Rhythm of Dammam is a visually putting and shifting characteristic that shines a light-weight on the marginalised Siddi neighborhood — an ethnic group of primarily African descent whose ancestors got here to India by means of the slave commerce centuries in the past — by means of the story of 12-year-old Jayaram Siddi (Chinmaya Siddi), who’s possessed by his late grandfather’s spirit.
Its author and director, Kerala-born Jayan Cherian, has lengthy been concerned with and researched the historical past of the trans-Indian Ocean slave commerce and its affect on the African diaspora in India. “Naturally”, he says, “when creating a movie exploring the intergenerational trauma of chattel slavery in India, I selected to heart it across the Siddi neighborhood.”
Cherian has been in touch with the neighborhood in Uttara Kannada district — the Siddis have lived in Karnataka for practically 400 years — since he started creating work on ‘Rhythm of Dammam’ in 2016. He says the screenplay advanced organically as he lived in the neighborhood in Yellapur city and “interacted every day with my characters.”
“I engaged extensively with the neighborhood elders, conducting interviews to discover their folktales, myths, legends, and their views on historical past. By means of this course of, I sought to seize the neighborhood’s collective creativeness and cultural id,” he says. Rhythm of Dammam is being screened within the ‘Cinema Of The World’ part of the continued fifty fifth Worldwide Movie Competition of India (IFFI) in Goa.
The 92-minute movie, which predominantly makes use of the ‘Siddi dialect’ of Konkani, follows the story of Jayaram, who regardless of in search of assist from native black magicians is haunted by the spirit and escapes right into a dream world, utilizing ‘magical’ devices from his grandfather to attach along with his ancestors. The agonising historical past of his ancestors’ chattel slavery overwhelms Jayaram. He loses contact with actuality and drops out of faculty, prompting his household to try to revive his steadiness by embracing tribal rituals and Dammam music, each very important to their cultural heritage.
A pupil of Iranian filmmaker Abbas Kiarostami, Cherian, who holds a Grasp of High-quality Arts in filmmaking from The Metropolis School of New York, says he views himself “merely as a storyteller”, sharing the tales of the individuals he interacts with, tales that intertwine along with his personal and turn out to be part of his existence. “On a deeper stage, I turn out to be my cinema; it’s an inseparable a part of me. Should you reduce me, I bleed cinema,” he says.
Cherian has typically chosen the tales of these dwelling on the perimeter or not conforming to societal norms. That’s evident from his films, together with Ka Bodyscapes (2016), The Form of the Shapeless (2010) and Papilio Buddha (2014), which tells the story of Shankaran, a younger Dalit man, who befriends a white homosexual American lepidopterist (an individual who research or collects butterflies and moths).
Cherian says most of his earlier work is deeply impressed by modern social actions, such because the Dalit land struggles in Kerala and the LGBTQIA+ motion.
“My work broadly investigates how identities —corresponding to race, gender, ethnicity, and their intersectionalities — are constructed, carried out, and employed as instruments of each oppression and empowerment… For me, it’s important to stay alongside my characters and actively interact with the neighborhood throughout the writing course of,” he says.
As a matter in fact then, in Yellapur, whereas working for Rhythm of Dammam, Cherian actively participated in Siddi occasions and household features. For the reason that movie options various first-time actors, Cherian additionally carried out a number of appearing workshops, “drawing on the Siddi neighborhood’s outstanding inventive expertise”.
“Many Siddis are naturally gifted singers and dancers, and the presence {of professional} actors inside the neighborhood, corresponding to Prashant Siddi, Girija Siddi, and Parshuram Siddi, drastically contributed to the method. Their experience performed a key function in coaching and getting ready new actors for the shoot,” he says.
The neighborhood embraced him as one in every of their very own, says Cherian. “I’ve shaped deep friendships inside the neighborhood. Notable people corresponding to Mohan Siddi, Jayaram Siddi (the primary lawyer from the neighborhood), Yellapur MLC Shantaram Siddi, and neighborhood leaders like Lawrence Siddi and Santosh Siddi have turn out to be like household to me”.
