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DAM/AGE traces writer Arundhati Roy's bold and controversial
campaign against the Narmada dam project in India, which will displace up to a
million people. The author of The God of Small Things, which won the
prestigious Booker Prize in 1998, Roy has also published The Cost of
Living, a book of two essays critical of India's massive dam and
irrigation projects, as well as India's successful detonation of a nuclear
bomb. In her most recent book Power Politics, Roy challenges the idea
that only experts can speak out on such urgent matters as nuclear war, the
privatization of India's power supply by Enron and issues like the Narmada dam
project.
As the film traces the events that led up to her imprisonment, Roy meditates on
her own personal negotiation with her fame, the responsibility it places on her
as a writer, a political thinker and a citizen. As she puts it in
DAM/AGE, "The God of Small Things became more and more
successful and I watched as in the city I lived in the air became blacker, the
cars became sleeker, the gates grew higher and the poor were being stuffed like
lice into the crevices, and all the time my bank account burgeoned. I began to
feel as though every feeling in The God of Small Things had been
traded in for a silver coin, and [if] I wasn't careful, I would become a little
silver figurine with a cold, silver heart."
The film shows how Roy chose to use her fame to stand up to powerful interests
supported by multinational corporations and the Indian government. For her, the
story of the Narmada Valley is not just the story of modern India, but of what
is happening in the world today, "Who counts, who doesn't, what matters,
what doesn't, what counts as a cost, what doesn't, what counts as collateral
damage, what doesn't."
In a clear and accessible manner, the film weaves together a number of issues
that lie at the heart of politics today: from the consequences of development
and globalization to the urgent need for state accountability and the freedom
of speech.
A First Run/Icarus Films movie. 50 minutes.
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