Window to an undertaker’s world

Shoma A. Chatterji

Manoj michigan’s silent film I, Reborn bagged the prestigious Remi Award at the 52nd Houston International Film Festival recently. The film also won the Best Director Jury Award at the ninth Dadasaheb Phalke Film Festival. Like a poem in celluloid, the beautiful film captures the cycle of birth, love and death through the life of a young Dom, who ekes out a living for himself and his paralytic father by cremating dead bodies. Doms belong to the Dom community. They are outcastes, mostly engaged in professions such as agricultural labourers, weavers, and cremation of dead bodies. They are the lowest in the caste hierarchy of Hindus. But this Dom, a young man with his old and physically challenged father on an isolated beach, waits for a dead body to come along. The beach is not a conventional cremation ground but circumstances have turned it into one.

I, Reborn journeys through the cycle of life — death, birth and love through the eyes of this young and able-bodied man. Besides looking after his father, who can neither speak nor move and communicates with a stick, his day is spent cooking, cutting down wood for cremation and cremating the occasional dead body that arrives on the beach. The lack of dialogue makes the ideology of the film all the more loud and intense.

I, Reborn opens a window to the world of an undertaker/dom who lives in isolation with his aged father in the backwaters of the Bay of Bengal. He takes care of his almost-paralysed father. His father observes his son cremating the departed relatives of the villagers nearby. Suddenly, one day, life enters their cocooned world. A baby arrives floating, along the waters in a small basket. The young man picks it up, takes it back to his ramshackle hut. He tries to feed the baby. This defines “Life”. The baby gives a completely alien perspective to the outlook of the young Dom and his father.

One day, a woman’s corpse, bedecked in bridal finery, arrives on the beach for cremation. This defines “Death.” In this woman, the young man tries to recognise the face of a newly married bride, who had sailed across a few days ago. This illustrates “love” which is also replicated in the relationship with the old father who cannot speak but “speaks with a stick” and also, the young man’s growing relationship with the little baby that gurgles and smiles and communicates with him in its own baby language. This defines his “family”. 

The young man is not a microcosm of the community he represents because he stands on his own. His silence speaks a thousand words. The silent film is dotted with ambient sounds of wood being axed to pieces, crackling wood from the fire of the burning pyre, waves of the sea, and later on with cries and gurgles of the child. The ailing father feels a bit left out with the arrival of the baby but the baby adds colour and “music” to the young man’s otherwise colourless life, all within a span of 20 minutes.

Says Michigan, “Death as a subject always fascinated me. I wanted to make a silent film on death as life’s ultimate truth — the truth that rekindles the breath of life again. It was difficult to formulate the screenplay and convey the relationship between father and son — pointing out the nuances, the role-play, emotions, anger, joy and ultimately the realisation of the end and the beginning. Thanks to my producers, my entire team of friends and technicians that this dream was realised. They worked with practically minimal budget without any demands, and passionately made it their own film. This is their film.”