In Mumbai (Bombay), a city of 15 million people, 7 million commuters travel by train to work in a daily nightmare where the difference between first-class and second-class seats no longer means anything, as people are jammed like sardines into the train coaches.
Actually, it is considered lucky to be able to get inside the train coach at all. Many people hold on to the edge of the trains at the doors. Others ride on the roof of the trains.
PHOTO COURTESY OF TIDF
Fifteen people a day, or around 4,000 a year, are killed from falling off speeding trains, being run over on the tracks, or being electrocuted by high-tension wires.
PHOTO: YU SENLUN, TAIPEI TIMES
With poetic visual presentation and sound editing, director Vinayan Kodoth makes a record of the horrifying everyday trip for Mumbai's commuters in his documentary Journey, which screens today at the Taiwan International Documentary Festival. It is perhaps the first film from India presenting a deep reflection on this everyday drama.
"I want to present the degradation of human beings. People are powerless facing the situation. They just take it for granted," Kodoth said.
Kodoth previously lived in Mumbai, and sometimes joined the crowds taking the train to work. "You don't realize what you are doing. It's said that once you get into a train station, you become a different person. They only thing you have on your mind is to get on the train," Kodoth said in an interview in Taipei. His film has been selected in the Asian Vision of the competition category at the festival.
"The traffic operators in the city have lost control of the situation. And the people, like cogs in a machine, just have to accept it, and get used to it," Kodoth said.
The trains and the peculiar environment in Mumbai have, indeed, transformed people's character and human relations. "It is this change that I find it traumatic. And it was the main reason I left the city," Kodoth said.
When returning to Mumbai to shoot the film, Kodoth chose to look at the situation with a non-traditional documentary approach. There is no first-person accounts, no interviews or commentaries in the film. The film does not try to find reasons or answers, nor does it try to find out who is to blame for the chronic problem of urban planning in Mumbai.
Instead, there are abundant visuals of the commuters and train rides. Inside the train, there are pictures of hands holding on to the handles, a man's sweating forehead and people's backs and chests forced closely together.
The commuters are all silent and impassive, showing few facial expressions, just quietly and swiftly rushing into the trains, or climbing up to the roof. And when the train arrives at a stop, people quickly jump off. The only noise in the film comes when a commuter falls onto the camera while rushing into the train.
"He was rushing too fast and did not see us and the camera," Kodoth said.
The passenger almost fell off the train and was pulled back in and actually fell on the camera again, Kodoth said.
"I'd like to focus on the human condition in this situation and hope people can reflect on it. This is why I took a distant look at the situation," he said.
"There have been news reports about the situation, but people read and forget about it," Kodoth said.
The director's detached attitude in the film gives an even stronger impression of the situation, clearly a reason why he was won awards at five international documentary festivals in the past year and seems a strong contender to win another at the current festival.
通勤斷魂路
維那楊康杜斯
印度
身為絕望的七百萬通勤者之一，每天穿梭於住家與工作地點夢饜當中，究竟有何意義可言？孟買是一個擁有一千五百萬居民的城市，每年約有四千人或從火車摔落而喪命，或在鐵軌上遭輾斃。本片運用音效與視覺上的重疊效應，生動地營造出一個超現實社會的蒙太奇效果，把這樣不幸的處境與關於國家發展和軍事力量的主流論述重疊。它以豐富的細節與詩意，幾乎不用旁白，微妙又尖銳地探討在一個非常特定的環境裡，有關空間與人際關係之間的普遍性問題。
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