“There once was a man.
This man came into
the European war.
Germany captured this man.
He wishes to return to India.
If God has mercy, he will make peace soon.
This man will go away from here.”

When Philip Scheffner stumbled on to these words in an almost-ghostly voice of Mall Singh on a Shellac record in a German archive, a shiver went down his spine. Singh’s was among 300 sound recordings made of Indian soldiers serving for the Allied Forces kept as PoWs in Germany during the First World War, as part of what Scheffner describes as a “unique alliance between the military, the scientific community and the entertainment industry”. Nobody knows what became of Singh, or  others like him in German jails, but these words, recorded through a phonographic funnel on December 11, 1916 in Wünsdorf near Berlin, set Scheffner to try and bring alive the story of these unknown soldiers on the screen.

Voices from past
The result is ‘The Halfmoon Files’, an 87-minute documentary that seeks to find out who these men were – purely through their voices that resonate like voices of ghosts from the past. No wonder that since its premiere in the 57th Berlin International Film Festival, the film has shaken viewers be it at the 18th Documentary Film Festival at Marseille (France) or the 9th Osian’s Cinefan Film Festival in New Delhi. In fact, the filmmaker himself felt haunted while making the film, as the spirits of the men, whose fate remains unknown, pursued him through their voices – to bring their voices back to their home countries.

Scheffner stumbled onto the archival recording while researching for another film, at the Humboldt-University in Berlin. “When I listened to these sound files, I was totally shocked. It was like an encounter with a ghostly world – voices from the past that surround you with their stories,” he says. As an intrigued Scheffner started listening to the recordings, he became more and more drawn into them, as curiosity built up in him about the persons behind those voices and why were they recorded.The thought of making a film on the subject came much later to his mind, as initially he was more interested in finding out about the men. And now that the film is complete, he is taking it to the next level, developing a lecture on the subject together with the German scientist Britta Lange and preparing an exhibition in Berlin in December.

Given the fact that these recordings were 90-years-old and not much detail about the men behind those voices were available, Scheffner could not trace their origins. “I didn’t manage to trace any of the PoWs to their origins and I was not able to speak to any of their descendents. The plan was to come to India to do that, but I didn’t get a shooting permission and so I couldn’t go. Some people in India heard about my research and then followed that up. But I was not involved in this. I think my film is really a film from a German perspective – I was working from here and tried to find as much as I could in the German archives. I think besides the disappointment of not getting a shooting permission, for the film at least it was actually a good thing to not being able to go to India. I have the feeling that through this, in the end the film became much stronger in a way,” says Scheffner, who has been visiting India since 1995 and have close friends in the filmmaking fraternity, such as filmmaker-activist Madhusree Dutta, scriptwriter Urmi Juvekar and director Onir. In fact, he even made a film on the making of Onir’s ‘My Brother Nikhil’.

As part of the preparation for the planned shooting in India that did not happen, Delhi-based researcher Manak Matyiani acted as the coordinator, trying to to contact as many people as possible from official archives to individuals who are somehow linked to the whole matter. As Scheffner explains in his film synopsis, “Like a memory game which remains incomplete right until the end – I have uncovered pictures and sounds that revive the ghosts of the past. The protagonists’ words intersect along the concentric spirals the story follows. Those who pressed the record button on the phonographs, on photo and film cameras, were the ones to write official history. Mall Singh and the other PoWs of the Halfmoon Camp disappeared from this story.” 

Theatrical release
The disturbing content of the film, set for theatrical release in Germany, Switzerland and Austria, has led Scheffner to develop plans to take to the next level – he is working together a scientist to develop an exhibition in which lots of material will be used. “Also, we are doing lectures which we present in various contexts – from the art world to the scientific and academic field. But I am not a historian myself, so my main focus is the question of ‘how can we speak about this at all’ and not so much the presentation of the mere facts and figures,” he says. He is also trying to “convince” the Max Mueller Bhavan Institutes to organise a tour through India to show the film and to do lectures. Incidentally, the term ‘Halfmoon Files’ is a fictitious one derived by the director from a PoW camp with the name ‘Halfmoon Camp’, where most of the Indian PoWs were detained.

Scheffner believes that cinema, especially documentary and experimental cinema, has the potential to analyze historical events. “It is interesting to see that theoretical discussions about sound and image or what you could call ‘politics of sound an image’, which are very common and inherent in documentary filmmaking, suddenly have a relevance also for historians,” he explains.

A feature film?
Scheffner agrees that it could be the subject of a feature film, though he is skeptical about such an idea. “I think I won’t be the person who could or would even like to do that. I guess there is the danger to reduce the whole context to the so called ‘human angle’, and I think this wouldn’t be very useful and wouldn’t give justice even to the protagonists of the story,” he says, and  adds, “In my film, I was trying to include somehow ‘fictitious’ elements – in a sense that I was concentrating on story telling. So it is maybe already a feature film.”

‘Halfmoon Files’ leaves one feeling haunted, as voices like that of PoW Bhawan Singh recorded in 1917 crackles, “When a person dies, he
constantly roams about
and becomes a ghost.
It is the soul that roams
 about.
The roaming soul is like air.
So a ghost is like air.
He can go everywhere.”