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Police violence, inner workings of power put under the scanner in artist-filmmaker Pallavi Paul’s ‘The Blind Rabbit’

By Faizal Khan

Premiered at the 50th International Film Festival Rotterdam earlier this week, ‘The Blind Rabbit’ looks at the Emergency, 1984 riots, 2019 Jamia Library attack and the 2020 Delhi riots.

‘The Blind Rabbit’, directed by Delhi-based contemporary artist and filmmaker Pallavi Paul, premiered on the opening day of the International Film Festival Rotterdam (June 2-6).

Somewhere in the middle of Pallavi Paul’s new film, The Blind Rabbit, is a heart-rending story of children arrested during the Emergency unable to remember their home address when the time comes for their release. There were hundreds of boys aged 7-16 who were picked up from the streets during 1975-77 to bump up the number of daily detentions.

“At the time police were instructed to make 18-20 arrests every day,” says a retired police officer who is interviewed in the film. The officer, whose identity is not revealed, goes on to say that under pressure “very young children” were also put in jails and remand homes after “falsely” tagging them as “found while committing a crime”.

The Blind Rabbit, which premiered earlier this week at the 50th edition of the International Film Festival Rotterdam (IFFR), is an explosive film on police violence. A combination of documentary and fiction, the 42-minute film uses archival footage, social media content and interviews to create a series of landscapes of unanswered questions.

Read entire article here: https://www.moneycontrol.com/news/trends/features-2/police-violence-inner-workings-of-power-put-under-the-scanner-in-artist-filmmaker-pallavi-pauls-the-blind-rabbit-6987211.html/amp?__twitter_impression=true&s=09