Scratching Beneath the Surface

An Interview with Sourav Sarangi

At first glance, Bilal is a normal 3 year-old kid. He goes to school; he plays with other kids in his neighborhood; he teases his younger brother. But dig beneath the surface and there’s something a little bit special about Bilal. Looks can be deceiving, you see. In fact, they can be totally redundant.

Bilal and his brother can see perfectly well, but both their parents are blind. All four live in a 12’ x 8’ room in central Kolkata. It’s a tiny, tangible universe. Mother and father feel their way around the room with experienced dexterity as they perform everyday tasks. Meanwhile Bilal does everything kids are apt to do – namely get into trouble and then, just when they’re needed, get out of the way. Independent filmmaker Sourav Sarangi spent the best part of a year filming in this absorbing environment. The result is Bilal, a documentary that’s rightly proving one of this year’s big successes on the international festival circuit.

Over a coffee and later beer, I ask Sarangi how he met Bilal. He describes the scene with typical warmth: “My wife was working with a theatre group for non-sighted people called Blind Opera. Bilal’s parents were in this group, so I’d heard about their kid before. Then, one day, my wife phoned and asked me to book a hospital bed for Bilal. He’d fallen from a great height. When I went to see him in hospital later it was the first time we’d laid eyes on each other. He looked at me for ever and then he reached out to touch his mother. It was his way of telling her I was there!” Sarangi looks at me and bashfully confides: “I could smell a film”.

Skip forward 12 months and Sarangi had captured 160 hours of footage of the family; it took a further 18 intense months to edit it all together. Throughout that time, Sarangi’s point of interest never wavered from what he’d seen (or smelled) in his initial chance encounter with Bilal: “The whole thing deals with language… My area of observation is how these people can communicate”.

Touch is clearly of great importance to this family. Mother and father use taps, strokes, and (not infrequently) thumps to communicate with their sighted kids; Bilal, meanwhile, knows just how to reply. But the levels of communication run deeper than the matter of sight. The family converses in a bewildering mix of Hindi and Bengali (Bilal’s father speaks Bengali and Hindi but his mother only speaks Bengali and he speaks mainly Hindi). As Sarangi puts it, their one-room house contains a “spaghetti of languages”. Communication here occurs through “a language of grey areas” and there’s always something beneath the surface. 12’ x 8’ may not seem like a big space, but to Sarangi and his viewer the room becomes something mystical, even unknowable. 

Of course, Bilal does attempt to know what goes on in the room, but it’s to the film’s great credit that it respects the hodgepodge of languages and layers of communication on display. Sarangi could have made his life (particularly the task of editing) much easier had he perched his camera at the side of the room and let it record blithely, ‘objectively’. Instead, he picked the camera up and thrust it into the action, pushing and feeling his way around the room: “My camera is not a fly on the wall. It’s better to subscribe to reality more, to be in to it. The camera goes where it wants to see the moment from. It’s very emotional… impulsive.”

It’s this active, intuitive approach that allows Bilal to succeed as a film. For a start, the film looks simply gorgeous. Its beautiful ad-hoc compositions speak of a terrible irony – that there’s something infinitely photogenic about the room Bilal’s parents live in but never see (though at one pointed moment Bilal’s mother speaks of being happy with her blindness, of not wanting to see the “dirt” of sighted-peoples’ world).

There’s also a deeper level that lies beneath this surface success. In this room where touch is so important, Sarangi’s camera is treated like an everyday object. It’s felt. Manipulated. Moved. In other words, his frame becomes tactile, and as an audience we’re able to feel the onscreen events as much as see them. Bilal does indeed manage to live the reality in front of it.

As Sarangi readily admits, in that reality “nothing much happens. Life is just going on and on”. Dramatic events do occur in Bilal – a broken arm, a neighborhood feud, even an abortion – but they all segue naturally into the rhythm of the household’s daily life. Bilal is at the heart of that rhythm. A magnetic Artful Dodger type of character, he is the key to the language spaghetti of his household. Bilal has access to more levels of communication than any other person in the family, and he certainly knows how to manipulate the grey areas to his advantage. Effectively, Bilal is a life in his day. “Bilal becomes my microcosm”, says Sarangi “and you can make a whole society around him”.

According to the daily events in Bilal, that society can be raw, even disturbing (violence is never far away). Yet Sarangi steadfastly resists the temptation to moralize or proffer a direct argument. In fact, for such a powerful film, Bilal is remarkable for just how quiet it remains. I ask Sarangi whether he was scared to give his viewer such space, to allow them to think what they will. His response sums up much of what is to be lauded about Bilal:

“For me, film is not a guided tour, like you take some tourists and show them information and then put them back where they came from. The argument part of my film lies not in the newspaper headlines; they are in the small captions that go inside the newspaper. They are in the layering of society. As an audience you analyse and go deeper and look for the source of problems. I’m sure that you’ll find the answers.”

Reproduced courtesy of The Statesman. Originally published 24/10/09.