TG Life
Earlier this month, the documentary ‘Saxtticho Koodo’ or ‘The Granary of Salcete’ aroused a lot of interest when it was screened at the Xavier Center for Historical Research, Porvorim, not the first time it has been screened in Goa.
Winner of the ‘Short Doc’ award at the Asia Independent Film Festival in 2018, the 38 minute documentary took four years of effort by a team headed by musician Vince Costa from Curtorim and his friends.
Speaking to ‘The Goan’, Vince narrated how the documentary first started off as a personal documentation project. ‘Over a period of time, I realised that what I was dealing with was much more serious than a personal documentation project. That’s when my work started to take shape and I started to consider a film,’ he said.
What changed when he decided to make it a film was his commitment to it. ‘I realised that my commitment had to be much deeper. That meant I had to spend much more time, doing deeper research. I then had to give the project the kind of respect it deserved to do justice to the people whose story I was trying to tell : the people working in the fields everyday.’
The short trailer of the film shows farmers ploughing fields in the Granary of Salcete - Curtorim. While farmers of the older generation talk about how respectable farming is as a profession and vocation, they lament the younger generation’s lack of interest in farming.
Vince’s background in music and sound engineering helped him as far as telling the story in the film is concerned, but learning the art of using the camera was harder. The film was shot on a Canon 50 D camera, and other equipment like a microphone and a monopod were used. While the equipment was not expensive, Vince says that his biggest investment was time - both his and the team’s. For example, editor Gasper D’Souza took a year editing the film. Others in the team include Dunstan Dias (Drone Photography), Prashant Sharma, the colourist, and Tilak Goswami, the sound editor and designer.
But Vince says that it is the interest that the film has aroused that makes the entire team feel vindicated. ‘I would be happy if the film started some interesting conversations and dialogues,’ says Vince.
Going forward, Vince hopes that the company he created - Red Mackerel - will discover more stories that deal with the Goan community that we are losing. ‘We strongly believe that documentation needs to be done, and stories need to be told,’ he says. He concludes by saying that he encourages youngsters to get into journalism, documentation, archival work, and look a the prospects of documentary film-making, so that stories like this one can be preserved for posterity. ‘You can always start with a mobile phone, and tell simple stories from your neighbourhood,” encourages Vince.
