The Islamabad burqa massacre

MARQUEE

As a long-time movie buff with Catholic tastes, I thought I had seen it all, but during last month’s Cinefan festival I found myself in one of the smaller Siri Fort auditoria watching an unlikely progression of images.

Omar Ali Khan’s Zibahkhana (Hell’s Ground) begins with five Pakistani youngsters lying to their parents and stealing off together in a large van to watch a rock concert — fairly routine, you’d think, at this stage.

But that’s before the kids get off the main road into jungle terrain and encounter, in turn: a Dracula lookalike who runs a tea-stall and shouts “Jahannum mein jaa rahe ho, mere bachchon!” (“You’re on the road to hell, my children!”); a tribe of flesh-eating zombies; a satanic hitchhiker who rolls his eyes and portends doom; and, for a grand closing flourish, a ball-and-chain wielding psychopath clad in a burqa.

Zibahkhana, a very low-budget spoof, is billed as “Pakistan’s first gore film” and a couple of things occurred to me during the non-stop hooting and whistling by the audience at its screening. First was the realisation that of the dozens of movies screened at Cinefan 2008 —nuanced, thoughtful films that draw viewers into the lives, cultures and tribulations of people in other countries — among the most popular was this gore-fest featuring loving close-ups of youngsters being chopped into tiny bits. I wonder how the festival’s organisers feel about this, considering that Cinefan has taken its role as a purveyor of Meaningful Cinema very seriously for nearly a decade.

The other thought that struck me was that this sort of audience-pleasing, camaraderie-generating film might turn out to be the best way to create genuine interest in the Other. For years, filmmakers from India and Pakistan have been making sensitive features and documentaries in an attempt to open the eyes and minds of viewers on both sides of the border — to help us appreciate each other better, discover cultural similarities and shared histories. (Just a couple of days earlier, at Cinefan, I saw the earnest Ramchand Pakistani, about Pakistani Hindus stranded in India.)

Now it turns out that these well-intentioned moviemakers may have been barking up the wrong tree. You want us to find common humanity? There’s no better way than to make us laugh and shudder together in a darkened room. So get off that soapbox and pick up a chainsaw instead. Who could have guessed?

One of the highlights of the Zibahkhana screening was the interaction with the director, who turned out to be likable and self-deprecating. He joked about his early influences as a movie-watcher (“my parents let me see just about anything I wanted to — maybe they shouldn’t have!”), about Hell’s Ground being “a tribute to directors whom you wouldn’t even have heard of, they are so bad”, about the gore effects being bought wholesale from the hardware store down the road, and even about the contaminated-water problems in Pakistan (referred to in the film), “which doesn’t mean that all of us will turn into bloodthirsty zombies — but some of us might!”

The film has understandably caused ripples at many film festivals, where people tend to have pre-set ideas of what a Pakistani film should be like. Will there be a sequel, someone asked Khan. If I can get someone deranged enough to finance one, he replied straight-facedly.

Hell’s Ground cost only about $100,000, and it shows. No one is ever going to pretend that it’s a quality film in any known sense of the word “quality” (speaking as a gore-and-horror buff, I can confidently assert that it scrapes the bottom of the barrel even within the genre), but we could do with more films like it shuffling back and forth across the border.

(jai.arjun@gmail.com)