Start the week with a film: ‘Tortoise Under the Earth’ is a haunting portrayal of displacement

Shishir Jha’s Tortoise Under the Earth takes its own sweet time to unfold. That is to be expected in a film that measures the gradual disappearance caused by displacement.

Jha’s Santhali-language feature debut meshes fictional and documentary devices while following a nameless couple living in a village that has been earmarked for “development”. The village is on a uranium mine in Jharkhand – too lucrative to be left to the people who actually care for the land and its produce.

For the Adivasi couple, the soil has other associations – it holds memories of their lost daughter, the time they spent together as a family, the years devoted to ploughing fields and tending to long-standing trees. Their uprooting not only means a severing of connections with their home but also the shattering of ties with their tribe’s origin stories, its songs and its cultural practices.

Memory – of times past, of the place in the present that will not be around in the future – defines identity as well as shapes the unhurried narrative. Jha, who has also shot and edited the movie, wants viewers to savour every minute spent in the company of his characters.

Just like they linger in their house unwilling to leave, so too the film...

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