Alms for a Blind Horse Directed by Gurvinder Singh

India (2011) - New Horizons

Anhey Gorhey Da Daan (Alms for a Blind Horse) is a refreshingly new film from the Indian state of Punjab. Documentary filmmaker Gurvinder Singh’s first feature film is based on a novel by Gurdial Singh of the same name, which he claims to have read many years ago and has been in his mind ever since.

The movie has quietly garnered international acclaim without a single beat of Bhangra, weddings under the rain or a confused Desi girl running away with a white man. This could have been mentioned in the ADFF synopsis of the movie to avoid the exodus of the weekend popcorn-crunchers halfway through the screening. The reason is the pacing of the story. It is excruciatingly slow. But in India, beauty and truth are virtues associated with patience. The director mentioned after the screening that expressionist paintings inspired him. The visual artistry is sparse yet surreal and at times, breathtaking. Sometime one gets the feeling the storyline has been reduced to the title of a painting.

Almost the entire cast is comprised of real-life villagers. This manages to take away the artificiality of drama acting. But sometimes it is replaced by robotic movements and expressions, like a herd of sheep forced to jump a fence. Gurvinder Singh is primarily a documentary filmmaker. Maybe it was the rigorous adherence to the novel, but the misery in the movie felt excessive. The young daughter in the household looks like she never had a friend in her life and is forced to make tea all day long. A fact rarely found in serious Indian cinema is that villages also tend to be peaceful, generally happy places. Families and relations live close together and the burden of sadness is shared among all. Are all low-income people in rural India destined to be miserable? Do they not smile, share a joke, and visit each other on birthdays? If given a camera, I wonder if rural Indian farmers will choose to make a movie based on Grapes of Wrath.

The audio is noteworthy. The drama in the movie is announced using unusual everyday sounds of the village and city. The rare but effective use of music, instead of dictating the emotion, enhances it. Alms For A Blind Horse has different shades of meaning that might not be understood by a non-Punjabi viewer. The subtitles do not say much for the story, but to a fan of serious films, the cinematic language fills the holes using light and sound. After this promising start, I would watch out for the name Gurivnder Singh in the coming years.

by Ziad Abdul Samad