Monsoon Views: Up Down and Sideways

By Sammie

Up Down and Sideways is the first feature film from the u-ra-mi-li project (meaning “the song of our people”) which purports to explore the connections between music and labour, both of which I am absolutely unqualified to comment on. I do practice urban farming, but am more like an armchair farmer who reads more than she grows. As for music, I do not remember those compulsory music lessons in primary school fondly, and routinely doze off at classical music concerts.

Anyway, don't stop reading just yet. It is also this distance which made me try harder to understand the villagers of a village in the borders of India and Myanmar through their voices as they laboured in the fields.

What are they singing? What are they thinking? What are the values that they believed in? One line which spoke to me was “If not for love, why would I return?”. What is this ‘love’ that they sing of? One finds the answer as one looks at the love the villagers have in what they do with each other. The term ‘work together’ is taken for granted in modern life - it is seen as a exercise in compromise, consensus and getting the work done, but it seems that working together for these villagers is more about sincerity and joy. It is labouring together but also resting after together. Work is mundane but working not only together but in love guarantees to the villagers, joy and satisfaction.

The film is as much about work as it is about music. One scene was well, laborious to watch. A fixed camera showed four men tilling the soil while singing for what seemed like forever (we were later told that this bit was about 7 minutes). This segment is perhaps the single most powerful moment which forces the audience, who initially expects to be entertained, to strain and to feel the intensity of what it means to work almost viscerally. The work song is also best 'appreciated' by the audience visually, as one ,atches the repetitive movement of the villagers as they work the fields to their voices.

What is precious about films like Up Down and Sideways is also the authenticity of these communities that they capture. Listening to the interviews with the villagers felt more like joining in on their daily chit-chat. They are relaxed as they talk about the mundane, banter and exchange jokes. We also get a snapshot of the village as we eavesdrop on elderly couples, middle-aged ladies, male siblings and youths. References to the outside world only make this portrait of the community more delicate - the audience is invited to mull over the impacts of evangelising by Christian missionaries, violence brought on by the Indian soldiers and most recently, the thoughts and ideas through Western and Korean media on the villagers.

It can be tempting to romanticise the village, its musical traditions and its culture, or even compare it to perhaps a further time back in our own cultures. However, films like this, or any efforts at capturing culture, cannot be expected to be an attempt at preservation and should not be taken as an occasion for nostalgia. These works are more like witnesses to human history - of how people have once lived - quietly confident in the changing contours of culture, revelling in its ephemerality rather than worry about its demise. There are important questions the film ends up asking about the changing values in societies across history and across geography, and this film is not the answer.

The film is in itself important however, because it is a poetic representation of a community which one would not have known if one did not choose to enter the landscape of the terraced fields, and listen to their voices. As someone used to getting my information through reading, it agonised me when I googled and found hardly a trace of this community in research or any form of substantial writing. This film is thus really an invitation for us to uncover communities in more serendipitous and poignant ways.

You can find out more about the Uramili project at https://uramili.in