Camera and Associate Director: Vivek Shah Associate Editor: Sankalp Mishram Post Production Sound: Vinod Subramanium Contributors: The people of Kutch, Gujarat Produced by: Shoot Out Films Edited and Directed by: Batul Mukhtiar Duration: 115 minutes Shot on Mini DV, Edited on Mac G4/ Final Cut Pro

Synopsis:

January 26, 2001. 8.30 a.m. 150 seconds ago, a world existed that was 475 years old. Bhuj - a world full of exciting tales and legends; narrow streets full of history; homes full of tradition; relationships based on culture. People had lived within the walls of the city in houses belonging to their families for centuries - traditional lives bound by their communities and their culture. Yet, Bhuj had made its mandatory leap into progress in the last 20 years. Then an earthquake struck, destroying hundreds and thousands of buildings, killing and injuring vast magnitudes of people and animals. Almost the entire area of Kutch, 95,000 sq.kms., was devastated by the killer earthquake. The walled city of Bhuj became a massive pile of rubble. A few seconds threw everyone out on the roads, a proud people reduced to beggary.

The film 150 seconds ago covers one year in Bhuj after the earthquake. Walking through the city again and again, talking to people over cups of tea, trying to piece together a landscape, a culture, lost memories, an anxiety about the future, attitudes towards God and Government, the practical difficulties in rebuilding a city, where rules, regulations, maps had been ignored by all, and now become the masters of their lives. But above all the film is a story of brave people who never lost their smiles or their ability to offer one a cup of tea even in the midst of the most enormous social and personal disaster.

I first visited Bhuj two days after the earthquake. I was on a shoot for a Channel 5 documentary on the International Rescue Corps. There was no electricity, no phone lines. No food or water to be bought. Roads blocked with trucks full of aid. People were desperately trying to rescue the trapped ones. Walking through the city, over people's homes, over dead bodies, tired, dusty, we went on many frantic calls trying to detect sounds of living beings under the rubble. Most of the calls were unsuccessful. On the 4th day when the IRC did rescue a young man, we watched him helplessly the next day, as he watched the bodies of his family being removed from the rubble.

I had never seen disaster of this magnitude so close before. Nor had I seen the entire machinery of personal, national & international help that gets activated, not to mention the media from all over the world. Satellite phones, lap-top edit suites, global rivalries to get stories, to get publicity. Disaster as an international event!

I had my mini-DV camera with me, but was unable to shoot those first few days. There was too much happening, too many practical issues to be taken care of, constantly translating between Gujarati & English. When I came back, I wrote a couple of stories, but was unable to write about my experiences. It was difficult to relate what I had seen in Bhuj to "normal" life in Mumbai, without losing one's balance.

Later discussing the experience with the family, my cameraman husband, Vivek and I decided to go back and shoot some stories of ordinary people who had behaved very courageously during the earthquake. The papers were full of such stories then. But when we did go back, we realized within a day, that this was a very naïve way of looking at things. Yes, people did behave courageously. But often stories were fabricated. What became immediately fascinating instead was not the heroic, not the extraordinary, but the mundane, the ordinary, in the face of a life-changing event.

I realized, and tried to make Vivek realize that the only way we could shoot, if we wanted to do it honestly, is to forget stories, forget "the film" and just to try and record what we saw. Easier said and done at least as far as Vivek was concerned. He'd be shooting something, and I'd be nudging his elbow, trying to make him see some person, some small thing, which I thought was interesting. He'd glare at me for shaking the camera, I'd be upset that he'd missed what I had seen. But we settled into a rhythm soon enough. We became more patient with ourselves. We sat down and had cups of tea when we needed them, we walked endlessly on the streets of Bhuj, we took a rickshaw when we were tired. We went on long cross-country rides on impulse. We went back to our room and slept in the afternoons. (Later, even a simple hotel room seemed a guilty luxury when our friends were living in tents, in uncertainty about their futures and were yet always inviting us to stay over).

When we came back with the first lot of 30 odd hours of material, I realized that we had enough to make a film about the earthquake, but not enough to make a film that would interest me. The people of Kutch fascinated me, their clothes, their faces, their smiles, their attitudes to life, the landscape. I wanted to know more, I wanted to experience more, and I thought that the experience of the earthquake didn't end in 150 seconds, or a few days or a few months, that it would resonate for at least a year, actually at least 5 years. So, I decided it should be a film shot over a year.

DV is the ideal format for this kind of film, because it is affordable, and it allows you to be flexible, intimate, it's not intrusive, not intimidating. It allowed us to be friends with the people around us, to share their experiences as human beings first, and then as film people.

A lot of people were also used to being shot, giving interviews, to TV crews. So initially we got very typical responses, the kinds you hear in news coverage. We'd switch off the camera in exasperation, start talking about other things, and start rolling again at some point. But soon people got used to us, got used to the fact that we were not looking for issues, for reportage, we just wanted to know what was going on with them. We went back to Bhuj 7 times over a year. It was nice to walk around the city, and greet people, be greeted by them familiarly, be invited to their "homes."

We had decided mentally that we would not shoot a day beyond 26 January 2002, because we had to stop somewhere. We did not know the beginning, middle or the end of the film. Should it be a diary, a calendar, should it be about this or that? I wanted to break chronology, I didn't want to "focus" on any thing, I didn't want a film that could be explained in a one-liner. I wanted to just be able to take the viewer with me through an experience, to be able to create an emotion through the mundane business of it all. Again, easier said than done.

The edit was several times more difficult than the shoot. During the shoot, we always had the incredible energy and spirit of Kutch to keep us going, the cheerfulness of the people that warmed our hearts. The edit was a tough, cold, lonely business. We had 80 hours of material. Sitting in front of a computer, discarding, discarding, discarding stuff, trying to make sense of it all. It took me around 6 months of logging, clipping & sub-clipping & assembling, to even arrive at some sense of what I wanted to do. It would have been faster if I worked with an editor, or wrote a script down on paper. But I stubbornly wanted to retain the sense of looseness, the exploration, in the edit as we had in the shoot. I've worked on too many documentaries with other people and always hated how usually reality gets subverted to the cause of the film.

The film cost me around 1,00,000 rupees in cash, for production, travel, tapes, etc. I have my own equipment, so that was not a cost. And it cost me 2 years of my time; And almost as much of Vivek's.

Now that the film is complete, I feel lost, I feel satisfied, I feel good. I want to show it around as much as possible, sell it of course if I can, take it back to Bhuj, show it to our friends there. I don't know if the film, any film can make a difference to people's lives, except perhaps the life of the filmmaker. But hopefully, it can help people to see themselves a little more clearly. It's certainly helped Vivek and me to see ourselves a little more clearly. The trouble with this film is that anything I say about the experience sounds too philosophical, too "up above the world so high". But finally, that's what the experience of making this film has been - very elevating and yes, very humbling.

Batul Mukhtiar passed out of the Film & Television Institute of India (FTII), Pune with specialization in Film Direction in 1994. Since then she has directed various documentaries besides handling research, scripting, casting and production co-ordination for several foreign film units in India.