The Materpiece: Children of War

There is no manipulation here in the merger of the murky and the magnificent. They have co-existed from time immemorial. In this film, the ugly and the cherishable are so close together you can touch both and come away a changed film viewer. The plot moves across several epic conflicts simultaneously. There is a teenager Rafiq (played with heartrending vulnerability by Riddhi Sen) who loses his entire family and his home and is left with only a sister (Rucha Inamdar) to flee from the brutality of his homeland to the relative safety of India. Rafiq's journey becomes a metaphor of Bangladesh's feral fight for freedom.

While the director has made extensive and telling use of documentary footage, including Indira Gandhi's rationale for Indian intervention in Bangladesh, there are many passages of unbounded symbolism leaping out of the screen. I was specially fascinated by a boat journey across a blood-soaked tell-tale river where a girl sees ghosts and other casualties of war violence as they jostle to tell her it is not over yet. A true blue epic of mind-numbing intensity Children Of War is the kind of cinema that David Lean would have attempted were he a witness to the barbarism that went into the formation of Bangladesh. The film's brutal brilliance and spiraling structure of dread doom and devastation make you wonder how first time director Mriyunjay Devvrat could muster such a masterly vision of human oppression and resilience.

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