Phase 2

2006. On weekends, you sometimes go to Nani Cinématheque on Miller's Road, the film school with a small hall where film societies screen movies. You are usually the first to enter. And then maybe around five people come. That's it. The rest of the world has more exciting things to do on Saturday evenings. For you, all these foreign films are ways of traveling across the world and observing other ways of living. Even if the film is not wildly exciting, it's okay, you get to see another country, another culture, you get to learn something new, your world is that much broader, your mind that less narrow.

What you have been fearing has finally happened. They can't afford these screenings anymore. Not enough members. This is the last screening by Vikalp. Film by a young German director Lukas Schmid, called Phase 2.

So you go to watch this film, heavy-hearted. The lady from Vikalp introduces you to Lukas and his wife and a friend, because they came up with you in the lift. He speaks good English. You go and sit alone in the hall as usual. You quite like this time you get to sit by yourself, on one of the black minimalist chairs, a stage in front of you, beyond that the screen, with dim back-lighting, the silence an unobtrusive presence, the outside world shut-out, non-existent.

Six thirty comes and goes. No one. And then Lukas and his wife and the other lady come in and walk straight towards you and sit next to you. You are taken aback. It appears that you are the only person who has come to watch the film! So he wanted to know whether you still want to watch it, and if you want to hear about the film. You feel terrible for this man. You are not going to sadden him any further by making him feel that no one in Bangalore cares to watch his film. You say, “But of course.”, if it’s not a bother for them. He smiles, he’s happy to screen it just for you.

So he tells you the story, this smiling man with a black beard. How when he was a student he went to this remote little village in Eastern Switzerland (he's Swiss by origin). Extremely beautiful, but "boring place", he says. One of those remote sylvan places of rolling green hills and golden wheat where nothing ever happens. And there's a monastery there where there's a section where juvenile delinquents and young  drug addicts are brought and kept for three months by the State, and if they don't reform, they go to prison. A last attempt by society to give these young men a chance before they are thrown into prison.

He went back and shot this movie all by himself. He just portrayed the lives of a few inmates there for three months - real people, whose names were acknowledged. The movie was called Phase Two. That's the phase when these young men are allowed to go out for a day to the main village.

So he tells you all this sitting next to you, patiently, not for once cutting it short because you're an audience of one, answering your questions with a smile. Then the three of them leave. And you watch the entire movie all by yourself, on the big screen. As always, you absorb the movie way better when you are alone, no one else's opinion coloring yours, and for the first time in your life, you are alone there in the complete sense, an entire hall all to yourself.

The movie is beautiful, so sensitively made. You feel sad that so many people missed it.

As you look for Lukas Schmid on the Net now, you learn that he has been prolifically making movies, and in 2007, the next year, he won an award for the best Director, for the film 1%. 

Photo not mine, taken from here: http://www.lukasschmid.com