1947 Earth
I think it was almost two years ago that when visiting the namesake, we were discussing Indian movies and he told me most of the Bollywood movies he did not really like. At that time, he did show me some scenes of one of the movies he did appreciate: 1947 Earth. I remember being impressed by the beautiful scenes and music at that time and us planning to watch it together in one of the movies nights we used to plan when he was still living in NL. Unfortunately, we somehow never got around to watching it, maybe also because most of the movie was in Hindi and I needed some kind of subtitles to understand 
. But still I was really curious to see it one time, so a couple of weeks ago I decided to go ahead and order it from Amazon; last week it arrived.
The movie revolves around a group of friends of different religions that live in British India of 1947, just before India’s independence and breakup in what we now know as India and Pakistan. More specifically, it tells the story of Leny baby, a Parsi girl, and her nanny Shanta, who is a Hindu. Shanta falls in love with the muslim masseur Hassan, which arouses the jealousy of Dil Navaz, also muslim, who is better know as the Ice Candy wallah and is also madly in love with Shanta. During the violence that occured at the breakup of India and Pakistan, also the group of friends starts falling apart, and the classical love triangle between Shanta, Hassan, and Dil Navaz leads to growing tensions between the former friends with in the end devastating results…
Indeed the namesake was right, it was a beautiful, yet more specifically a really impressive movie. As I said, the scenes were brilliantly filmed and are supported by beautiful music, which in the good old Bollywood tradition also plays an important role in this film. More importantly, the movie gives a personal view, that of the little girl Lenny, on the atrocities that happened between different religions at the time of breakup of British India, and illustrates the madness of good friends becoming enemies solely because they don’t share the same religion. And although, I think the characters were not fully deepened out, 1947 Earth illustrates one thing very well, it starts out as a joyful movie but grows dimmer and dimmer as it goes on. It’s a movie that incites one to contemplate and think about the results that difference in religion, opinion, or just a normal chain of results can ultimately have in extraordinary circumstances. Moreover, it illustrates how an ordinary life can turn into complete madness… Thus, if you can get your hands on it, it’s a movie I would certainly recommend you to watch! Hint: you might find more where this came from (see below).
