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Directed by Prithviraj Das Gupta, ‘Green Blackberries’, a new independent short movie by VA films, has been selected at the Dharamshala film festival which will be organised virtually this year. In depicting the life of a village girl, Nishu, it highlights the challenges and hurdles faced by North East Indian kids to get one step closer to their dreams and ambitions.
Simple is difficult when you are a village girl who wants an education. Nishu, hailing from the remote village of Assam, has a deep desire to study. But, it isn’t an easy feat to do so, when you have to cross so many hurdles even to get the basic amenities of life. Just the journey to school is a huge task. A river stands in her way. Her teacher’s political aspirations too may come in the way. So it’s not just the tests in school that she has to pass. How will she fare?
Everyday she goes to school with her sister, steering through mud tracks and across a river in a boat. It’s the only way she feels she can leave the village for a new horizon.
One day, making the same journey that she’d made hundreds of times before, Nishu and her sister face an unforeseen calamity. In walking the audience through a journey in which she must reach school in time for an exam, the film depicts her struggles – both physical and psychological – that test her limits in the wake of a calamitous life situation.
The idea for the film occurred to the crew when they had gone to shoot an independent documentary in the remotest villages of North East India in March 2018, and found that there are areas with just one government Primary School for 20 villages, often with a single teacher who has bare minimum education.
The terrain in these areas is relentlessly hilly. Children aged between 3 to 13 years old, walk up to 20 km in this unforgiving land, while others row up or down river for 3 hours, then walk up to 10 km to get to school. Despite these challenges these kids haven’t lost their hopes and dreams which is clearly the substance and splendour of this film.
Prithviraj Das Gupta is an Indie filmmaker who has written, directed and edited two short films previously, that have won at the Calcutta International Cult Film Festival and AMU international Film Festival. His short film, COWMEDY has been selected at New York Indian Film Festival 2020.
The film is produced by two prominent women Vaneeta Sridhar and Alka Hingorani who really believed in highlighting the struggles of these young kids and pushing this thought through the film.
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