A Voice For Peace: Anand Patwardhan’s ‘War And Peace’ in Mumbai theatres from today

“My documentaries are more difficult to screen than to make,” Anand Patwardhan admitted in a recent interview.

He was referring to the Government ban on his documentary War And Peace, which was finally lifted by the Court, allowing the film to be screened publicly.

War and Peace opens today at 9.15 p.m. at Fun Republic multiplex, Andheri Link Road, Mumbai. And will run daily at the same time.

It’s scheduled to run at Inox Multiplex, Nariman Point, from next Friday, 1st July, onwards.

In a supremely ironic twist, it’s releasing in the same week as the big Hollywood blockbuster of the season, the Steven Spielberg-Tom Cruise megalith, War Of The Worlds.

How ironic is it that a tiny no-budget documentary film carrying the message of peace happens to come up against a mega-budget monolith glorifying the glamour of big-screen war fantasy?

Or then again, perhaps there are no coincidences.

Perhaps fate arranges things quietly to make sure that there’s always a balance, a check, to make sure we don’t all fall into the same pit.

In this case, the bottomless Hollywood-Bollywood money-machine pit of mindless entertainment…

I happened to meet Anand Patwardhan briefly at a Mocha Film Club screening about a month ago. He impressed me as a quiet, determined, gentle and committed person.

His conviction in the power of film and the media to achieve social change was very evident.

I told him that I was making a documentary film too and that he was one of my inspirations.

What impresses me most about activists like Patwardhan is not that they sometimes risk life and limb to ‘expose’ controversial subjects, but that they continue to hew to their stands even thirty years on.

I read in another interview today that he took part in anti-Vietnam war protests.

Now, that’s impressive.

To believe in something so passionately, and to stand by that belief throughout the course of one’s life – he’s 55 now, and that’s pretty much a life commitment in my view – is a rare quality, especially in today’s commercialized media world.

Even most journalists, for all their high-and-mighty moral stands, are quick to leap to greener (more lucrative) pastures, the minute they get an offer they can’t refuse.

That’s why I applaud when someone like Anand Patwardhan gets his due.

I know that War and Peace isn’t likely to break any box office records. A solitary screening a day in a single multiplex screen isn’t exactly going to shake up Bollywood.

But it’s a beginning.

A starting gun for Indian documentary film making.

For independent cinema that isn’t afraid to reflect the society it emerges from in the harshest light, hoping to help improve that same society in some manner.

That isn’t afraid to have a rich sense of irony, of wit, of intelligence tempered with biting comment, of satire, and compassion.

That doesn’t seek to condemn, or glorify, the way most news media love to do.

That seeks the greys of reality, rather than the blacks and whites of ‘noise’paper journalism.

War and Peace is an important film. It must be seen for that reason.

But it’s also a landmark in the business of film distribution and exhibition.

If it succeeds, even to a modest degree, it will open a door, or at least a wedge, for other independent documentary makers to screen their work for a larger audience.

And even if no Michael Moores emerge, even if we don’t get docudramas that match the smallest Bollywood extravaganza, at least we will have an alternative.

And that’s worth supporting.

I’m going to be there, watching War and Peace. This very evening, if possible, over the next few days definitely.

You should go too.

Help change the Indian film business, one ticket at a time.