The sound of crickets and croaking of frogs permeates the silence of the night. A young boy named Seita is washing dishes in the river as he is joined by Setsuko, his little sister. “Stay inside the net. You will get bug bites,” he tells her. “It’s dark and I’m scared,” she whimpers. Seita finds a way to resolve Setsuko’s difficulty. As he asks her to get inside the mosquito net in the cave—their new makeshift home—he opens his palms and releases fireflies inside the net. In a stunningly beautiful scene, the whole cave lights up with the quiet glow of the fireflies. One lands on Setsuko’s hair. “Look! It’s a hairpin,” Seita exclaims gleefully. Next morning, Seita sees Setsuko hunched on the ground, digging the earth. “What’s that?” he asks. “It’s a grave,” she replies. “Mama’s also in a grave, right?” Shock splashes across Seita’s face, as he sees Setsuko put the dead fireflies in the earth pit. Their mother’s burnt body being thrown in a pit full of the dead flashes before his eyes. “Auntie told me. Mama is already dead and in a grave,” Setsuko says solemnly, while burying the fireflies. Tears flood Seita’s eyes. He realises that Setsuko knows about their mother’s death. He tries to comfort her with a promise to visit their mother’s grave. A teary Setsuko looks up, heartbroken, and asks, “Why do fireflies have to die so soon?”
Caught In The Fences: Children Of War In Cinema
From dwelling on the impact of mass violence on children, to their integration into the infrastructure of war, filmmakers across the world have created works that see conflict through the eyes of a child.
Isao Takahata’s Grave of the Fireflies—a Studio Ghibli production made in 1988—is by far one of the most moving anti-war films of all time. Through the eyes of Seita and Setsuko, the film paints in poignant colours the horrors of World War II, which leave their childhood splintered. Grave of the Fireflies leads a league of films that are premised on children of war across the globe. From dwelling on the impact of mass violence on children, to their integration into the infrastructure of war, filmmakers across the world have created works that see conflict through the eyes of a child. At a time, when horrifying visuals from Gaza of headless bodies of toddlers and malnutrition-stricken babies have been blazing across our screens for the past twenty months, the International Day of Innocent Children Victims of Aggression assumes a macabre significance. It becomes a fitting occasion to reflect on some of these films, which look at how the harsh social realities of war shape young impressionable minds.
Iran—a country where filmmakers have consistently rebelled against the diktats and bans of an authoritarian regime—has a rich history of cinema that centres narratives through a child’s perspective. It is perhaps true, what they say—the most remarkable stories emerge from amongst people who face the most challenging predicaments. From Abbas Kiarostami’s Where is the Friend’s Home? (1987) to Jafar Panahi’s The White Balloon (1995) and The Mirror (1997); Majid Majidi’s The Colour of Paradise (1999) and Children of Heaven (1997) to Bahman Ghobadi’s A Time for Drunken Horses (2000) and Turtles Can Fly (2004)—Iranian directors have evolved a unique language of realism in the way their camera captures the tender dilemmas of childhood. Often, many of them tend to work with non-actors in their films, to step up the authenticity of emotions and avoid performances that are undercut by melodrama. Turtles Can Fly, in particular, is a film situated squarely in a warzone, right before the US invasion of Iraq. The film follows the lives of three children—Kak Satellite (Soran Ebrahim), Agrin (Avaz Latif) and Hengov (Hiresh Rahman)—at a Kurdish refugee camp on the border of Iraq and Turkey. While looking at innocence ravaged by war, Ghobadi also presents a wary disillusionment with the facade of “hope”, mobilised whenever a Western intervention is celebrated in regions ridden by conflict. The children become symbols of an irretrievable loss of humanity that is treated as “collateral damage” within the political games of the powerful.
The Chechen war and its impact on children has also been a persisting subject for several filmmakers from Europe. After the Soviet Union’s fall, Chechnya declared itself independent from Russia, leading to the First Chechen War between 1994 and 1996, and the Second War between 1999 and 2009. These conflicts have seen significant loss of lives, especially of Chechen civilians, and most of the war films situate their depiction within this human cost of war. In 2004, Finnish director Pirjo Honkasalo made The 3 Rooms of Melancholia—a landmark film that documented the impact of the Russo-Chechen conflict on children from both the warring sides. Apart from revealing the devastation of countless families and orphaning of children at a dreadfully young age, the film also threw light on excesses such as sexual violence against children that was used as a weapon of war. What The 3 Rooms of Melancholia documents in the non-fiction form, The Search (2014) narrates as fiction. Directed by French filmmaker Michel Hazanavicius, The Search strings together the journeys of Kolia (Maksim Emelyanov), a Russian army soldier and Hadji (Abdul Khalim Mamutsiev), a Chechen refugee child. With its breathtaking cinematography, the film charts the systematic dehumanisation that Kolia undergoes to turn into an efficient soldier, while Hadji struggles to make sense of the devastation he is surrounded by. Both their trajectories symbolise a lost innocence that is arrested by the violence that they witness and are subjected to. Through its intriguing formal framework, The Search takes the viewer from the “what” to the “why” and the “how” of the quagmire that is war.
In India, most war films are still plagued with the compulsive need to reinforce a jingoist idea of nationalism that benefits from castigating the enemy. Seldom does the human cost feature as a subject of importance in these films and demonisation becomes a key operative in this formula—sometimes of a neighbouring country, and at other times, of a religious community. However, there are a precious few filmmakers who do attempt to take the conversation beyond the language of hate. Ashvin Kumar’s Little Terrorist (2004)—nominated for the 2005 Academy award for best Live Action short film—is one such work. In a lively tale wrought with trepidation, Little Terrorist follows 10-year-old Jamal (Salim), a Pakistani Muslim boy, who loses his way across the Indo-Pak border while retrieving his ball during a game of cricket. He is protected by Bhola (Sushil Sharma), an Indian Hindu, in the nearby village, when the Army comes looking for him. In its tight runtime, the film manages to transcend the vitriol that often entails stories that are drawn from the tensions between these two countries and speaks of a humanity that, in an ideal world, would have been the prerogative of well-meaning citizens. In its poetic imagination, the film serves as a soothing balm for communities wounded by a bloodied history of loss and separation.
