Hollywood Is No Talliwood

George Gittoes was in Houston when I spoke to him, but now he's in New York, and a little while from now, he will be in Afghanistan. He is from Australia. Despite all this travel, he has still been able to complete a movie called "The Miscreants of Talliwood" about the film industry in Pakistan, specifically Peshawar and the Taliban-dominated northwest. This region's movies are known as Talliwood films. Mobile as Gittoes may be, his opinions are concrete. "Most documentaries," Gittoes says, "are so boring it's impossible to watch them." Interesting, considering Gittoes' Pakistan-based project, "The Miscreants of Taliwood," is itself a documentary of sorts. It's also a film-within-a-film, a piece of performance art, a participant/observer ethnography, a war report and a music video. "The medium," Gittoes says, "has to constantly reinvent itself." And this man with a movie camera was born for the job.

              

Well, if not born, then bred. Gittoes, who thinks of himself as an artist first and foremost, has been involved in community art since childhood, when he held puppet shows to raise money for the Red Cross. Artistic talent, Gittoes says, can be applied to social projects, and having spent over a decade, on and off, on other artistic and humanitarian ventures in Pakistan, he realized that "no one else could [get] into these provinces," and thus the onus was on him to "get there and do something about [it]," the 'it' being the plight of the fledgling film industry, only about four years old and already on the way out – not because of market troubles, but rather due to the Taliban groups in control of the area, whom Gittoes documents systematically shutting down film productions, destroying film vendors (and replacing them with vendors of ultra-violent propaganda videos depicting real violence, not the heavy-on-the-ketchup kind, which is so common in the Talliwood films), and terrorizing actors, actresses and filmmakers.

 

In the process of making "Miscreants," Gittoes became an actor in two of these ill-fated productions himself, along with local star Javed Musazai, whose large extended family survives on Musazai's film salary…so, no films, no food. As Musazai and Gittoes grow closer throughout the film, they begin referring to each other as brothers – and indeed, "Miscreants" investigates what it portrays as the global brotherhood of creative men and women. With "Miscreants," Gittoes breaches the tragedy of oppression, from the assassination of Benazir Bhutto to the arrests of young militants storming a mosque. But do not despair for the future of cinema. Gittoes is at work on an Oxfam program to subsidize Taliwood filmmakers, and this funding may result in something more than the typical, conventional Taliwood film, all dance numbers and explosions.

 

Elina Mishuris is a staff writer. E-mail her at film@nyunews.com.