The shocking documentary “Invisible Demons” blows a wind of fear on Cannes

Suffocating atmosphere on the Croisette. Nothing to do with the summer temperatures recorded in Cannes. The discomfort comes from the documentary “Invisible Demons” by Rahul Jain, screened this week in a special “Cinema for the climate” screening, which reveals the hell of pollution on the daily life of Indians.

Because the climate apocalypse is well underway in the new opus of the Indian director. The visually stunning documentary presents the enormous cost of economic development on the environment in India. As in his previous work “Machines” (2016), which explored the unbearable working conditions in an Indian textile factory, “Invisible Demons” tells through the eyes and words of the poorest of the climate emergency which is no longer for them a prospect but a terrifying reality.

“For a very long time, the Yamuna River was Delhi’s lifeline,” says the director and narrator at the start of the film. Yet, as far back as he can remember, Jain had never seen a clean river in his childhood spent in the greenest areas of the Indian capital. In his child’s mind, rivers have always been “either black or white”.

Rahul Jain was born in New Delhi in 1991, the year India opened up its economy and succumbed to the forces of rampant capitalism. Thirty years later, his work explores how these forces precipitated the cataclysmic changes in the lives of ordinary people, poisoning the air they breathe and the water they use for drinking, cooking, making a living and perform purification rituals. Even the once celebrated monsoon has turned into a deadly plague, arriving too late and hitting too hard.

Extracts from newsletters and the voice-over of Rahul Jain – the narrator – set the apocalyptic scene fueled with a lot of alarming figures. In particular on the annual number of heat waves which has increased more than twenty times in less than ten years. But the film is not a collection of edifying data. “Invisible Demons” addresses the climate emergency above all through the sensitive experience of climate change: the unbearable heat, the lack of water, the mountains of waste, the mosquitoes “exterminated with toxic chemicals”, and the smog so thick that cars and rickshaws keep their traffic lights on at all times, hoping other drivers will spot them. Monster traffic jams inevitably take up a significant portion of the film.

Radical, Rahul Jain approaches the subject through the prism of the Anthropocene, this new geological era characterized by the advent of men as the main force of change on Earth, surpassing geophysical forces. Before his Cannes premiere, France 24 was able to meet him in the company of the film’s editor and co-writer, Yaël Bitton.

France 24 : Can we consider that this new film, “Invisible Demons”, as the second chapter of your work on human exploitation and self-destruction ?

Rahul Jain: I would hate to repeat myself. But I do remain inspired by similar undercurrents. When I spoke about my project to Martín Plot, one of the most important teachers of my life, he said to me: “Oh Rahul, your work is part of a broad critique of the capitalocene”. I did not know this word, I had to look for its meaning. This concept questions the responsibility of capitalism in the destruction of the planet. This idea is surely the common point of my films.

California light is said to be the source of the energy and optimism of Hollywood cinema. Conversely, is the smog of New Delhi the reverse of our capitalist system? ?

Rahul Jain: I don’t want to draw parallels. The two lights are beautiful, but they are different. The light and smell of Delhi has a tremendous charm on me, who grew up there. During the monsoon, after a heavy downpour, there is a beautiful pink sky. We breathe the dust of the Thar desert. You are transported into the sensuality of a humid and rainy landscape, and this is what Delhi looks like. There is a certain poetry in all of this, a form of romanticism.

The sensory experience is at the heart of your film. Was it important for you to focus on the human experience rather than the pollution per se ?

Rahul Jain: If I could interview animals, I would. But the human genome limits us in our communication with them. Even though I decided to make this film after watching a bee crawl through a puddle one day during a heat wave. She was dragging her two hind legs, millimeter by millimeter, and by the time she reached the puddle, she died. It was terrifying. And I know if that can happen to a bee right now, we’re not far behind.

“Invisible Demons” was presented in the special selection “Cinema for the climate”, here in Cannes. Some movies try to conjure up the bright side and give hope, but yours looks a bit darker.

Rahul Jain: We had a great discussion about it. I wondered if my job as an artist was to give hope when I didn’t see it. Something deep inside me refuses to do this. No, it’s not my fucking job to create hope if I don’t see it.

Yaël Bitton: We went even further in the discussion. We wondered if humanity really needs to survive. Of course, this is a very nihilistic question. We have created a narrative where we have to survive as a species. But if you transcend that narrative, you might be able to start telling the story slightly differently. Your job is not necessarily to give optimism to humanity.

Rahul Jain: Socially, we are still stuck in a pre-Copernican paradigm, where just as Earth was the center of the Universe, our species is currently the center of any biogenome. It’s not true, but it’s something we keep telling ourselves.

At the start of the film, a character wonders if science and experts can do something about climate change. You have clearly chosen the voice of ordinary people over that of the experts.

Rahul Jain: You don’t need an expert to explain why eight million people die each year. We don’t need experts, but feelings. The film is there to translate the immense sadness that these deaths have left behind us.

Yaël Bitton: We live in a world of numbers. And these figures, no offense to economists, by their abstractions, annihilate the relational aspects [du changement climatique]. The very idea of ​​this film, and the previous one, was to deliver a sensory and cognitive experience of reality in the light of capitalism and the industrialization of our world.

To what extent is it important that Cannes put in place a special selection on the climate, and that other festivals take up these issues ?

Rahul Jain: I am happy with the creation of this new selection […]. It is high time we put the spotlight on a subject that is going to be, and has already become, the defining question in everything we do. To tell stories, wars and peace treaties, romances or sports sagas, we need a planet. So I am very happy that this selection finally exists. Each of us, but also all those who have power or are responsible for cultural dissemination, should take this into account.

This article has been translated from English, click here to read it in its original version.