Given the storm over the West Bengal’s handling of the Nandigram issue, cinematographer Ladly Mukhopadhaya’s ‘Whose Land Is It Anyway?’, on the peasant movement in Singur, was bound to create a buzz at the International Film Festival of India.

The director followed this up with ‘Nandigram. This Land Is Mine’ which focuses on the aftermath. The sequel however failed to make it to IFFI because of delays with the West Bengal government’s certification, said executive producer Swati Chakraborty.

The Nandigram documentary, privately screened at Rome, Strassburg, Kerala, Delhi and Gorakhpur, was turned down for screening at the Kolkata Film Festival, the director said.

‘Threats to life’

A staunch CPI(M) supporter at one time, Mukhopadhaya who spoke to this newspaper from Sikkhim while on a shoot, said he’s shrugged off threats to his life while making the movie.

“I was once very close to West Bengal’s ruling party and am still very much a Leftist. But the manner in which the state machinery was used to crush the peasant struggle in Nandigram is unacceptable,” Mukhopadhaya emphasised.

The issues the documentaries highlight are all the more significant, given that West Bengal is ruled by a coalition of Left parties, he added. 

The 46-minute Nandigram documentary made in English was shot between October 2006 and beginning of March this year. Filming had to stop after the violence errupted on March 14. “What prevails there now is the silence of the grave,” says Chakraborty.

Insisting that there was no political agenda in making the documentaries, the film’s producer said the Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee government’s stand on Nandigram was a paradox, considering the Left had always stood by the peasant’s movement elsewhere in the country. “The present rung of Left leaders like Sitaram Yechury and Prakash Karat are out of touch with grassroots reality,” Chakraborty said.