Two

A Film Fable.

Drama Family
12 min     7.5     1965     India

Overview

This short film shows an encounter, through a series of games, between a street child from the shantytowns and a child of a rich family, stationed at his window. The film has no dialogue and the action moves through the attempts at one-upmanship evident in their successive display of their toys. Their rivalry (a kite shot down by a toy rifle, for example) concludes with the opposition between the world of noise (the toys inside the house) and that of music (the street child's flute).

Reviews

Sayantan Chatterjee wrote:
Rating: 8.7 / 10
"The war in Vietnam is but a symptom of a far deeper malady within the American spirit."

— Martin Luther King Jr.
Satyajit Ray shows in 12 minutes of cinema without dialogues how impressionable the mind of a child can be, how the rich kid will have all the means to get one up over the poor kid but will always be insecure of the liberty the poor kid enjoys. It is this sense of liberty that would make the poor kid stand back up after a heavy loss. Robots will fall, the tune of the flute will be heard again. Imagine the rich kid to be the USA and the poor kid to be Vietnam. 12 minutes of Ray's cinema will tell you why America lost the war.

Similar