the portrayal of the issue. Bringing social justice issues onto the big screen is her way of raising awareness and, hopefully, bringing about change.
One such depiction of injustice in Village Rockstars 2 is a scene at a music festival. Dhunu and her girl friends are signed up and ready to play, but the manager demands a male lead singer. Rima explains that while more and more female musicians gain traction in the music industry and there is a lot of female artistic talent to be found, management and production is still dominated by men. Obviously, this is a global issue in many different fields besides music, and Rima wanted to start a debate about this topic.
Part of raising awareness is creating spaces for affected people to share their suffering. One scene in particular surprised even Rima while shooting: during the harvest, the women of the village sit together and share their experiences and hardships with each other. They were not given a script, but the opportunity to share their real-life burdens. Here, they seemed to unravel years of pain and one women even burst into tears. It seems that once given the opportunity, many marginalised people want to share their struggles with the world, no matter how painful, as can also be seen in the documentary Hora do recreio (also screening in the 14Plus program). Rima helps create these safe spaces to share experiences and give them an audience.
Back to the roots
Village Rockstars 2 also addresses the floods the region of Assam is regularly affected by. In other areas the water takes two or three days to drain. Her home village and its farms will stay submerged for ten days at a time, leaving the year’s harvest completely destroyed. Many of her family’s neighbours have already sold their lands to big companies, as shown in the film. To Rima and her family, it’s important to let them know that selling is not the only way. Several scenes in Village Rockstars 2 are dedicated to arguments against the absurdity of selling land that could sustain a family for generations to come in order to buy a motorcycle or pay for a lavish wedding. Rima’s brother started farming during the pandemic and has now inspired many others within the village to also pick up farming again. Together, they are fighting the sell-out of their community’s lands.
But while they have already made incredible progress in raising the appreciation for nature in her village, the destruction of nature through big companies in favour of „development“ goes on. In the last few months, dozens of over 100 year old trees have been cut down. The grotesque demolition of mother nature is documented in Village Rockstars 2 as it happened in real life. Rima had not planned on including these shots in the film, but eventually felt like it was all connected and essential to depict in the movie.
The bright side
Despite the heavy topics, our conversation still feels warm and hopeful. In between social justice issues we focus on ways to make change, to connect and improve our society and other people’s lives. At the end, Rima invites us to Assam and we exchange contact details to stay in touch. As Rima keeps saying: it’s all about connection and the little acts that create a cascade of change. We don’t have to try and save all of humanity. But by trying to be helpful wherever we go, we will become heroes in our own right.
From left to right Liv Thastum, Bhanita Das, Rima Das, Johanna Gosten ©Liv Thastum
