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In debutant filmmaker, Lubdhak Chatterjee’s Whispers Of Fire & Water we observe Shiva, an artist from Kolkata, visiting Jharia, a coal mining region in Eastern India, to gather sounds for his audio installation. He records sounds from whatever sources are available at his disposal. But in this grueling process, he witnesses the exhaustion of the region’s natural resources, and his visit’s purpose begins to wane. He discovers that the once beautiful landscape now suffers from depletion in the hands of those in power. Such exploit maneuvering, for ages, has also inadvertently affected the lives of the locals. The breathtaking beauty of the area is now infused with the suffocating presence of toxic gases emitted by fires burning for over a century. These fumes have devastated every living entity in the vicinity. Animals, miners, and the natural flora are involuntarily subjected to the noxiousness floating in the air. As...

Shiva (Sagnik Mukherji), an audio installation artist from Kolkata, travels to one of India's biggest coal mines in the country's East to seek inspiration for his new piece, and discovers a huge potential in diversity of sounds. But before the first scene completely unfolds, his primary reason for the journey ebbs away, and Shiva's attention wanders off towards the scarred natural environment and its people. Everywhere he looks, the beautiful landscape gets depleted by the toxic fumes coming from the fires burning for over a century, suffocating animals, soil, the miners and their families.

Whispers Of Fire & Water is screening in Locarno Film Festival

In his debut feature “Whispers Of Fire & Water” which has just received its world premiere in Locarno's The Concorso Cineasti del presente, former engineer turned independent filmmaker Lubdhak Chatterjee uses two of four elements to address the pressing problems of a mining area in which fire doesn't cease to burn.

The mystical and the industrial cross paths in this haunting debut from India, screening at this year’s Locarno Film Festival in the event’s parallel competition for first and second movies. It begins in an almost documentary style, showing the harsh, eerie beauty of Jharia, a once-proud mining community that’s now an apocalyptic ruin of a city, where toxic waste is dumped 24/7 and noxious fires burn just as endlessly. Midway through, however, Lubdhak Chatterjee’s film begins to change direction, as its passive hero becomes attuned to the natural mysteries lurking in the adjacent woods.

The set-up is a clear-cut juxtaposition of ancient and modern, as sound artist Shiva (Sagnik Mukherjee) arrives in Jharia with a boom mic and recording apparatus to find material for use in an art installation back home in Kolkata. At first these are simply ambient sounds, like kids playing football or, more ominously,...