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SPIRIT OF PLACE
Absence and Presence

An article by Ali Kazimi

"Hanif's Aunt did not want to be in the film." Ali Kazimi is sitting on his living room couch recalling the making of the film Some Kind of Arrangement. On the wall opposite him are bookcases filled with works on photography, literature, politics and film. On top of one case are the plastic cowboy and red Indians from his film Shooting Indians: A Journey with Jeffrey Thomas. On another wall are photos shot by Ali of the Indians he first encountered, those who live in the subcontinent, from the Indian Ocean to the Himalayas.

Leaning forward earnestly, he continues, "She thought that I was going to do what the media was doing all the time and be disrespectful to her position as a woman who was arranging this marriage." He pauses to emphasize the point. "Hanif was very important to the film because he was taking a proactive approach to marriage. It was an exhausting process winning his aunt back. I had to say to her, 'Go with your initial instincts which were that you trust me.'"

Half a year later, when the film aired on the CBC, Kazimi got a call while the end credits were rolling. It was Hanif's aunt. "She was weeping. She apologized and said, 'I found this to be a very deeply moving film.'" Ali hesitates before putting his own twist on this tale. "It was a wonderful accolade but, at the same time, my frustration with the documentary form is that ultimately you are, creating your fiction of the reality you've experienced." In other words, Hanif's aunt had run into the right guy.

Kazimi always holds his subjects in the highest regard. Dignity is naturally given to all of his "characters," in a manner that is similar to the works of Preminger or Truffaut, directors of dramas who always treated their protagonists with equanimity. It's an essential element in his films, one that can be seen in assigned projects like Some Kind of Arrangement as well as in such personal works as the feature Narmada: A Valley Rises and the recent Shooting Indians. It may transform his documentaries into fiction, in the sense that all works of art are constructed, but that change is securely based on Kazimi's belief that everyone has the right to hold on to a singular vision of their place in the world.

Narmada: A Valley Rises, is Kazimi's magnum opus to this point in his career. A tale of massive civil disobedience, it chronicles the efforts of a group of tribal people to maintain their ancient rural society by stopping the construction of a government-sponsored dam which would flood their valley. Naturally, the voices of the valley's activists, the eloquent Gandhians Mehda Patkar and Baba Amte, are heard throughout the film. But so is this statement, delivered by a farmer: "The land is not rubber that they can stretch and say, 'You settle on this piece and then you settle on that one."

For Kazimi, poetry is not confined to spokespeople; he prefers it when the people speak. In Shooting Indians, the notion of the director sharing authority with his subject becomes a major element in the film. Kazimi became fascinated with the photography of Jeffrey Thomas during his period of adjustment to Canada, after moving from India in 1983. "I wanted to make films outside of the Indian community, " recalls Kazimi, "and Jeff's work was a great 'in' for me. Here was someone about my own age who referenced the same classic American documentary photographers as I did. We spoke a common language in terms of the culture of photography, but his notion that photography could be overtly political was a very new idea for me."

When he works as a director, Kazimi has always eschewed the notion of "making myself the focus of the story. I'd rather be the medium for the story to emerge." While making Narmada, Ali ran into countless problems acquiring funding for the film. Rejected by the then-powerful Ontario Film Development Corporation and the Canada Council, and refused consideration at first by Telefilm Canada, Kazimi spent three years cobbling together a budget that allowed him to do justice to the story.

In the process, he had to counter ideas that "objective" documentaries are not artistic, that new Canadians (which he is) can't make Canadian films in their former homelands, and that artists of colour should only be funded for works of drama. Yet he observes, "The whole struggle of getting funding was draining but also empowering." He felt he was emulating the people of the Narmada Valley "who refused to behave like victims but were taking their own lives into their hands and saying, 'In spite of insurmountable odds, we're going to do it.'"

Ali Kazimi has approached his role as an activist for the independent film community with the same relish and refusal to be seen as a "charismatic leader." As a past president of the Independent Film and Video Alliance and former co-chair of the Canadian Independent Film Caucus, Kazimi always acted from a need to "give back to a community that has opened certain doors for me. I know that I can't talk about social responsibility in my films as a theoreticalconstruct and not do anything about it myself, in my life."

Kazimi's career has hardly reached its apex. This is one film artist who obviously has many more projects in front of him. Yet, even at this point, Kazimi's artistic and political agenda is clear. Anticipating some end-point to his work, Ali comments, "I want to be able to look back at my films and say that I did the best I could, both for myself, in terms of what I could do with the material, and, at the same time, that I respected the people who allowed me to do the work."