Local language films come into focus

PANAJI

: Imagine a man and his

dog

struggling for survival and refusing to leave their home in a remote village, even as other villagers, harassed by mining companies, abandon their homes to move to a new place to start life anew.

It’s the plot of ‘A Dog Dies’ — one of the few films that brought to fore stories from rural India in lesser known native languages and made a mark at the Film Bazaar Recommends (FBR) section with their narrative in indigenous dialects.

“It is a story of the pain of migration due to industrialization which questions the cost of economic growth. It would not have been possible to communicate such pain through any other language besides the one spoken in the region. Therefore, it was crucial to use Chattisgarhi,” said director, Siddharth Thipathy.

Filmmaker Pradip Kurbah made his film ‘Iewduh’ (The Market) in the

Khasi language

of

Meghalaya

. “Though the language is over 1,000 years old, Khasi cinema started only in the 1980s and is still in a very nascent stage,” he said. ‘Iewduh’ looks at one of the oldest markets in the region and the bonds between vendors.