When the river speaks

KARACHI:

It was 1966, when colour films were still a novelty, that Soviet filmmaker Andrei Tarkovsky famously dismissed them as a "commercial gimmick." For Tarkovsky, whose cinematic language flourished in the quiet, monochromatic worlds of Stalker and Nostalgia, the use of colour on screen was an extraordinary, almost otherworldly choice - far removed from the textures of ordinary life.

It's fitting, then, that Rahul Aijaz's debut Sindhi feature film, Indus Echoes, tells the story of ordinary lives through a deliberately desaturated lens. Running just 71 minutes, the film employs colour with a striking economy, even as it draws its inspiration from the Indus River - its water-soaked plains, sprawling fields, and the thick, shadowy trees that dot its agricultural landscapes.

Tarkovsky said, "Colour film as a concept uses the aesthetic principles of painting, or colour photography. As soon as you have a coloured picture in the frame, it becomes a moving painting. It's all too beautiful, and unlike life." While monochrome and muted palettes are not unfamiliar in Pakistan's burgeoning independent film scene, Indus Echoes feels like a deliberate act of homage to Tarkovsky's philosophy.

This is a landscape that might easily have been rendered in lush greens and radiant blues - a visual symphony of sparkling waters and clear skies. Such a film could have evoked the pastoral rapture of Bollywood's Shah Rukh Khan-starrer Swades (2004), a crowd-pleaser steeped in commercial sentimentality. Or perhaps it could have taken the form of a contemplative documentary, where the Indus serves merely as a backdrop to its isolated human subjects.

But Aijaz has little interest in commercially viable paths. With Indus Echoes, he isn't just taking the road less travelled - he's rejecting the map entirely.

On death and loneliness

Two men walk along a riverbank, searching for a third. One conceals a secret. The other harbours a plan. The third is an absence made palpable, a ghost that slips in and out of their conversation like the breeze catching on the river's surface. The men's pace is deliberate, the muted winter sun soft against the landscape, its light dulled by the weight of a persistent chill. Their steps are unhurried, allowing the camera to fix its gaze in alternating close-ups, each more probing than the last. In the film's confined 4:3 frame, this simplicity sharpens into something almost suffocating.

The film unfolds in five vignettes, tied together by the silent, haunting presence of an unnamed corpse. Drifting in the currents, it becomes less a character than a witness, its fragmented form - a sunken head here, a limb there - emerging only intermittently from the waves.

The corpse, macabre and strangely enduring, is less a figure of death than a reminder of its impossibility in this watery limbo. In the folklore of rivers, death resists permanence. Instead, it lingers, cycling between surface and depth, refusing the closure promised by soil and burial.

A father and son, out fishing, stumble across two dead bodies. One is a fish, the other is the man. When the two fishermen bemoan the dearth of fish and livelihood, wondering if they should move to Karachi and find another profession, the rebuttal follows in the same breath, dressed in despair both political and spiritual. The father will don a shawl and the crooked posture of his wife. Abandon the profession of their ancestors? For what? Karachi?

A different lexicon

Elsewhere, a poet and his younger lover sit with their backs to the camera, their intimacy captured in gestures rather than words. The poet speaks of a statue - odd, weathered, and strangely magnetic, while his companion listens, in awe of him, his words, and this statue where he finds his words in. It is moments like these when it is very easy to slip into the theatricality and frontal address that's long been a staple of Pakistani cinema. Certainly, it takes a writer with a vision to capture curiosity without condescension and self-importance, sentiments better reserved for philosophical treatises.

Notes of magical realism and black comedy intertwine to make the tenderly poetic dialogues neither declamatory nor polemical. For how else does a poet leave behind a fountain of words that turns his lover into a poet too?

To die in a river is to keep on living, even though no promises are made (or kept) on what will follow. Sure enough, the corpse does not depart. There is no burial and the predictable fixity of soil. There is no white light or a halo-stricken staircase leading somewhere new. Like its forlorn characters, the corpse in the river moves in circles between vignettes. It travels to the depths and returns to the shore of the same lonely river.

Like its characters, all the corpse knows is the Indus and its song, a rueful folkish tune lamenting the plunder of the water, its lands and its people.

Aijaz's writing is both careful and human in painting this limbo, executed by an intuitive cast. Vajdaan Shah, Ansaar Mahar and Samina Seher lead the film with a novel authenticity that brings to mind arthouse cinema's signature chemistry between the director and actors. When they are not talking, they are kept company by the sound of water and breeze that never makes the lack of activity tedious.

For the love of cinema

At the Karachi premiere of Indus Echoes on Thursday, I sit down with Mohammad Kamran Jawaid, the man steering Anthem Films, the official distributor for the feature. Jawaid exudes an infectious optimism, convinced he is part of a project that demands to be seen. Aijaz, on the other hand, appears almost dazed. "I cannot believe the film is complete and out there for people to see," he tells me.

His disbelief is understandable given the enormity of his ambition. With Indus Echoes, Aijaz seeks nothing less than the rebirth of Sindhi cinema - a tradition as storied as it is beleaguered. The first Sindhi feature, Umar Marvi, debuted in 1956, followed two years later by the blockbuster Abana. Though never as flourishing as Punjabi or Urdu cinema, Sindhi films experienced bursts of creativity until Himmat in 1997. After that, the industry seemed to vanish.

This history is not lost on Aijaz, who first ventured into Sindhi filmmaking with his short A Train Crosses the Desert in 2020. It became the first Sindhi film to secure spots on the international festival circuit. But if the weight of reviving an entire cinematic tradition loomed over Indus Echoes, it doesn't show on screen.

"I have been fascinated with the Indus River for over five years," he tells The Express Tribune. "Everything I think about ends up coming back to the Indus. Her story, from her perspective, is so important to me. She also has a voice. She also feels lonely."