Ramkhind, A Warli Village
2003, 78 min
Synopsis:
A glimpse into the everyday life of the famously reclusive and creative Warli tribe. Ramkhind is a village in Thane district, a little over 100km from Mumbai. Yet in the year 2000, this village had managed to stay centuries away from the mainstream, preserving it’s ancient way of life and rich ecosystem. Gods, ghosts and tigers still inhabited their world.
The film is a portrait of the village, quietly following the rhythms and routines of its inhabitants from dawn till nightfall. This tribal village on the threshold of modernity is observed through the digital camera, with no preconceived ideas. The social roles and beliefs of the villagers come across alongside fragments of their inventive material culture, including their art, organic to their life.
On the film:
“the film is a breakthrough in terms of the relationship between image and sound.”
– Olaf Moller, Film Comment
“A Warli tribal village in Western India, where artisan painters have developed a whole repertoire of brilliantly expressive forms. Gods, demons, and tigers haunt the forests and crossroads…”
– Cinema Du Reel
“… the film is more interested in registering the rhythm of a place and a people than in mounting a pedagogical project. It observes the villagers’ insignificant habits, takes in its stride their superstitions without judgment, and discovers their investment in mainstream religion… We notice how Warli painting on the walls of the houses in the village derive from lived experience, and we realize that this film is a comparable enterprise.”
– Srikanth Srinivasan, Modernism, by other means: the films of Amit Dutta (2017)
“Ramkhind (A Warli Village), which was made in partnership with the Department of Anthropology at the University of Pune. Here, Dutta portrays a village in which the spiritual world he describes is still lived out every day – a fascinating document that gives Western viewers in particular an understanding of the point of departure for Dutta’s world.”
– 56th International Short Film Festival, Oberhausen 2010, Festival Catalogue
“Of all [Amit Dutta] films, Ramkhind reads the most like an ethnography. In the film, [he chooses] to focus on the hidden dimensions of the village: the powerful narratives that are invisible to the camera, but very real and influential to the culture of the village and to the craft of the Warli artisans living there.”
– Shambhavi Kaul, Amit Dutta by Shambhavi Kaul (Interview), Bomb Magazine, September, 2017
“…this project helped Amit Dutta arrive at a set of habits that would soon become hallmarks of his style: his immersive sound design, his attention to minute environmental details, his willingness to linger in a space waiting for a disruption or a shift in the atmosphere, and his tendency to place works of art in a kind of symbiotic, mutually dependent relationship with the landscapes and places that enclose them.”
– Max Nelson, Dreams of Light: The Cinema of Amit Dutta, CinemaScope.