Rebellion films

Eight in the morning on a weekday: cheering erupts at scenes of Maoist cadres storming a prison. More enthusiastic applause greets the fighters as they free their friends, to the beats of the Mission Impossible theme song. On the other hand, the title song of the movie, penned by the party chairman and first prime minister of the Federal Democratic Republic of Nepal, Pushpa Kamal Dahal (aka 'Prachanda'), received a more muted response. The aisles of the 1000-seater Bishwa Jyoti Cinema, just down the street from the Narayanhiti Palace in Kathmandu, are packed, even overflowing. The occasion: a special screening of the Communist Party of Nepal (Maoist)-produced film Jana Yuddha, 'People's War'. With the screening taking place soon after the Maoists swept the Constituent Assembly polls in April, interest in the film is understandably high. Kathmandu which, unlike much of the rest of Nepal, remained largely insulated from regular contact with Maoist cadres during the decade-long conflict, is curious about this new entity.

As it happens, the audience left the theatre almost three hours later, but without much new insight. Following the lives of a few individuals in a particular village, the film captures the ways in which the brutality of the state converts the people to Maoist sympathisers or activists. Interspersed with this narrative is the story of the cadres themselves, as they go about interacting with the villagers and plotting attacks against the state. Scene after scene depicted the Maoists' struggle to liberate the people from the clutches of a corrupt state machinery, which is shown as the perpetrator of unwarranted violence against the powerless. This portrayal is neither unexpected nor, indeed, misleading. As is true of leftist revolutions elsewhere, the armed struggle in Nepal was certainly a response to the state's failure to do its job. But the villains of this film are small-time district officials – not the 'oppressive state' against which Marxist jargon rails before the proletariat. Interestingly, land owners and businessmen exemplifying the oppressive 'feudal' or 'capitalist' classes do not appear in the film. Despite the locale, however, Jana Yuddha oddly does not situate the roots or the evolution of the conflict in the specific Nepali context. In fact, if one were to alter the set, cast and language, the movie could easily be about the Naxalites of Chhattisgarh or the Shining Path of Peru.