Faiz 

Restored Pak-Indo classic dropped from Jio MAMI’s 18^th Mumbai Film Festival with STAR

At Jio MAMI’s 18th Mumbai Film Festival with STAR, which kicks off in two days’ time, of particular interest to film historians and cineastes in general was the Pakistani film, Jago Hua Savera (Day Shall Dawn). It was the only film from that country to find place in the programme. The inclusion sparked off controversy in the wake of hostilities along the border and several prominent Indians urging the boycott of anything Pakistani, including participation of Pakistani talent on art and media. Several Pakistani actors, music composers and singers are working in India for many years now, but demand for their boycott has been growing. Releases of some films have been stalled and the foreign artistes have been asked to go back. But it was hard to imagine that this outcry would impact Jago Hua Savera, made in 1958-59, by a Pakistani director with Indian talent.

Yesterday, there were reports of a Mumbai-based organisation, Sangharsh, filing a complaint against the organisers, and threatening to protest against the film at its screening. Its president, Prithvi Mhaske, had said the film is “likely to flare outrage among people”. His stand follows the directives issued by the Maharashtra Navnirman Sena (a political party, founded by Raj Thackeray, nephew of the ultra right-wing politician, late Balasaheb Thackeray, Supremo of the Shiv Sena. MNS was supported by Indian Motion Picture Producers’ Association (IMPPA) and the Cinema Exhibitors Association (CEA) in its stand against Pakistani talent and technicians in Indian films, in the wake of the India-Pakistan political skirmishes.

A one-line press release was issued today by the Mumbai Academy of Moving Image (MAMI), the organising body, citing the “current situation”. When asked to elaborate, by the prestigious Hindu daily, Festival Director Anupama Chopra, a TV journalist of good standing, refused to comment further, saying, “We said what we had to in the press release”.

Jago Hua Savera would have been the pièce de résistance of the festival, opined the Hindu, and for good reason.

Famous Pakistani film-maker and director Akhtar J. (AaeJay) Kardar, kid brother of Indian legend A.R. (Mianjee) Kardar and cousin of Pakistani cricketer Abdul Hafeez Kardar, made this film in 1959. It had Bengali actress Tripti Mitra in the lead, with many first-timers, and was shot in East Pakistan (now BanglaDesh, over 48 days, at the banks of the river Meghna. Based on a 1930s Bengali story by Indian writer Manik Bandopadhyaya, Padma Nadir Majhi (Boatman of the River Padma), it had dialogue and lyrics by Faiz Ahmed Faiz, and music by Indian maestro Timir Baran. A.J. spent his childhood in Mumbai, with his brother, who was already an established film-maker and studio-owner.

Faiz and A.J. often worked together after Jago Hua Savera. A.J. also made a documentary on the great sub-continent poet, Iqbal, and several others in Pakistani painters. He even made a film on Inder Sabha (1972). A great Indophile, A. J. had made a film on Budhha, in the 80s, and Mianjee had asked me if I could help market that in India, since there was little interest in the subject at home. After serving on Pakistan’s National Film Development Corporation (NAFDC, to avoid confusing it with India’s NFDC), he moved to the UK, where died in 2002, aged 76. Jago Hua Savera was possibly the only feature he ever made, but for one docu-feature, and though it was a commercial disaster, it won eleven international awards, including one at the Moscow Film Festival. It was also Pakistan’s entry at the Oscars.

Day Shall Dawn’s reappearance on the big screen has been brought about largely by Anjum Taseer, son of Nauman Taseer, the businessman who produced the film. Anjum tenaciously dug out the prints from storage in France, London and Karachi. Thereafter, screenings at the Three Continents festival in Nantes in 2007, and New York in 2008, followed. In 2009, painstaking restoration was begun, frame by frame. The film was screened in Kolkata, at the ICCR auditorium, as part of a tribute to Faiz, on his birth centenary at the Apeejay Kolkata Literary Festival, in January 2012.

Wrote the BBC, in June 2016:

General Ayub Khan had become the first military dictator of the country in a coup only months earlier, positioning the country firmly in the American camp, during the Cold War.

"Three days before the release of the film, the government asked my father not to go ahead with it," Anjum Taseer told the BBC.

"The government branded the young artists and writers involved in the making of the film as Communists."

It did not help that iconic poet Faiz Ahmad Faiz, who was a known revolutionary, had written the script, lyrics and dialogue of the film."Gen Ayub Khan imprisoned my father and many other artists," said Faiz Ahmad Faiz's daughter Salima Hashmi.

It was decided to premiere the film in London, but the military government instructed the Pakistan high commission to boycott the event. "But on that day, then high commissioner and his wife defied the order," Mr Taseer said.

Inspired by the early works of iconic Indian director Satyajit Ray, Jago Hua Savera is moulded in neo-realism, a genre shaped by Italian greats like Luchino Visconti and Vittorio De Sica. The film portrays the hardships of a fishing community in Saitnol village, near Dhaka, which is at the mercy of loan sharks. It presents an unusual collaboration between Pakistani and Indian professionals, only a decade after the bloody partition.

Bengali actor Tripti Mitra and her husband Shombhu Mitra were both members of the Left-leaning Indian People's Theatre Association of the 1940s. With Faiz, Baran and Mitra on board, the producer commissioned British cinematographer Walter Lasally, who later won an Oscar for his work on Zorba the Greek.

Within weeks, everybody, including its makers, forgot about the film. A classic that belonged alongside films like La Strada, The Bicycle Thief and Pather Panchali, was, instead lost to the world of cinema. Nobody talked about it for another 50 years, until two French brothers Philippe and Alain Jalladeau, founders of the Three Continents Film Festival in Nantes, France, decided to screen a retrospective of Pakistani films in 2007.

"It was then that Shireen Pasha (Pakistani documentary filmmaker and head of the department of film at the National College of Arts, Lahore) said, “You can't have a retrospective of Pakistani films without Jago Hua Zavera," says Philippe Jalladeau. What followed was a frantic search for a print of the film that took Taseer (his father died in 1996) across Pakistan and Bangladesh, and film archives in the western Indian city of Pune, London and Paris.

One week before the festival, Taseer found some reels of the film with a French distributor, some in London and the rest in Karachi, eventually putting them together for a "showable print". After the Nantes festival, Taseer took on the task of properly restoring the film and sent a copy to a lab in the Indian city of Chennai. "It took six months to get the copy released by the Indian customs," says Taseer, who then, exasperated by the delay, decided to take the film to London for restoration, in 2008, instead. It was finally completed in 2010.

On an unusually warm Sunday morning on 15 May, Taseer joined Faiz's daughter Hashmi and Philippe Jalladeau to present the film in the Bunuel theatre, at the Palais des Festivals venue of Cannes. The hall was half empty - there were no Pakistani film critics, and only four Indian journalists were present.

Many more were looking forward to the privilege at Jio MAMI’s 18th Mumbai Film Festival with STAR. That day did not come, and this dawn, turned out be a dream.