Writer and Director: Utsav Gonwar
Cast: Mahadev hadapad, Sandhya Arakere, Veeresh Gonwar, Jahangeer MS
Available in: Theatres
Duration: 98 minutes
Despite the simplicity of its narrative, Utsav Gonwar’s Photo comes through as an exercise of great intricacy. It’s a heaving film that has lots to exclaim but never does it allow its underlying anguish or sorrow to get in the way of its tall journey. The silence, as they say, speaks volumes here and that is because, for the writer-director, the film is more than just a visual document. Instead, he sees it as an opportunity to address the viewers directly, to politely ask them to stop the pretend act and to tell them that they too are partially complicit in the problem.
The problem, of course, is centred on the mass exodus of migrant workers during the Covid-19 lockdown in 2020. The entire event, which now seems like a distant memory, has been the subject of a lot of discourse and popular cinema such as Anubhav Sinha‘s 2023 film Bheed, too, has shared its two cents on the matter. Bheed cast a searing and emotional gaze with its reconstruction of the exodus, peeling several layers of the social apathy that had come to the fore.
The Hindi film’s black-and-white frames painted a vivid picture and its loud, chaotic tone amplified its message. Photo, in contrast, opts for a completely different approach and remains still and silent throughout. And unlike the many threads of stories that Bheed weaves together, Photo follows the solitary tale of a father-son duo and its labyrinth trip back home during the lockdown. What both films do is they comprehensively and boldly underline the systemic mismanagement that we saw at play at the time, but they both have starkly dissimilar voices to get the job done.