CHENNAI: Police tried to prevent the screening of 'Siam-Burma Death Railway,' a documentary film, on Saturday but relented after the organisers refused to budge. An award-winning documentary on the killing of more than one lakh Tamils during the construction of a 415-km railway track, 'Siam-Burma Death Railway' has become the latest on the list of independent films to face police action.
Screening of Anand Patwardhan's much-acclaimed 1992 documentary 'In the Name of God' ran into trouble in April this year. Two weeks later, screening of the film, 'Corrupt Electricity,' was boycotted at the same venue in Egmore. May 17 Movement founder Thirumurugan Gandhi, who organised the screening of 'Siam-Burma Death Railway,' said, "The screening of a documentary on Marxian and civil rights activist S V Rajadurai was recently stopped in Coimbatore. Similar incidents had taken place in Madurai and Trichy too."'Siam-Burma Death Railway,' made by Puducherry-based academic R Kurinjivendan, was to be screened at 5.30pm but was delayed due to the police intervention. Around 5pm, RKV Studios at Vadapalani was overflowing with hundreds of people including Left intellectuals, historians and activists. The film was screened an hour late after police relented. "We had applied for permission and had met senior police officials for that. But they kept stalling the screening and asked us to meet the commissioner. The director of the film had to spend time at the police station since Saturday morning seeking permission," Thirumurugan Gandhi said.
For its Great Asia plan, the Japanese military forced Tamils out of plantations in Malaysia and Burma to put them to work on the 415km line connecting Thailand and Burma. With available records, the film chronicles the events over a 15-month period between 1940 and 1942 where more than a lakh Tamils perished. The line, which was to be constructed in five years, was completed in two years at the cost of lives that were lost on a daily basis, the film says. The Japanese military made the workers live in inhuman conditions.