Consider the following statement: “Oh let my camera record the desperation of the small countries. Oh how I hate you, the big nations, you always think that you are the only ones, and others should only be part of you and speak your language. Oh come, come the dictatorship of the small countries.” (Lost Lost Lost, Jonas Mekas).

The perplexity and resentment notwithstanding can we take to heart that, the implications of Jonas Mekas’ position don’t only remain confined to a artistic discourse, or, even to a merely big-nation Vs. small-nation, America Vs. third world, center Vs. margin, north Vs. south matrix but, this apocalyptic discursive wound lend itself to a metaphysical schema to birth an absolute will-to-hear-oneself-speak on it’s own terms rather than through a mediated, and co-opted ready-made or “industry” formulation. Please, bear this on mind when you watch The Citizens of the Wombs, because in my first outing as a feature film director, I maintain my position, essentially, as a rhetorician. Film, unlike movies, has always been a philosophical epiphenomenon.

The Citizens of the Womb is not handcuffed to the history of Hollywood or “industry” movies and, is unencumbered by the representational and mimetic burden; getting a grip on The Citizens of the Wombs’ aesthetic strategy, as it were, at least for me, entails also an understanding that the very act of seeing and explaining the world of the “Wombs” shall not resemble anything that we have learnt, hitherto through movies, about the world, and that in the events that take place on the screen, there is the itinerary of a constantly thwarted desire to make the story explain. Forgive me, if I make it sound like this film has a slant to sale, because it does not. Also, beware christmas shoppers! The Citizens of the Wombs’ story is the oldest chestnut there is and, the story is not the point at all. Nonetheless this is a tale of one man’s righteous crusade against a whole state: Le Ebad is a vigilante whistle blower, and an internationally renowned filmmaker–from a country so pathetic and cartoonishly oppressive that it’s suffocation-inducing name is invoked only during disasters: flood, hurricane, political unrest, fire or collapsing of textile factories–who is being hounded by a special para-military force to be renditioned to USA. Le Ebad’s last film, The Citizens of the Wombs, was destroyed and, Le Ebad was arrested by the Authority. Before Le Ebad was arrested, Thomas, on a commission from European Public TV, had tracked him down to make a documentary on the making of The citizens of the Wombs; Thomas has been interviewing people from Le Ebad’s network: a motley crew of hackers, and dissidents who had published sex tapes of government officials or brutal videos of people being killed by government goons, and mobilizing convincing–or, comic, depending on your position– analytics connecting these events with America’s post 9/11 war-on-terror policy in the south Asia.

The film’s narrative action dwells around Le Ebad’s mysterious disappearance, and the extra judiciary killing of his friends; as a matter of fact the turning point of the film takes place when Le Ebad disappears, as it seems to trigger a bizarre chain of events. The dark cast of characters that people Le Ebad’s life–MK Ultra handlers and slaves, assassins, hackers, dissidents, porn-stars–are somehow lost exiles from a season of disposable heros; the turbulence of the big bad World connects and infects Le Ebad’s otherwise insular mental and physical precinct only through violence. The recurring vision of an uncanny city–from the perspective of a moving motorcycle or through a car window–is a key to understand the nervous energy, and what Maurice Blanchot, invoking Marx, called, “the ghost dance”–of the people with objects–of The Citizens of the Wombs. Reflections on the invisible and/or impending disaster, rupturing and (re)forming alliances, links, chainings, connections and mutations form the emotional clutter of the film. (Also, people like Quentin Tarantino,and Kathryn Bigelow make cameo to question or deconstruct the ‘rightness” of the emotion the viewers might begin to feel.) I privileged lyricism over narrative; although I mined Bengali films–Satyajit Ray, Ritwik Ghatak etc–for visual ideas but, my prime métier in audio-visual plagiarism plunders the oeuvre of Jean-Luc Godard, and Alain Resnais. I always felt Godard was a minor thinker, though an technically innovative craftsman, and for years my critical engagement with Godard had been like ” a steady groundbass” to which much that I experienced was set in counterpoint; his best art was dependent on appropriating something beautiful and alive–like a Rolls Royce or a shanty town–and destroy it to affect and explain the current relationships. On the other hand, I am not interested in art or appropriation at all, as utility, firmness and beauty would be unsustainable in the unsettled,uncategorizable and “sick” images I work with; my open source logic which upbraids cinematic grammar and succeeds no precept or pattern but blastomic growth, has become the only thread of a plot, connecting moments into a narrative that stage a cinema of, what Paul Virilio inscribes, “pure war”; the cancer-structure might be a simple chain of events with no simple beginning, middle, and end; cancer might be embellished with diversions, digressions, and picaresque twists, be accompanied by subplots to fork into alternative scenarios explored in an organ ready to mutate. In other words, The Citizens of the Wombs is conceived as a cancerous growth, with synthetic and expendable permeability,and I have used tools of a lapsed genre to topple the false structure that describe contemporary life, and the untold, unexamined events of contemporary lives, on screen where new states of matter and new forms of relations appear, forming new possibilities of, once again recalling Marx, the “ghost dance” between people, objects, and meanings.

I have attempted to subvert the empathy of the audience with my characters; empathy that we assume is rooted in the recognition of a shared system of values between a audience and the filmmaker: the world I present is brutal and insular; my seamless mix of fiction and non-fiction, the naive hyper-real look and the mostly un-staged documentary content intervene in the current Hollywood/Occidental packaging of “torture”,”international terrorism”,”war-on-terror”,”dangerous brown bodies” and the ensuing presupposition of values by disrupting the formulations and the semiotic chain of an entire socius which make for a grueling viewing experience in the realm of the taboo and déclassé.

Also, The Citizens of the Wombs is peopled with un-emotive amateurs; the protagonist(s) of the film are permanently lodged deep in their own groove, awkwardly presenting themselves to the camera evoking a stilted, blue airtightness of the soul. But, at the same time, I have attempted to deftly handle the disjointed small-scale dramas of their imagined lives; whats on screen is so lucidly intended that, it is almost passionate, and intelligent, and despite the nostalgia of cold experimental credentials the mood of sadness, poetry, and pulp sustains beyond the temporal frame of the film. The Citizens of the Wombs illustrates the taut tension between militant aestheticism and my need for an impure filmic process leading to the effect that Althusser once described as “ruptural unity”, inventorying the infinity of traces forming my body, my body politic, signaling and framing the moment in which the coexistence of ethics and aesthetics, culture and art, black, brown and white, politics and poetry become antagonistic; in which a cry is drowned in clamor, a conversation is cut on and, a question asked by dead bodies hangs in the air. The Citizens of the Wombs is a collage of my soul’s contents; where innocence dies, the wicked wins, but there are no moral outrage, no bereavement because everything is just an illusion, nothing is real,and in the end, all that matter is a fragile zen of fighting disillusionment and the art of motorcycle maintenance.