Sunday, January 30, 2022

10th Chennai Film Festival 2022 : Retrospective - Ramachandra PN

10th Chennai International Documentary and Short Film Festival 2022

21-27 February, multiple venues, Chennai 

Organised by MARUPAKKAM

Retrospective : Ramachandra PN


Graduated from the ‘Screenplay Writing & Direction’ discipline from the FTII in 1991, Mumbai based Ramchandra PN is a Bachelor of Commerce from Mangalore University. Over the past 30 years he has been making documentaries, features, short films and TV programs. His documentaries have been screened in various national and international film festivals, like The Mumbai International Short and Documentary Film Festival, The International Documentary and Short Film Festival of Kerala, The Kolkata International Film Festival, MAMI Film Festival, Mumbai, The Madhurai Documentary Film Festival, Delhi International Film Festival, Prague Indian Film Festival, Abuja International Film Festival, Nigeria etc.

He has also worked in fiction and Nonfiction TV programs like Surabhi India Anjana and Swara Sadhana, Tele Tubbies, Chahcha Chaudary etc.. 

His activities in Cinema Academics includes conducting workshops and short courses,  and mentoring young students in various institutions like FTII, SRFTII, Whistling Woods,  LV Prasad Film Institute, Central University of Hyderabad, Mangalore  and Kuvempu University, Karnataka, Lohit Libraries, Wakro Arunachal Pradesh etc..

His first fiction feature Suddha (The Cleansing Rites) won him the Best Indian Film at the Osian Cinefan Festival of Asian Films, New Delhi Indian 2006. His Putaani Party (The Kid Gang) won the Best Children’s film at the Indian National Film Awards, 2009.

Apart from writing on Cinema, he has also served as a Jury member at the Kashish Film Festival, Mumbai and the Orange International Film Festival, Kerala. Mumbai International Film Festival for Documentaries and Short Films, International Film Festival of Kerala and The Dusserra International Film Festival of Mysore, are some of the Festivals in which he was involved in the pre-selection committee. Besides, his expertise has also been used in the script committees of NFDC, CFSI, the Rough Cut committee in Films Division; as well as the selection committee for commissioning of documentaries in Films Division and the Himachal Pradesh Government.

List of films to be shown: 

1) Voices of Mini Tibet
10 Minutes / Hindi-English / EST / Documentary / 2000
Producer: Films Division
Script and Direction: Ramachandra PN
Cinematography - Shivaji Mane
Sound - H. S. Neelakanta
Editing – Sanjay Jadhav 


Synopsis: Nirvana a spiritual liberation is the core of any form of Buddhism, but to the refugees in the many Tibet are settlement colonies in India such spiritual liberation is closely associated with their political liberation. This film zeroes in at one such colony in Mungod, Karnataka.

2) Makkala Panchayat (Children’s Panchayat)
30 Mins / Kannada / EST / Documentary / 2007

Producers: UNDP
Script, Direction and Editing: Ramchandra PN
Camera: Sameer Mahajan
Sound: Santosh Kumar



Synopsis: In Coastal Karnataka, in South India, 56 Gram Panchayat’s (Village Self Governing Bodies) hold elections to the Makkala Panchavat (Children’s Self Governing Bodies), so that the children can from a pressure group to help solve developmental issues that they think are important to them and to their villages.

3) Gudigeri Company
24 minutes / Documentary / Kannada / EST / India / 2011
Director / Editor / Cameraman: Ramchandra PN 


Synopsis: A popular professional theater troupe arrives at a busy fair in North Karnataka, South India only to find that its audience base is dwindling.

4) Miyar Mané (Miyar House)
76 minutes / Kannada / EST/ Documentary / 2011
Producer: Sonk Films
Camera: Ajay Raina
Sound Design: Santosh Kumar
Direction & Editing: Ramchandra PN


Film Festivals: International Documentary and Short Film Festival of Kerala; Prague Indian Film Festival, Czech Republic; Mumbai Film Festival (MAMI); Mumbai International Film Festival for Documentary and Shorts (MIFF)

Synopsis: The filmmaker’s 200-year-old ancestral house in a remote village of Miyar in Karnataka is being dismantled, giving him an opportunity to undertake a journey into a past that he shares not only with his extended family but also with successive generations of rural Indians. A realisation of the inevitability of a transition marks this journey, which could well be the journey of a country that has propelled itself into modernity. As plans are on for the house to be reconstructed in an open-air museum, divorced from its original context, the fossilization seems to be complete.

5) The Unbearable Being of Lightness
45 minutes / Hindi-English / EST / Documentary / 2016
Producer: Sonk Films
Camera, Editing and Direction: Ramchandra P N


Film Festival: Kolkata International Film Festival; Signs Film Festival, Kerala; Social Justice Film Festival, Chennai; Regional International Film Festival of Kerala, Film South Asia, Nepal; Social Movements, Protest & Dissent in India series, Cambridge University, UK

Synopsis: The filmmaker goes to the University of Hyderabad to conduct a film related workshop where the students have to observe and write a structured report using the sight and sounds of a crowded place. The place selected is a shopping area at the University called the Shopcom, which was the epicenter of the struggle for social justice launched immediately after the death of a research scholar Rohit Vemula.

6) An Autobiography of a Project Report
44 mins / Kannada / EST / Documentary / India 2021

Producer: Sonk Films
Writer, Director, Camera: Ramchandra PN


Synopsis: A retired Government technocrat passionately remembers his environment destroying pet projects that he had painstakingly worked out and proposed to the Government of Karnataka that aims to divert a portion of the water of the west flowing rivers of the state into the deep east, where it will be used for drinking purposes and to recharge ground water levels.


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