Another film I could well have done without seeing was Pushkar Myths.  I know very well why I chose it.  The Pushkar camel fair has always been high on my list of things to see before I die so a documentary about it seemed a good idea, either as an appetiser or as a means of saving all the hassle of actually going.

Someone said at the screening of another film that there is too much verbalisation nowadays in what is essentially a visual art.  Let the pictures tell the story.  I have a lot of sympathy with that view but in a documentary it's generally helpful to back up the pictures with some words.  That's maybe what the makers of Pushkar Myths were trying to do but none of the words were a direct commentary on the pictures.  They were mostly rambling, and to me barely comprehensible, stories about the Indian gods with a lot of old testament style X begat Y and Y begat Z...

The story the pictures did tell was of a fairly chaotic gathering of people and beasts.  Some of the pictures were great, folk dancing displays for instance or haggling over a best cow in fair competition.  But not all.  A ferris wheel is a ferris wheel is a ferris wheel in India or in Cowdenbeath.  And the camels figured hardly at all.

While Pushkar Myths may have given me the hump Testament repaid my small investment in time and treasure manyfold.  Made in 1983 it's the story of the effects on a typical, not to say stereotypical American family and their small Californian community after a nuclear attack on the country's main cities.

The director, Lynne Littman, was at the screening and was visibly moved when she came on for a Q&A.  She said she hadn't seen the film for 25 years and that as she watched she blushed at everything she thought was wrong with it, every family cliché, every overdone moment, every obvious emotional trick.  But she could not help herself from being stirred.  Neither could the audience. 

Saying she'd been scared at the possibility of nuclear annihilation when she made the film her one regret was that given the present regime in America it seemed to be relevant still.