Once upon a time there were a brother and sister who had illicit sexual relations. That was the beginning of the age of Kalyug, the age of downfall in Hindu cosmology. Has it started again? The Bhil, an ancient tribe, must think so. Modern society has condemned them to live in poverty and loneliness as migrant workers. Worse, a terrible disease is raging among them: HIV. It’s hard to develop a rational attitude towards the causes and effects of the virus on the background of traditional beliefs and the hierarchy in Indian hospitals. At least now the medicine is reaching the patients. A young medical student brings it on his motorcycle, travelling endless miles through a barren, dusty landscape. But his fight for enlightenment seems a fight against windmills.
“Kalyug”’s sophisticated dialectic narrative, which interweaves ancient legends and the stories of the present age, is compelling. The film moves without breaks from a background story, a storyteller at a campfire, to three different internal stories which in turn are linked in a kind of circular structure, with one motive prompting the next. Embedded in the serene flow of the narrative, the archaic images have a mythical effect – while remaining firmly rooted in the reality of the here and now.

Lars Meyer

The white citizens of Tanzania are the rich settlers. The “white men”, the albinos, however, the white ones among the black ones, are considered underprivileged and leprous. And not only that: especially in the region around Lake Victoria superstition has it that anyone who owns a part of their body will suddenly become rich. So they live like fair game, constantly in danger of being attacked, mutilated or hacked to pieces. The film manages to make this permanent feeling of exposure palpable by following the protagonists on long walks through streets lined with shabby cabins. What is garbage here, what is furniture? They seem defenceless, forced to run this gauntlet every day while people are calling from all sides: Hey, white man. The two Italian directors Baltera and Tortone portray four of them, show how they organise their survival, how they fight back. The rapper Dixon, for example, takes the offensive: as Mr. White he angrily cries out his lyrics at the local Kiss Club. Or Alfred Kapole, president of the local Albino Center, who collects all the horrible news from the region, usually unable to help. The idea of shooting the film in black and white is almost mandatory as a format if you want to take the albinos’ perspective. Those who are different face difficulties all across the globe, but here, where the perpetrators have practically nothing to fear, the albinos live in dread.
– Cornelia Klauß