Ever since 1895 on a Sunday, when Louis Lumière filmed workers pouring out of the gates of his factory in Lyon Monplaisir, the history of cinema has been inseparable from questions of work, leisure and workplace surveillance. Sometimes in the next century those image making tools made it into the hands of workers or sympathisers making films on their behalf, opening up questions about representation, ethics and consent.
Who holds the camera? Who is filmed? Who holds power over whom? Can an employee ever especially if they are dependent on this month’s wages refuse to be filmed? Must consent always be sought when filming subjects bound by exploitative contracts?
These questions come alive in Renu Savant’s powerful new documentary The Orchard and the Pardes (Bageecha aur Pardes, 2024). An FTII alumna, Savant is an independent artist based in Mumbai who is keenly aware of her practice’s complications and positionalities. Her most well-known project is Many Months in Mirya (2017), a four hour feature shot in her ancestral village in coastal Maharashtra.
A warm and unassuming pastoral diary film, Many Months in Mirya looks not only at the social fabric and rhythms of life within this geographically diverse village but also at what it is like to see and hear different things when one lives there as well as its history, politics and ecology. It weaves together microscopic detail with macroscopic events; crafts a kind of earth cinema showing that an artwork can confine itself to a few square kilometres yet still unearth worlds.
The Orchard and the Pardes takes place in a private mango orchard outside Ratnagiri town one of India’s major centres of mango production which lies just down the coast from Mirya. It observes day to day activities among immigrant workers who travel down from Nepal each year for the harvest season. We watch them gathering fruit, pruning trees and doing whatever else is required of them by their Marathi speaking employer.
To see through their long, hot days they drink locally brewed liquor; chat on the phone; sing songs. It is summer 2021 and an epidemic threatens not only these men’s earnings but also their ability to return home in time.
To talk about what The Orchard and the Pardes is about is to run the risk of turning it into an issue-based documentary. What drives Savant’s film, rather, are the things that happen in between people each shot a document of the changing networks of faith, power and language among the filmmaker, the workers and their boss.
A first intertitle sets out the social location of the filmmaker: “The film is a document of the conditions of migrant labour in Konkan, Maharashtra, India. The film is also about the encounter between an urban woman filmmaker from the dominant caste and rural, Bahujan caste men from a male-dominated, agro-business field.”
Savant finds herself in a complex power equation with her subjects as a lone woman dealing with an all-male environment. To them she appears as an emissary of their employer; therefore, they treat her so. They believe that she has come to record everything they do wrong on site using her camera as a surveillance device.
Such natural distrust makes them perform for the camera on one hand and take refuge in their native Nepali tongue on another. We see them saying something to Savant in Hindi while adding something else in Nepali among themselves knowing well that anything said could be translated usually teasing or joking at her expense and sometimes lewdly.
But sexual tension also hangs thickly in this air: these are anxious bachelors sizing up a single woman who has infiltrated their midsts; wondering aloud through stolen glances and sidetracked conversations what she might be doing there alone with them? When will they get back to work? How did their employer expect them not to drink if he left all this alcohol here?
One sequence stands out: during one such break when Savant’s reluctant camera records them drinking together; Ratnagiri being strange territory indeed for someone like her just as much as it is for them. With alcohol lowering their inhibitions further still, the camera acts as a kind of protective shield now comparably vulnerable itself but also out-of-place.
The employer (we see less of him than we do his workers) sees the filmmaker as potentially embarrassing: someone who could record things they say about him which are not flattering; or how unfair he is making them work. He keeps to himself mostly, but his power manifests through instructions given and worker testimony on ruthlessness and money-mindedness. We also get hints that should things go too far south, he can easily have her evicted.
This three-cornered contest between employees, employer and film-maker comes into perfect relief during a shot where one man is seen up a tree trying to cut down branch as camera gazes upwards towards him speaking into lapel mic; an obviously dangerous job which he is reluctant to do even after boss insists. Completing it grudgingly so as to avoid accident whose near-miss only underscores his lack of enthusiasm for task at hand , Savant records from next seat along with boss man.
Here seems present have conflicting expectations each other its side . Standing beside employer while monitoring this worker’s progress may incriminate latter over hazardous working conditions created by former though not without reproach itself; while hoping for no such eventuality, act filming does breed voyeuristic suspense.
In every of such standoffish confrontations, the cameraman gradually gains the workers’ trust. The presence of camera, it seems, helps these men to find some free time and fantasy amidst their tight routine being more and more open with showing disrespect towards their supervisor or planning a verbal assault on him. Of course, not all the way is passed here; at no point do they stop treating the filmmaker like an idiot for example by claiming that popular Nepali songs were composed by them. But there is some liking and mutual esteem too.
And a part of this reciprocity has to do with words, especially with poetry. Kushal says that he loves creating songs at work a statement taken up by director who pushes him into writing his verses down in notebook. At first claiming authorship for well-known Nepali numbers, as days pass he starts making them his own even adding new lines from himself. It’s really moving when we see how vulnerable Kushal becomes while reading those poems before camera risking being mocked other boys; but only because she interferes so it can happen.
The Orchard and the Pardes provides what could be considered as an encyclopedia of roles played throughout history by documentary cameras: means for capitalist surveillance; instruments for journalistic exposé or academic knowledge production; finally poetic devices delving below surface appearances.
Rather than merely recording fly on the wall observation unassailable reality, this film shows us its self-awareness about catalyzing reality that should have been captured instead. Within ethnographic framework Savant’s seemingly plain movie manages to reveal various subtexts running through all documentaries.
Earlier this year The Orchard and the Pardes had its world premiere during Kolkata People’s Film Festival, now awaiting international screenings.
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