Date | Dec 22, 2016:
In one of the opening scenes of Chandrashekhar Reddy’s Fireflies in the Abyss, we see the protagonist, a 11-year-old boy called Suraj wrestling with the idea of waking up early, hours before the crack of dawn. It is dark, on top of the Jaintia Hills in Meghalaya and like any child that age, we can see him trying hard to negotiate with the remnants of sleep that pull him towards the bed. Finally, sleep loses the battle and he wakes up, wears his shoes and sweater.
You expect him to pick up a school bag but you see him instead taking a pickaxe in his hand and wearing a head-torch. Slowly, Suraj makes his way to a ‘rat-hole’ mine, descending steep chutes into narrow horizontal tunnels where he crouches for hours together to scrape coal out of hard rock.
Reddy’s film, which was screened recently as part of Vikalp, Bengaluru’s Doc@Everest series, does not prepare his audience for what is to come. Along with Suraj, the camera too enters the coal pits, thrusting us into complete darkness. As the camera frantically searches for light, a couple of head torches from crouching workers guide our vision. Dark, grey, wet surfaces are revealed, sounds of heavy breathing and of pickaxes scratching hard rock form the soundtrack. There is a sense of foreboding, of doom and of suffocation and one searches for the little child that is squatting in some corner, perhaps full of fear, like us.
Using the medium of cinema in a rather compelling manner, Reddy lays bare the truth of a part of Jaintia Hills, the ‘epicentre of illegal coal mining’ as he terms it. While he follows the story of Suraj for the most part, he also takes us closer to the lives of other mine workers, mostly older men, who were each drawn to the coal pits for a variety of reasons. Nishant, for instance, had come hoping to return in a year, after making enough money for college. But had stayed on, unable to find an escape, Reddy tells us.
Through Nishant and Suraj, Reddy introduces us to a bunch of migrants from Nepal. They have each made a home close to the mines, but hope to return to their ‘real’ home soon. For Suraj, this idea of home is a little complicated, for he was born close to the mines. The idea of going to Nepal does not excite him, for he has never known another home.
Reddy’s camera listens in as much detail as it reveals. Once in a while, we hear the filmmaker’s voice gently nudging the protagonists to speak about the choices they have made, their dreams and what they think about the coal pits.
However, it is the child’s journey that forms the anchor of the film. Suraj lives with his alcoholic father, his mother is no more. He is close to his sister’s family and his closest friend is a 12-year-old boy called Shaila. When Shaila and his family suddenly decide to return to Nepal, Suraj is devastated. He escapes to another camp and even joins a school there for a brief period. Reddy traces Suraj and spends some time with the new-school going child that Suraj is now. There is an uplifting moment in the film, when we see Suraj reading out a lesson in English from his textbook as Nishant looks on. But as circumstance would have it, a year later, Suraj returns to the mine. “Karna padega na,” (have to do it , no?) he says simply. And the camera watches again in horror as he descends the chute again. Curiously, the perspective or the stories of the mine owners or the business side of things do not feature in the film at all. One wonders if that perspective too would have enriched the film a little more.
As a filmmaker, Reddy’s style is quirky and bold. More than once, he throws the camera into the coal cart and sends it into the pit. The cart becomes the camera and its wide sweeping movements take one closer physically to the life inside the pits. Outside, Reddy often breaks out of the static camera mode and punctuates his narrative with photographs and music. These break the monotony and also serve to create cinematic heroes out of the protagonists. Each one gets a soundtrack, a series of photographs—asking us to pause and look closely at their lives. Then he does something else too: using a mix of narrative, visuals and sound, he also takes us into the minds of the workers while they are inside the pit. A telling example of this is when Suraj describes ‘Dedhfoot’, a monster he believes that is lurking in the darkness of the pit, which attacks and kills people if he does not like them-- a little boy's explanation for the workers' death in the mines.
(Source: http://www.thehindu.com/)