Shishir Jha’s Tortoise Under the Earth takes its own sweet time to unfold. That is to be expected in a film that measures the gradual disappearance caused by displacement.
Jha’s Santhali-language feature debut meshes fictional and documentary devices while following a nameless couple living in a village that has been earmarked for “development”. The village is on a uranium mine in Jharkhand – too lucrative to be left to the people who actually care for the land and its produce.
For the Adivasi couple, the soil has other associations – it holds memories of their lost daughter, the time they spent together as a family, the years devoted to ploughing fields and tending to long-standing trees. Their uprooting not only means a severing of connections with their home but also the shattering of ties with their tribe’s origin stories, its songs and its cultural practices.
Memory – of times past, of the place in the present that will not be around in the future – defines identity as well as shapes the unhurried narrative. Jha, who has also shot and edited the movie, wants viewers to savour every minute spent in the company of his characters.
Just like they linger in their house unwilling to leave, so too the film uses long takes, minimal camera movements and still frames to depict the feeling of being vividly in the here-and-now in a village that will soon vanish. With some patience, Shishir’s Jha’s storytelling approach acquires a haunting quality.
Tortoise Under the Earth (the original title is Dharti Latar Re Horo) was completed in 2022 and recently premiered on MUBI. Despite stilted dialogue delivery by the lead pair (played by Jagarnath Baskey and Mugli Baskey), the 95-minute film draws viewers into a world that is portrayed with understated but unmistakeable feeling. The couple’s anguish is palpable, as is their comfort with each other.
Several compositions reveal emptiness, the silence broken only by singing. In one of the most moving scenes, the Adivasis depart from their village one by one, carrying their meagre belongings – pots and pans, woven beds, goats. Some of them stay behind, unable to leave behind that which they have painstakingly built, only to have it brutally snatched away.
Also start the week with these films:
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Grave of the Fireflies’ is a heartbreaking tale of sibling love
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