Cinestaan Curates: How She Moves is an ode to a beloved teacher and her resistance

“You are what you can do,” says the nonagenarian Indu Mitha, a Bharatnatyam teacher who has dedicated her life to teaching the dance form in Pakistan.

Directed and produced by Anya Raza and Ayesha Linnea, the short documentary follows the dynamic teacher as she prepares for her students’ final recital before she retires.

As one of the last remaining classical dance teachers in the Islamic republic, the film traces her work and contribution as it delves into the ways in which Mitha’s dance and her activism came together.

Through the documentary, we get glimpses of her unconventional life as a Bengali Christian, her move to Pakistan after the Partition of India, and her rebellion, which comes together through her art.

In sharing her thoughts about Bharatnatyam, Mitha displays a keen understanding of the form and the ways in which young students respond to it, all of which demonstrates her secular outlook. Freeing the dance from any religious underpinnings, she deploys it to tell secular stories, “I want to tell stories of Pakistan itself, within Pakistan," she says. "They are not political stories for me, they are very personal.”

Throughout the film, there is an awareness of the position of dance in the Islamic state of Pakistan, where the art form is regarded as a lowly one. Under the late military dictator General Zia-ul-Haq and his programme of Islamization, the art form was banned.

The film brings together various concerns from Mitha’s legacy and concerns of gender and class to the space for expression that dance provides. However, the narrative does seem a bit disjointed in places. One also wishes to have seen more of Mitha’s feminism, activism and her struggle over the years as an artiste; we get precious few glimpses of her long rebellion against the state.

Raza and Linnea’s documentary is a crucial archive that brings forth Mitha’s fight to keep the arts alive against all odds. The directors deploy a countdown of days leading up to the final show and there is a beautifully edited sequence towards the end where the teacher and her teachings become one. As Mitha says in the film, “I’m thinking and I’m making people think, and that’s where revolution starts.”

The film has been screened at several festivals and won the award for Excellence in Documentary Short Filmmaking at the 43rd Asian American Film Festival.

How She Moves is being screened at the Beyond Borders Feminist Film Festival.