A Rifle and a Bag review – quiet study of a marginalised Indian family

If it’s the function of a documentary to open a window on the world – a part of the world that isn’t revealed by the nightly TV news – then this film is a distinct and deliberate success: a product of the NoCut Film Collective, founded in 2016 by Romanian Cristina Hanes, Indian Arya Rothe and Italian Isabella Rinaldi to explore collaborative and transcultural ways of film-making.

A Rifle and a Bag is about the life of a quiet Indian couple, Somi and her husband Sukhram, who have one son and a baby on the way. They are looking for work and are concerned about schooling for their children, but their condition is more complex than most: they are former Naxalites, ex-members of a Maoist guerrilla group that operated in the remote and forested areas of central India, fighting for land and employment rights for the poor. But the couple took advantage of an amnesty offer to any Naxalite who agreed to renounce their membership, and now they are apparently poised to embark on their new lawful life.

But the film shows that something is terribly wrong. Their eldest son is temporarily enrolled in a strict school which encourages the children to chant nationalist slogans, but he will only be allowed to stay there, or in any school, if Sukhram can produce his “tribal caste certificate”. Having this document will also be vital for their baby’s upbringing and their own chances of employment. But he is unable to get it; Kafkaesque problems mean the bureaucracy obstructs him at every turn.

Sukhram is assured he could procure this piece of paper if he went back to his home village (an almost Joseph-and-Mary situation looms) but it wouldn’t be certain even then, and in fact old acquaintances in that village, resentful of his revolutionary past, might cause problems if they recognised him. So the couple are drifting into a kind of internal statelessness, an unperson condition that the state has semi-intentionally inflicted on them. The film is cool and crisply shot and lit; a calm and cerebral look at marginalised lives.