THE ARYAN SAGA -- A TALE OF WANNABE MASTERRACE MOTHERS

In the documentary section Sanjeev Sivan's "The Aryan Saga" starts out like a colorful Himalayan tribal travelogue but slowly sneaks a time bomb into the Llaps of the unsuspecting audience, with a film which unleashed the most heated post screening discussion of the entire festival. It is generally accepted historically that somewhere around 1,500 BC the Indian subcontinent was invaded from the north by so-called Aryan tribes who spoke languages which would eventually become Sanskrit, and bore with them the basic rituals and pantheon of the Vedas which would evolve into Hinduism. Of course the northern pale-faced Aryans soon cross bred with the darker skinned aboriginal populace to produce the genetic mix that is modern India today. Still in the extreme northern province of Ladakh in Kashmir, near the border of Tibet, there exists a small isolated ethnic group of some 5,000 souls known as the Drogpas, who are relatively light-skinned, and who regard themselves as racially pure descendants of the first Indo-Aryans. They dress like Tibetans, have taken over a form of Tibetan Buddhism, practice similar rituals, and speak a Tibet-Burman language, but cling firmly to their "Aryan" identity. One current theory is that they are actually the offspring of the armies of Alexander the Great who got as far as India around 330 BC. After showing us spectacular views of the Himalayan setting, some of the colorful Drogpa dances and rituals, and some ethnographic testimony by selected academicians including a lengthy discourse by leading American genetics expert Stan Gartler, professor emeritus of the Univeristy of Washington, to the effect that the concept of a "pure race" is scientifically ridiculous, director Sivan suddenly takes us off on a different tack ...

We are now told that every summer this Himalayan paradise is visited by female sex tourists from Germany, women determined to get themselves impregnated with "pure Aryan" seed in --ulp --true Hitlerian Master Race tradition! Most of the locals are reluctant to discuss this rather touchy topic but one pudgy gentleman by the name of Swang Dorjee is rather proud of his personal Aryan stud service and speaks quite openly about it. Though happily married with three pure Aryan children by a local wife he regularly receives these Teutonic ladies and even keeps them in his house for the duration of their summer insemination seminars. His wife turns her head as there is a substantial income from these intercontinental stud services. Swangjee proudly notes that he has a number of offspring in Germany some of whom he fully expects will some day come and take him for a sightseeing tour of heimat Deutschland. Hmm ---

As this bizarre tale of would-be German Master Race Mothers begins to unfold we are suddenly treated to archival images of Hitler among his true-believers as flashes of Swastika banners fill the screen --- Ironically enough the swastika is an ancient Bhuddist symbol which originated in India and was co-opted by the Nazis who rotated it 22.5 degrees and adopted it as their own symbol of German racial superiority. For the time being Mr. Swang is living better than ever from the proceeds of his well-paid summer job, but it turned out to be a difficul task to track down a German mother willing to talk about all this. Finally a young woman was located who agreed to talk but only with back to camera and face in shadows to preserve anonymity. From her testimiony it seems that this Master-Race Mothers phenomenon is not just limited to a small coterie of lunatic fringe females, but is a systematic movement which, for obvious reasons, is not being publicized in today's officially hard-line anti-Nazi Germany ... but is nevertheless gathering steam!

The Q & A session with a stunned Italian audience following the screening evoked a flood of questions such as: How can these mountain people think of themselves as "pure Aryan" when they actually look more Tibetan than Caucasoid? One elderly gentleman got up and delivered an impassioned speech about the dangers of such thinking arising again and was roundly applauded by the gathering. Only the need to empty the auditorium for the next screening put an end to the discussion in progress. What this film does, in effect, is transport an audience from a colorful Himalayan mountain Paradise to a potential neo-Nazi Hell in just thirty minutes. Bravo Sanjeev Sivan for demonstrating once again that Truth can be stranger than Fiction -- and that the Devil is still among us!

Alex Deleon, Florence