One Side of the Road Documentary film

Synopsis

A road runs through a village in Tamil Nadu in southern India. This road is a frontier that divides habitats, and it is a gateway to a wider world, the nearby industrial city, a means of possible emancipation for some, but the enslavement of others by the spatial segregation of castes in these rural areas of southern India. Between 2019 and 2022, four dalits (former “untouchables”) reveal their ongoing struggle to survive: over-indebtedness, poor working conditions in the sugar cane fields and brick factories, domestic and social violence, discrimination and political unrest.

These four characters from the same village, with their intertwined destinies, describe their daily lives through intimate and rare testimonies, which form a life journey around three extraordinary years marked by an international pandemic and its harsh economic and social consequences in rural India. Chance encounters on one side of the road, these voices convey the stories of countless others. Fragile lives on one side, the road is a partition of territory that emancipates, segregates, and brings together all at once.

Technical details

Format: 86 minutes
Genre: wide audience and ethnographic film
Language: Tamil, English
Subtitles: French, English

Written and directed by Jalil Nordman

Images: Jeremy Carroll, Idrissa Guiro, Jalil Nordman
Editors: Bastien Gens, Jeremy Carroll
Music composer (and English narration in one version): Shanks Kini
Translations and subtitles: G. Venkatasubramanian, Jasper Daniel, Jalil Nordman, Bruno Morat
Production: Butternut Productions and IRD (audiovisual department)

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Genesis of the documentary

Tamil Nadu, March 2019. We meet four “Dalit” villagers grappling with their daily difficulties in a small village of Tamil Nadu, near Panruti, around 60 km away from Pondicherry. A village intersected by a road, a border that divides villagers’ habitats, but also a road that allows escapes to the near industrial city, movements of people, the needful displacement of everyday life, a way to possible emancipation of some, but enslavement of others, through caste spatial segregation in these rural areas of South India. The four characters, Vijaya, Rhagavan, Pandy and Lakshmi, tell a story of everyday struggle: over-indebtedness, bad working conditions in sugar cane fields and brick kilns, domestic and social violence, discrimination and political unrest.

In the spring of 2020, the COVID pandemic struck without warning bringing the world to a standstill. The lockdown in India, one of the harshest in the world, was implemented in just four hours after the news of the pandemic was announced. Millions of lives in the vulnerable segments of the society were the first to feel the heat of the lockdown. Migrant workers living precarious lives, with their plight tied to daily wages from seasonal jobs, found themselves unable to go to work, unable to repay their debts, unable to sell their agricultural produces, and unable to fulfill even their basic needs. In these rural areas of Tamil Nadu and elsewhere, agricultural activities were interrupted and people had to rely on their own resources and families.

Tamil Nadu, May 2021. We meet again Vijaya, Rhagavan, Pandy and Lakshmi we interviewed two years back. How has the pandemic changed their lives? Have these fragile individual trajectories been inflected? These people faced an unprecedented catastrophic event. But to what extent were the tremors felt locally, in their villages, their families, their finances and in their minds?

Away from a factual narration of this unprecedented international shock, this film documentary actually offers crossed portraits of four common characters of a Tamil village in India, with a micro level incursion into a rural life where time seems to have stopped, despite the turpitudes of the world surrounding it: Vijaya and Lakshmi, two women seasonal labourers, a generation separating them, still facing similar uncertainties and concerns in their everyday life of working women; Pandy, watchman in Pondicherry at times, expert in ingenuity at others, the smiling face of his village every day and, since returned to his own village, an exhausted and aging daily worker. Rhagavan, an over-indebted and disillusioned rickshaw driver, struggling on a daily basis on the Tamil Nadu roads, while trying to escape the greediness of his financial creditors.

The precariousness of the characters made the making of this documentary complex, with a need to alternate between the urgency of filming and the necessity to write the film. The documentary was first meant to appear in a feature lenght documentary, but we then decided to create four related episodes instead (series), so as to give an independent voice to each character. The series was then edited as as a feature ethnographic documentary.

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Music composition note

The film One Side of the Road benefits from an original music. It took advantage of the proximity of the film crew to the field to create musical compositions from local music as practiced by folk musicians of the Tamil Nadu villages. The artistic musical production was directed by Shanks Kini. Shanks is a professional Indian musician, independent music producer and multi-instrumentalist (guitar, bass, violin, mandolin, trumpet…) based in Auroville, India. He explores the different genres of jazz, blues, rock, folk and funk. His encounters with Jalil Nordman during musical exchanges between them convinced him of the interest of taking part in the project and using his experience: to record sound and music locally (rhythmics, songs) in order to produce melodically and harmonically original music from this material.

For the documentary, he thus composed and interpreted a rhythmic, melancholic and playful music, all at the same time. It borrows the spirit of the sound from the villages of Tamil Nadu, while diverting its sonorities to make it feel something both familiar and foreign.

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Awards and festival history

 

 

 

 

 

Trailer

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Contacts