An Exceptionally Evocative, Visually Arresting Movie

The Siddis, a group unrepresented in Indian cinema, is below the highlight in Rhythm of Dammam, an exceptionally evocative, visually arresting movie written and directed by Kerala-born, New York-based Jayan Cherian.

The movie premiered this week on the fifty fifth Worldwide Movie Pageant of India in Goa. It’s now headed to the Worldwide Competitors line-up of the upcoming twenty ninth Worldwide Movie Pageant of Kerala.

Rhythm of Dammam – the title alludes to a musical custom germane to the Siddi lifestyle – shines a lightweight on the plight of the marginalised Afro-Indian tribe that languishes on the backside of India’s social hierarchy.

In 2013, Cherian’s debut function, Papilio Buddha, probed systemic and bodily violence perpetrated in opposition to Dalits, ladies and the atmosphere. Three years later, he made Ka Bodyscapes, a movie about three rebellious millennials who defy notions of gender and sexuality perpetuated to a change-averse society.

Rhythm of Dammam is not fairly as subversive however, just like the filmmaker’s earlier movies, is political to the core. Utilizing comparatively muted means, it examines the marginalization of the Siddis who’ve suffered centuries of oppression.

Cherian’s script, which attracts liberally from his in depth documentation of the lives of the forest dwellers, alludes tangentially but unambiguously to the obliteration of the endangered minority’s historical past, tradition and language.

Rhythm of Dammam, lit and lensed by Sabin Uralikandy, has the tone and texture of a documentary. Nonetheless, the seeds of an ethnographic movie embedded within the movie are grafted upon a full-blown fictional construction for the aim of elucidation. The technique works splendidly effectively.

The movie’s protagonist, a 12-year-old Siddi boy, Jayaram (Chinmaya Siddi), struggles to return to phrases with the demise of his grandfather Rama Bantu Siddi (Parashuram Siddi). His anguish, bewilderment and fears are aggravated by the methods wherein the adults round him react to the dying and its aftermath.

His alcoholic, debt-ridden father Bhaskara (Prashant Siddi, broadly recognized to Kannada film followers), bickers endlessly together with his youthful brother Ganapathi (Nagaraj Siddi). The 2 males have their eyes on what the deceased man is believed to have bequeathed to them.

Their residence and the land on which it stands are at risk of being seized by the upper-caste landlord to whom Bhaskara owes just a few thousand rupees. He hopes to avert the eventuality with the inherited cash. However the field Bhaskara digs out of a nook of the home comprises trinkets of little materials value.

To Jayaram, nevertheless, the heirloom, irrespective of how nugatory, change into a prepared, if unsettling, conduit to the hoary roots of his brutally exploited tribe who had been dropped at India as slaves by Portuguese and Arab merchants and thereafter left to cope with persevering with subjugation and persecution over many centuries.

The principal actors in Rhythm of Dammam, set in Yellapur within the Uttara Kannada district of Karnataka, the place a big share of Hindu Siddis are concentrated, are all non-actors from the group. The actors forged as non-tribals, all tertiary characters – the owner, a physician, or an teacher in a tribal boys’ hostel – are (or seem like) actual individuals.

Cherian units the actors free to improvise their performances, songs and dances. Many prolonged pictures with a static digital camera present naturalistic, unmediated frames to create a tangible context for the sufferings of the Siddis at the same time as Jayaram’s visions of his forebears transport the boy, and the viewers, to a surreal, usually disturbing, zone.

The assimilation of the Siddis we see within the movie is full, so, satirically, is their alienation from mainstream India. They converse a creole of Konkani, which is the language of their spiritual chants. Their gods and rituals are Hindu. However their spirit – embodied within the white-robed determine of the grandfather Jayaram sees and touches in his desires/nightmares – is pushed by a craving for an identification.

Politics makes its emphatic means into Rhythm of Dammam. The songs and dances of the Siddis, carried out to the accompaniment of the dual-headed cylinder drums known as dammam, which additionally provides their principal musical custom its identify.

The dances are studiedly unchoreographed. The actors work themselves up right into a frenzy and create their very own strikes as soon as they get into the swing of the music. It’s marked by a distinctly Afro accent.

Haunted by what his grandpa is attempting to inform him, Jayaram turns febrile, teeters on the sting of delirium, and is branded an issue youngster in want of therapeutic. A fretful mom, an aunt possessed by Goddess Yellamma, a group shaman and a physician who prescribes psychiatric therapy counsel methods to assist the boy tide over his drawback.

Jayaram’s fragile way of thinking displays the truth of a group that dangles between a previous they’ve all however forgotten and a gift that they might relatively put behind them.

A younger man raps angrily, bemoaning the group’s lack of the soul, language and identification. The languages Jayaram speaks serve to indicate how far eliminated the Siddis of India are from their Bantu roots.

In Jayaram’s college, the medium of instruction is Kannada. The trainer, a non-Siddi, makes the scholars recite a patriotic pledge earlier than testing the scholars’ data of the world’s seven continents. Jayaram is misplaced in thought.

The trainer ridicules him. He asks: The place do you reside, Jayaram? Please, the boy replies. That’s the identify of his village. Jayaram’s ancestry, straddling two continents, is shrouded in a dense haze. For him, the assertion of specificity of location stems from a need to belong.

When Jayaram is admitted to a hostel, the mass prayer there, rendered in Sanskrit, is overtly spiritual. Each step that he strikes away from his moorings is indicative of the blows that his ancestors have confronted.

Amid the politics that Rhythm of Dammam espouses, Cherian sprinkles the narrative with pure magic seen by way of the pristine eyes of a pre-teen boy. The tender, poetic imagery suggests a despairing seek for stability amid a daunting absence of certitude.

Rhythm of Dammam trains its empathetic highlight on the troubles of 1 group. However not solely does the movie give voice to the unvoiced, it additionally speaks to all those that discover themselves painted right into a nook by historical past.

Hitting all the proper notes, Rhythm of Dammam laments the undermining of a civilisational tapestry that thrives on range.