Telling a painful story

Almost a year since the tsunami destroyed families and homes, Dhruv Dhawan still feels the pain of loss.

Though he's back in the comfort of Dubai, the filmmaker, whose documentary From Dust will be screened at Dubai International Film Festival, says he still sees the images of destruction that remained in the aftermath of the disaster.

Dhawan left for Sri Lanka soon after the tsunami - early January - accompanied by his video camera and knew he wanted to film.

He just didn't know what to film and more importantly where to start.

"I had no premise whatsoever. Just went there with two other friends in the industry. But they left quite soon as the situation was pretty bad and it was hard for them to acclimatise themselves to the conditions," he says.

Through Ravi's eyes

Calling it a blessing in disguise, Dhawan's story and his documentary's course starts off

through the eyes of Ravi, a middle-class entrepreneur, who lost his father and sister to the tsunami.

He managed to rescue his mother, but struggles to save his land, due to new governmental policies.

"I was just staying at a camp and Ravi, who spoke English came up to me and asked me what I was doing there," Dhawan recalls.

Calling it a question that was loaded with scepticism but with its share of despondency, it triggered Dhawan to go about filming Ravi's story.

"It took me months before Ravi opened up about how he saved his mother. Months. They have been through enormous tragedy and following Ravi through his immediate days after the tsunami slowly revealed some realities that just seemed unfair," he says.

Another of his subjects in From Dust is an acupuncturist from Australia, who was led by his conscience to the island country in order to use all his skills and help the people return to normalcy.

"Cameron and I slowly realised some of the new rules enforced were pretty contradictory and that got us thinking about what the real motive behind them was," Dhawan says.

The rule in question was a ban on building any commercial or residential premises within 100 metres of the coast.

This so-called buffer zone used to house 350,000 inhabitants, most of whom were fishermen. Which meant that they were all homeless.

Of course, they were given land in exchange in other places - in the case of the fishermen it was apartments more than a kilometre away.

However, the promised land was not conducive to their livelihood.

It also raised questions such as, considering the wave hit out and affected people up to a kilometre away from the coast, why was there a restriction covering only 100 metres?

Dhawan says there is a bit of an investigative element within the feature, but adds that it was purely unintentional and something that just emerged along the way.

"I didn't set out to film an expose. I just filmed and it took its natural course. In situations like that there's bound to be so many complexities and the natural inclination would be to make a film about corruption," he says.

However, to most people, including the victims and survivors of the tsunami, corruption was a given.

"They weren?t bothered about corruption and neither was I because it just extends along three levels. But there were little things like aid duty and all the supplies that were being sent by everyone in the world and people on the ground not seeing any of it," he says.

His third protagonist is a fisherman, Cyril, who managed to save his entire family, but continues to be homeless and only recently received a boat from the government.

Until then he made his living entertaining tourists and providing photo opportunities by standing on wooden stilts in the ocean and fishing.

Those stilts, which Dhawan uses in his publicity stills are more than 200-years old and miraculously survived the wave that left practically nothing behind.

"The tsunami was basically a disaster that created a lot of suffering for some, but it also created opportunities for others and From Dust is about that," he says.

Raising questions

Filmed over four trips to Sri Lanka that amounted to almost 12 weeks of staying there, Dhawan's documentary is a story of these three men, but also has some talking heads from the government, who answer the inevitable questions that are raised by the filmmaker.

Based in Dubai, Dhawan directed, produced, filmed and wrote the script of the film, but doesn't fail to graciously credit his sound man, who was basically his tuk-tuk driver.

With more than 68 hours of footage that was whittled down to a little over 68 minutes, Dhawan says he adopted his personal preference for observational documentaries as the style for its presentation.

There is minimal contribution from a voice over as the enormity of the scale of devastation was presented through his visuals and his subjects' stories are proof enough of the ground realities that the viewer can draw his or her own conclusions by just watching.