The Half-Moon Files
>
> By Sushma Joshi
> published in Kantipur Online
>
> I happened, by accident, to hear about 'The Half-Moon Files.' The
> Berlinale, Berlin's international film festival, is the biggest in
> Europe after Cannes, and there were 250 films competing for attention.
> But the woman who told me about it was certain I would be interested.
> It was about the POW (Prisoner of War) camp in Berlin after WW 1 and
> had interesting anthropological elements, she said. 'It is about
> Indians in the POW camp,' she said. As soon as she said 'Indians', I
> knew I had to watch it. It was the last day of the festival, but I had
> no hesitation chucking my ticket to the Hongkong action movie and
> heading to the Arsenal, a theatre located in the basement of the
> Filmhause of Berlin.
>
> The documentary was in German, which I do not speak or understand. But
> it was probably the most interesting film I, as a Nepali, watched in
> the entire festival. The reason was this-- the film, an ostentious
> 'ghost story' in which filmmaker Philip Scheffener goes out to track
> down the voices of prisoners-of- war imprisoned in a camp in Berlin
> after WW1, features old archival sound files, a four minute film
> footage, and a treasure trove of photography.
>
> The filmmaker spends a great deal of time shooting the bureacrat at
> the Indian Embassy and the difficulties he encounters trying to get a
> shooting permit to India. This lavish attention to Indian bureacracy
> seems to lead him astray. For what I saw on the screen were not
> 'Indians', but face after face with distinctive 'Nepali' features.
> They had names like Dhanbahadur and surnames like Budathoki. They said
> they were 'Singhs', but the accent--rough mountain voices with a
> Nepali accent, gave them away as not the fieresome Tigers of the Sikh
> Punjabi regiments but Gorkhalis who had descended from the hills to
> make a living in the British regiments.
>
> There was an old photograph of a court with men in Nepali topis. The
> four minute footage, the only extanct one as far as I could tell,
> features a Dashain ceremony in which men perform a vedic ceremony
> before a goat is taken to be sacrificed. In the background,
> there is a dance performed by dhami-jhankri. Anybody who has taken a
> look at contemporary shamanistic cermonies in Nepal will instantly
> recognize this cermony. This was not Dusshera, as the filmmaker
> explained to me later, but Dashain--a very distinct form of
> celebration with its own geographical and cultural connotations. The
> causal disregard that most Indians hold for cultural distinctions
> between Nepalis, who have a distinct national and geographical
> reality, and Indians, was apparent in the way the researchers in India
> had informed the filmmaker. The Sikhs stand around watching but there
> is a little excited scamper as a group of Nepali men cluster around
> the priests who perform the fire ceremony, just before the white goat
> is brought to be sacrified.
>
> The film also tracked the way scientists used the POW camp as a rich
> treasure trove of ethnic groups to practise their first
> anthropological and ethnological experiments on. They measured body
> parts to figure out why the Germans were not as hardy as their
> enemies. This was the beginnings of the scientific racism of Nazi
> Germany which would manifest twenty years later, with tragic and
> far-reaching consequences.
>
> A german girl sitting next to me was kind enough to translate. The
> film ends with a funny story--although the filmmaker has never been to
> India, he appears in several news reports in India, 'shooting in
> Andhra Pradesh' on this story. The filmmaker, it appeared, was open to
> the humor of narratives, to the ways in which stories are made up and
> in which reality is often constructed and open to interpretation. I
> wondered how he would react if I told him his story was not complete.
>
> The ghost may have been tracked, but he seems to have left some
> important details out. Did he know that about fifty percent of the
> people he shows as POWs are not Indians, but Nepalis? So I asked him
> in the Q and A. Had his research assistant in India, by any chance,
> not told him that the men were Nepalis, speaking Nepali?
>
> The filmmaker, disappointingly, said that he had been aware of that
> they were Gurkhas, speaking a mixture of Khas and Hindustani, but that
> he had not felt it was important enough to distinguish between the
> many different groups from India. This would have complicated the
> story. I pointed out that Nepal was already a different nation state
> in the 1700s, far ahead of the Indians, but this apparently was not
> historically important to distinguish. It seemed incredible to me that
> an European researcher at this day and age, working with serious
> historical materials, would feel this was not pertinent, but
> apparently such was the case. The filmmaker talked a great deal about
> colonialism. I sat in the audience and thought of the irony of how the
> Nepalese reality, once again, had become submerged into a larger
> Indian one, but the critic of colonialism couldn't fathom this
> important distinction.
>
> There were large segments of black footage during which one can hear
> the voices talking. As I heard the Nepali voices from almost a hundred
> years ago talking about how their King would recall them back to their
> homeland from the terrors of Germany, I thought about how things
> haven't really changed. Nepal sends its men and women out to Malaysia,
> Korea, Iraq and Jordan these days, instead of Germany. But the faces
> and the voices are still the same, and the simple faith that their
> country, no matter how impotent, will save them eventually is still
> the same.
>
> 'The Half-Moon Files' moved me, not only because the voices from so
> far ago talking about displacement and loss were never heard by their
> countrymen, or understood by their captors, in their own time. It also
> moved me because this remains the case to this day--that Nepalis, to
> this day, remain an invisible group in the global conciousness.
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