It was 1966, when colour films were still a novelty, that Soviet filmmaker Andrei Tarkovsky famously dismissed them as a “commercial gimmick.” For Tarkovsky, whose cinematic language flourished in the quiet, monochromatic worlds of Stalker and Nostalgia, the use of colour on screen was an extraordinary, almost otherworldly choice — far removed from the textures of ordinary life.
It’s fitting, then, that Rahul Aijaz’s debut Sindhi feature film, Indus Echoes, tells the story of ordinary lives through a deliberately desaturated lens. Running just 71 minutes, the film employs colour with a striking economy, even as it draws its inspiration from the Indus River — its water-soaked plains, sprawling fields, and the thick, shadowy trees that dot its agricultural landscapes.
Tarkovsky said, “Colour film as a concept uses the aesthetic principles of painting, or colour photography. As soon as you have a coloured picture in the frame, it becomes a moving painting. It’s all too beautiful, and unlike life.” While monochrome and muted palettes are not unfamiliar in Pakistan’s burgeoning independent film scene, Indus Echoes feels like a deliberate act of homage to Tarkovsky’s philosophy.
This is a landscape that might easily have been rendered in lush greens and radiant blues — a visual symphony of sparkling waters and clear skies. Such a film could have evoked the pastoral rapture of Bollywood’s Shah Rukh Khan-starrer Swades (2004), a crowd-pleaser steeped in commercial sentimentality. Or perhaps it could have taken the form of a contemplative documentary, where the Indus serves merely as a backdrop to its isolated human subjects.
But Aijaz has little interest in commercially viable paths. With Indus Echoes, he isn’t just taking the road less travelled — he’s rejecting the map entirely.
On death and loneliness
Two men walk along a riverbank, searching for a third. One conceals a secret. The other harbours a plan. The third is an absence made palpable, a ghost that slips in and out of their conversation like the breeze catching on the river’s surface. The men’s pace is deliberate, the muted winter sun soft against the landscape, its light dulled by the weight of a persistent chill. Their steps are unhurried, allowing the camera to fix its gaze in alternating close-ups, each more probing than the last. In the film’s confined 4:3 frame, this simplicity sharpens into an unflinching humanity.
The story unfolds in a series of five vignettes, tied together by the silent, haunting presence of an unnamed corpse. Drifting in the currents, it becomes less a character than a witness, its fragmented form — a sunken head here, a limb there — emerging only intermittently from the waves.
The corpse, macabre and strangely enduring, is less a figure of death than a reminder of its impossibility in this watery limbo. In the folklore of rivers, death resists permanence. Instead, it lingers, cycling between surface and depth, refusing the closure promised by soil and burial.
A father and son, out fishing, stumble across two dead bodies. One is a fish, the other is the man. When the two fishermen bemoan the dearth of fish and livelihood, wondering if they should move to Karachi and find another profession, the rebuttal follows in the same breath, dressed in despair both political and spiritual. The father will don a shawl and the crooked posture of his wife. Abandon the profession of their ancestors? For what? Karachi?
Elsewhere, a poet and his younger lover sit with their backs to the camera. The poet speaks of a statue — odd, weathered, and strangely magnetic, while his companion listens, in awe of him, his words, and this statue that gives him his words. It is moments like these when it is very easy to slip into the theatricality and frontal address that’s long been a staple of Pakistani cinema. And it takes a writer with a vision to capture curiosity without condescension and self-importance, sentiments better reserved for philosophical treatises.
Notes of magical realism and black comedy intertwine to make the tenderly poetic dialogues neither declamatory nor polemical. For how else does a poet leave behind a fountain of words that turns his lover into a poet too?
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