Babu Eshwar Prasad
Trailer of Gaalibeeja (Wind Seed)
Gaalibeeja
Wind Seed
96 minutes | Kanada film
Written and Directed by Babu Eshwar Prasad
Camera: B R Viswanath
Editor: M N Swamy
Music : Marcus Maeder
Actors: Venkatesh Prasad, Amaresh Bijjal, Mohammed Rizwan, Bhanu Prakash Chandra, Divya Murthy
The title of the film is Gaalibeeja, which literally translated into English means ‘Wind Seed’. The road is the central protagonist of the film connecting the various characters. Cinema has been an abiding influence for the filmmaker and this film is an homage to people like Wim Wenders, Jim Jarmusch and Abbas Kiarostami.
The film opens with Prakash, a road engineer, leaving for a site visit to an unnamed village. On the way he gives a lift to Jaffer, someone who previously sold pirated dvds, and receives a set of road movies from him.
The sequences in the films and the people that Prakash meets in life begin to resonate with each other. There is Lingappa, a farmer who waits by the bus stop on the main highway road for
someone, Manjana, a poster sticker who cycles around desperately searching for something and a female biker who captures her long solitary journeys with the camera strapped on her helmet. Jaffer’s pronouncement that Prakash’s life could be a film comes back to him as he witnesses each person starring in their own road movie.
The road is a metaphor for life, for the journeys we make, the transitory relationships that are
formed in the process. In the current Indian context it is also linked to the rhetoric of progress
and development. The Indian economy, a predominantly agricultural economy, has for the first
time shifted towards becoming a service economy. This means large tracts of land are being sold
for real estate and road development, so there is huge upheaval and reordering of resources in the country at a scale which is unprecedented.
The film presents a fragmented narrative through images and soundscapes. The road carries us, connects us, it equally disrupts lives. The film explores this ambivalence and the different
temporalities people inhabit.
Fast Forward to Zero Fast Forward to Zero
Single Channel / 2011 / 2:37 minutes
In the recent years I have been preoccupied with the effects of industrialisation and the social, economic, ecological and ethical dilemmas they pose. Already India’s post independence development strategies are showing results, they leave tell-tale signs on the soil and this is what I am interested in excavating. The film opens with a camera panning over a panoramic landscape that on closer inspection reveals itself as a collage of ravaged minelands. The eye continuously confronts roads and pathways used to carry the minerals and resources juxtaposed with the actual textures and hues of the denuded earth. We make our way to the next logical location – the factory as the site of productivity with its large-scale industrial machines and furnaces. Does anyone believe the linear stories it tells – on progress, sustainability and the future? The final sequence presents us with a static shot of ants clambering in and out of a hole in the ground, busily carrying soil. We return to the site of labouring bodies, collectively toiling. These notes on development would form a very different narrative if told from their perspective.
Looped
Single channel / 3:28minutes / 2012
I work with still and moving images that I have shot and collected over the years. There is an interest in the formal qualities of construction machinery and sites, hi tension cable wires, the abandoned junkyards of industrial relics, building equipment and signage that dot the city. I silently record and juxtapose them. Alongside I knit together a sequence which is a homage to the American experimental filmmaker Ralph Steiner and his 1930 classic Mechanical Principles. Here Steiner makes a short silent film which strings together almost abstract snapshots of gears and machinery in movement. I identify with his act of careful observation and yet I cannot share Steiner’s uncritical, almost celebratory stance on poetry and beauty of the machine. The final sequences of the film open on to panoramic views of Earthmovers trawling through denuded mine sites of Bellary, Vijaynagara and other places in Karanataka which have generated so much controversy recently. There is no single narrative, no a priori conclusion to be drawn from the film, only images that seem to accumulate evidence and link together the past, present and future
VORTEX
Pal /2008 / 2:35 minutes
The short video Vortex is a journey into a landscape of industry. Here, one walks through the debris of a mechanical world that has become obsolete; the camera captures large still-life that once was moving and was part of an industry. The camera focuses on the industrial urban landscape, fractured from functional state and constructed into another reality. The imagery looks like an aftermath of violence; I have attempted to play with surface of machine that has gathered patina, the multitude of tactile expressions in a metallic palette. The brooding images suggest the underlying concern of the urban metropolis, and the party seems to be over. The greed of industrialization is a common future and it is not about opposing growth but locating the self in it. There is emphasis on the absence of human presence; and echoes the absence of a narrative through figuration.