Partition.
Margret Atwood once said, “In Canada, everyone is talking and nobody is listening” Partition is a film that often feels like this. A Canadian production financed by Telefilm Canada Featuring an international cast – Jimmi Mistry (east is east) Kristen krueik (Smallville) and Irfan Khan (Maqbool), Neve Campbell(Neve Campbell) among others, the english language film is shot with a polish of a diploma film from a major Canadian university (which is to say It’s technically brilliant even if the screenplay looks like it’s filtered through the South Asian Studies department of the University of Ottawa).
By now we are familiar with a canadian frame to an Indian film. Deepa Mehta’s Earth or Hunt Hoe’s Seducing Maaryah are good representative samples. Canada is a fascinating country ful of a sociologist’s dream of issues and problems, not least because the reform impulse is solid among canada’s arts establishment. The country has come a long way since Native Americans were legally game , and their mulatto population (called the metis) were legally chattel. But there still survives today some element of memory of these days ,and with its liberal immigrant friendly policies, the nation still holds on to its traditional cultural values in a contradictory conflict inducing way, and this often makes for great feature films Specially from it’s minorities( the Sikhs, the Armenians, the tamils, the Bengalis) who often come to Canada from conflict ridden places. The resonance they find with canada’s native peoples of the past is fascinating to let unfold as cinematic texts.
The film partition is almost transparently a Canadian frame of an Indian historical event. You can see whom each group in the Indian frame represent in their “real “ Canadian avtars, if you have any knowledge at all of the histories in Canada, It’s the “Gadar” Story , lite remanufactured for an English speaking Audience. It’s the partition, Women are getting raped and people getting slaughtered for religious affiliation and a former soldier in the british army does the honorable thing by taking in a beautiful muslim girl, thus saving her from the mobs.
The film is shot In India and British Columba, (giving the Canadian frames more life ) and cinematographed beautifully, compositions speaking much more eloquently than the dialog . It’s worth watching for what the colors say, alone. Because the subalteran history is not of Indians…it’s of Canadians.
