SAT OCT 23 2004
7:00 War and Peace
Anand Patwardhan
(India, 2002)

Artist in Person

(Jang aur Aman). “The government is like a mother. If a mother feeds poison to its own child, what is the child to do?” A man living near the site of India's 1998 nuclear weapons tests sums up the central question of this powerful film. The issue is not only the physical poison of radioactivity, but the social poison of militarism. As India and Pakistan enter the nuclear age, Patwardhan shows us a wide range of responses, some of them verging on the surreal. People celebrating the tests explode fireworks inside a sculpted dove to show that the bomb is “for peace.” While protesters march across the country pleading for nonviolence, fervent nationalists sign petitions in blood, declaring “those who clash with us will be ground to dust.” Schoolgirls in Pakistan give inflammatory speeches, but afterward admit they disagree with their own arguments. (For Patwardhan, the sense of personal goodwill between individual Indians and Pakistanis, apart from political rhetoric, is “the silver lining in the mushroom cloud.”) Patwardhan listens to survivors of the blasts at Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and travels to Washington, D.C., giving a chilling reminder of the implications of nationalism far beyond the subcontinent. - Juliet Clark

Written, Photographed by Patwardhan. (130 mins, In English and Hindi with English subtitles, Color, DV-Cam, From First Run/Icarus)

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