The Earth Beneath His Feet: My First Film (2008)

This is a short-film which explores issues concerning the earth, ecology, environment, and our difficult relationship with them.

Environment

The Plot: The protagonist, an archetype of modern man, has to face a few hard facts.He had achieved much more than what death could kill. But he feared ‘the six feet of earth’ to where he, like any other mortal, must return. He had a reason to fear. He tried everything at death -he denied… he was angry… he argued… he bargained… and finally the inevitable happened.

Watch the full film here The Earth Beneath His Feet (15.5 minutes)

The Earth Beneath His Feet is screened and discussed at Voices from the Waters International Film Festival. It is also catalogued by Film Division India.

The Thought Process

2008, the issue of farmers’ suicide was on the peek in India. I wanted to make a film on that. I began reading. I got the statistics and stories. My mind began to wander around the question of ‘why’. Why did farmers, who managed their life for time immemorial by themselves began ending their life all on a sudden? The reason was clear; their farms are not producing any more. They are under debt. Then I hit upon the data that farmers’ suicide is more on areas where farmers had huge success during the green revolution. Green revolution of course was needed to unfetter India out of the great famines. India had to produce more. But today those farms are not producing anymore. High-end Fertilisers and pesticides that they had used have completely sucked out the ability of the soil to produce anymore. The farmers began to use genetically modified seeds, as a result they had to depend every year on business people to get seeds for sowing, and they were expensive. We as a humanity and as a scientific community had messed up the soil; had done irreversible harm to the earth. I had number of newspaper articles and statistics to back it up.

The Big Idea: Focus of my film shifted to the state of humanity after humans had done irreversible harm to the earth. This film is about the difficult relationship that humans have with the earth. My starting question was, ‘we have harmed the earth; but one day we have to return back to the earth; how will the earth receive us back?’ The film is about the struggle of a man, someone who was directly instrumental for the green revolution, who in some sense represents the whole humanity, to return back to the earth, because he knows he has harmed the earth. How will the earth receive him back? He is on the run.

Subtext: The film deals with dying; but who is dying? All see the scientist dying. That is the overarching main text and narrative. As we look deeper, it is about the death of the earth/soil, it is about the death of farmers, and it is about the death of humanity.

Those paying attention will discover that through the dialogues delivered by the protagonist the narrative goes through the five stages of dying by Elisabeth Kubler Rose: denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance. Be it the case of dying earth, dying farmers, or dying humanity, we are going through these stages. Some are in the stage of denial, some are angry, some are bargaining, some are depressed, some are have accepted the end.

There are many ironical facts to note. The film begins with the scientist boasting of him/humanity beginning their journey as a crawling tiny worm and went on to achieve everything; the film ends with the scientist/humanity reduced to a crawling worm. On prescription shown on the table as the scientist is drinking water, he is dying of a cancer caused by contamination of water and earth by pesticides; ironically he was the one who was inventing and promoting such pesticides. It is a film about all of us and the earth.

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