Having watched a zillion films on Hitler’s hate for Jews, I thought I’d seen the theme examined from every imaginable angle – till I chanced upon the 2023 Stella. Ein Leben. (Stella. A Life.) at the just-concluded Red Lorry Film Festival (RLFF) in Mumbai. Unlike most Holocaust sagas, Stella. A Life. by Kilian Riedhof is not about Nazis, their Jewish targets, or non-Jews who saved lives. This is a biopic of a German Jew called Stella Goldschlag who was captured and tortured by the Gestapo, and became an informer to save her own skin.
Goldschlag allegedly betrayed hundreds of fellow Jews to escape being transported to a concentration camp herself along with her parents. The primary question raised by Stella. A Life. is this: Was Goldschlag a victim, a traitor, or both?
Riedhof’s interviews indicate that he was conscious of the sensitivities involved when turning a lens of scrutiny on a member of an oppressed community. This would be a concern for any considerate artist whose goal is purely to study psychology and history. The fear is not only that one might be misunderstood, cause offence and hurt, but also that irrespective of the chronicler’s intentions, such stories could be misused by hate-mongers to further demonise an already beleaguered people.
Similar concerns are evident in the conversation around the 2023 film Amal, which, too, was showcased at RLFF. Amal’s eponymous protagonist, a progressive Muslim schoolteacher in Belgium, grapples with the radicalisation of her Muslim students.
As a critic, I, too, have wrestled with these questions, especially in the past decade as anti-minority sentiment surged in India, and Hindi cinema embraced Islamophobia. In fact, in these circumstances, it was unsurprising to read social media chatter by well-meaning individuals accusing Jasmeet K Reen’s Darlings (2022) and Zoya Akhtar’s Gully Boy (2019) – unfairly, in my view – of contributing to the vilification of Indian Muslims. Yet, Darlings and Gully Boy did not fixate on the Muslimness of their leads – they just happened to be Muslim in realistic settings dominated by Muslims, where the good, the bad and the ugly were all Muslim, and any injustice by a Muslim was also fought off by Muslims. This is in contrast with, say, Padmaavat (2018), Kesari (2019) and the spate of low-brow propaganda vehicles released in the past two years that have obsessively underlined the religious identity of over-the-top, stereotypically Muslim antagonists and distorted facts, or outrightly lied to villainise Muslims.
The counter to demonisation is not deification, or whitewashing. The counter is normalisation and unprejudiced truth-telling. This is the purpose served by the likes of Darlings and Gully Boy within a Hindi film universe where Muslims are now rarely portrayed as regular souls with regular weaknesses and strengths that are found among regular folks in all communities.
Stella. A Life., on the other hand, comes from a Europe that has, for decades, told tales of Jewish and non-Jewish heroes in Hitler’s era. A hesitation to also depict flawed individuals in this or any other oppressed minority community, is self-defeating, and in its own way, a form of othering. To sidestep the likes of Goldschlag or, for that matter, Amal’s fictional students, would be a disservice to the truth and to their victims.
In this regard, even a progressive Hindi filmmaker is likely to be viewed with suspicion by liberals in the audience because, among India’s largest film industries, the Hindi industry has, for decades, had arguably the worst track record in the representation of religious minorities. The challenge must be met nevertheless, if we are to have any hope of improving the present dismal discourse on minorities in Hindi cinema.