“Mahalle's School – Family Going Live” is the directorial debut of documentarian Akshay Pradip Ingle. The short was shown at the Dharamshala International Film Festival and the “Children in the Pandemic” program of the UNICEF Innocenti Film Festival.
“Mahalle's School – Family Going Live” is screening at the International Documentary Film Festival Amsterdam
Siblings Janu and Vedu Mahalle are two of millions of children in India forced by the COVID-19 pandemic to attend school online. Dressing in their uniforms every day, they sit in front of smartphones propped on books or held by tripods, participating in class and taking exams. Next to them, always just barely out of the phone's camera is their mother, massaging them, helping them find pages in their schoolbooks, re-enter the classroom when the connection fails, or when the children's grandmother turns the mixer during an exam.
Though brief, the documentary is a bit shy of ten minutes, Akshay Pradip Ingle's “Mahalle's School – Family Going Live” manages to presents us with a complex portrait of an Indian family's life during the pandemic. We see Vedu, the brother, trying to come up with ways of tricking the teachers, so he can stay longer in bed, or complaining about the fact he can't go to school in person. He can, once everyone is vaccinated, his father, a teacher himself forced to give online classes, tells him. But it seems like this explanation doesn't satisfy the hyperactive and anxious boy.
His sister Janu, on the other hand, is quiet and very serious in her studies. Though she props her smartphone on an old book and needs to sit on a set of stacked chairs while taking (and nailing) an exam, while her brother uses a tripod and a much more comfortable bench, she never complains. It as if it is normal for her to be in an inferior position than him, maybe because she is younger or because of her gender. Director Akshay Pradip Ingle doesn't delve on that, choosing to focus on the closeness between the members of the Mahalle family. The result is an impossibly warm portrait of a loving family.
