I did a near-86 km round trip this week to watch The Voice of Hind Rajab in NCR. The globally acclaimed Palestinian Arabic language docudrama was released in India on June 19 after some trouble with our notorious censor board. Having waited a fortnight for it to arrive at a neighbourhood theatre, my friends and I finally trudged the distance to Noida, for the only show at the only multiplex in the entire NCR where it was available that day.
Director Kaouther Ben Hania's film re-enacts the Palestine Red Crescent Society's response, one day in January 2024, on learning of a 5-year-old Palestinian girl stranded in a car in Gaza surrounded by corpses of her family who had been murdered by the Israel Defence Forces (IDF). Using actors to play real-life volunteers who stayed on the phone with Hind Rajab in her final hours, and actual recordings of the child's voice, the film chronicles her pleas to be rescued and their desperate efforts to get an ambulance to her, till the IDF killed her too, in addition to killing two paramedics who had almost reached her.
The show in Noida was nearly house-full. We watched in pin-drop silence. It was one of those rare occasions when cellphones did not light up in the dark every few minutes. And once the last shot faded from the screen, the audience seemed frozen in their seats, staring at the credits, some with tears flowing down their cheeks.
It was a Sunday. I imagine each person present could very well have been somewhere else, even asleep in bed. Being in that multiplex instead was not a compulsive act driven by FOMO that pervades a population if a film is hyped by cash-infused marketing and PR teams. It was a political choice and, at least for myself and my friends, an act of resistance.
To watch or not watch a film in a theatre has always been a political choice. It is more so now than ever before, in the streaming era of the internet, when every smartphone user at any given point in time has an overload of entertainment options at their fingertips.
Consider the slew of anti-minority, pro-government Hindi films made these days. If every friend and every critic whose politics aligns with yours declares that a particular film is a hate-mongering propaganda exercise, but you buy tickets anyway because your curiosity has been piqued to such an extent by the social media storm around it that you cannot bear to be left out, then know this: any adverse opinion you publicly express afterwards matters far less to the producer than your contribution to their collections.
Unless you had a professional compulsion to watch that film without delay - say, you're a film critic, or a politician who wishes to bring it up in Parliament - know this too: your money will play an active part in ensuring that profiteering filmmakers churn out more such propaganda.
I constantly meet people who grumble about toxic masculinity, or increasing minority-bashing, in commercial Indian films, yet will go all the way to a theatre for the latest release by a director with a track record of making such cinema, simply because it is the hot topic of the moment. Meanwhile, if there is no hype around a new film by a director with a track record of quality combined with political sensitivity, the same viewer cites ticket costs, pollution, traffic jams, and a million other reasons to explain why they're waiting for it to drop on an OTT platform.
The public has the power to steer film industries. Exercising that power, though, requires recognising and resisting the psychological games that marketing teams play. FOMO may yet be conquered by FOECTSTDU - Fear Of Encouraging Cinema That Seeks To Divide Us, a.k.a. FOC, Fear Of Crap.
