Synopsis
During India's celebration of the fiftieth anniversary of its independence, filmmaker Maree Delofski visited the residents of a home for destitute, elderly Anglo-Indians. Here, living in a quiet refuge away from Calcutta's bustling thoroughfares, 35 witnesses to the momentous events of half a century ago remember vividly how their community was forever altered; many continue to maintain their true home is Britain.
Impact
The Director's Statement
"The social and cultural impact of a documentary can be registered in many different ways but there is no doubt that documentary helps to shape the cultural and social life of our nation and, significantly, its image abroad. Documentaries, because of their privileged relationship to reality, send out waves of information into the community and can resonate profoundly with audiences in many different ways. Consider the range of Australian documentary produced over the last fifteen to twenty years and one begins to get a sense of why it is important – not so much as an industrial artefact but as a kind of aesthetic, creative ‘messenger service’ to, or ‘dialogue provoker’ with the community.
A film I made in 1998 had a particular kind of impact with audiences. A Calcutta Christmas is a film about a group of elderly Anglo-Indians living in a home for the destitute in Kolkata. The residents were, what every documentary filmmaker hopes for, great characters. However, their life in the home was quite isolated from the mainstream of Indian society and apart from times like Christmas there were few visitors. I was moved to make this film after I visited the home and realised that many of these elderly people felt a strong connection to Australia, even though they had never been here and would likely never visit. Some were the parents or relatives of younger Anglo-Indians who had emigrated to Australia after Indian independence and who had lost touch with the relatives left behind in India. Theirs was a hidden kind of a world… and yet still, some of them dreamed of Australia.
What I hoped to communicate to an audience was both the pathos of the residents’ situation together with a sense of their culture and their amazing resilience. A Calcutta Christmas was screened on SBS and internationally on television eg Sundance Channel. also screened at local and international film festivals. Each screening of the film on Australian television brought an onslaught of communication from the audience to me, the filmmaker. The questions were always the same, ‘how can I help these people, where can I send money, clothes, assistance?’ The audience’s impulse to help, to give, to connect, was not a passing fad. For example, a resident had mentioned in the film that she needed a winter coat. Consequently, so many coats were sent from Australia to the home that its administrative system (that had never had to deal with this kind of mass delivery before) was put in a state of mini-crisis! Correspondences were also started with residents and money was sent too. Viewers who had seen the film and were visiting Kolkata often tried to visit the home to see if they could help the residents in any way. But best of all, a family viewing the documentary in Australia recognised a long lost family member – and after many years, contact could be made. I had hoped that something like this might happen.
When the film was screened a number of times on the Sundance Channel in the USA similar audience reactions occurred. I had not anticipated the strength of the reaction when I set out to make the film – I had really tried to communicate a sense of my ‘feeling’ about the Home and its people. In that sense, the information the documentary conveyed was as much emotional as empirical. Audiences connected, not in a passive way, but actively. The film, in a way, facilitated a dialogue between the audience and the Home. It was a great outcome.
AWARDS
Certificate of Merit (2000) San Francisco International Film Festival (Golden Gate Awards) Television. Category 6. Society & Culture
Silver Conch (2000) Mumbai International Film Festival for Documentary
Short & Animation Films (MIFF) (International Video Competition - Non-fiction up to 60 mins)
Bronze WorldMedal - Television Documentary and Information Programs - Human Relations (1999) New York Festivals: International Television Programming & Promotion
Honorable Mention (1999) EthnoFilm Fest, Berlin
Golden Plaque for best documentary (1999) Chicago Film Festival
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