7th Chennai Film Festival 2019 : Reena Mohan Retrospective

7th Chennai International Documentary and Short Film Festival 2019

6-10 Feb; Max Mueller Bhavan

Reena Mohan Retrospective

Reena Mohan is an award winning independent documentary filmmaker and editor who has worked out of India, Dubai, Kathmandu and London. She has received several awards for her work including 3 Rajat Kamals (National Awards) as producer, director, and editor.

She graduated from the Film & Television Institute of India, Pune, in 1982, with a specialization in editing and since then has edited several features, television serials and over 50 documentaries for leading producers and directors.

She produced and directed her first award-winning documentary Kamlabai in 1991. This was followed by more than 10 documentaries that have received widespread recognition including Skin Deep (1998), On An Express Highway (2003), Kill Or Cure (2005).

She has published a paper in Deep Focus magazine titled Of Wayward Girls and Wicked Women on the contributions of pioneering women to early cinema. She has also written articles on documentary film making in Afghanistan and Bhutan for leading newspapers and journals (The Hindu, Himal, Hardnews).

She has conducted workshops on documentary practice for over three decades in leading educational institutes in India (FTII, SRFTI, NID to name a few) and was also the Course Coordinator at SAE, Dubai.

She has served as jury member of several prestigious international film festivals in India and abroad.

As a curator, she has been associated with major documentary festivals in India – Mumbai International Festival for Documentary, Short & Animation Films (MIFF), International Documentary & Short Film Festival Kerala (IDSFFK) and IAWRT Asian Women’s Film Festival (Delhi). She has also been Co-Director of the IAWRT Asian Women's Film Festival, New Delhi, from 2010-2012.

She was the Managing Trustee of the India Chapter of the International Association of Women in Radio and Television (IAWRT) from 2012-2015.

Awards: Best Editing, Indian Documentary Producers Association, 1988 Best First Film of a Director, Bombay International Festival for Documentary, Short & Animation Films (BIFF), 1992 National Awards (Producer & Director), Best Debut Non-Feature Film, 1992 National Award, Best Non-Feature Film Editor, 1998

Films:

1) Kamlabai
Dir: Reena Mohan; 47 min; 16 mm; 1991

Kamlabai Gokhale was one of the earliest theatre actresses of India. She and her mother are also credited as being the first ladies of Indian cinema having acted together in Dadasaheb Phalke's Mohini Bhasmasur in 1913.

Eighty eight years old when the crew starts filming with her, she lives by herself in a flat — an invalid confined to her bed. But her personality beams forth power especially when she recalls her early life and career on the stage in which she frequently played male roles.

Interviews with her form the cornerstone of the film. Past mingles with present as photographs, dramatic re-enactment and period music evoke the near forgotten years at the dawn of the 20th century. However, the film is not purely nostalgic. It gives an impression of the history and the changes, particularly the history of Indian film and theatre as it was experienced by a woman who struggled against the social structures of her times.

2) Tales from Planet Kolkata
Dir: Ruchir Joshi; 38 min; 16mm; 1993
Edited by Reena Mohan

Part fiction, part spoof, part essay, part documentary, the film weaves together disparate strands: a critique of Western media's construction, from the 1960s to the 1990s, of Calcutta as ‘the black hole’ and ‘the worst place in the world’; an elegy to Deepak Majumdar, one of Calcutta's great intellectual mavericks, a teacher and friend to Joshi and many others, who died while the film was being made; and the images and song of a patua – a traditional Bengali scroll-painter.

Starting with a variation on the opening of Apocalypse Now, moving through the performance-interpretations of the scroll-painter, the film-maker himself and an Afro-American video-artist from New York, the film asks questions about one's sense of place and belonging, about the links between memory and image, and about the permanence and transience of this thing we call `culture'.

While referring to the reconstruction of Calcutta in the Hollywood production of City of Joy, (the film based on Dominique Lapierre’s bestseller) or weaving a fantasy about getting Jack Nicholson to act as Majumdar in a film on the latter’s life, the film asks: can ‘the worst place in world’ be anywhere else but in your eyes and your heart?

3) Skin Deep
Dir: Reena Mohan; mini DV; 1998

Six first person narratives comprise the basic structure of the film which is an exploration of body image and self identity among contemporary middle class women in urban India. The feelings of being too tall, too short, too thin, too fat, too dark, too old that women experience and attempt to come to terms with.

4) On An Express Highway
Dir: Reena Mohan; 30 min.; 2003

The film traces the journey of a woman who gave up the material world for the austere life of a Jain Sadhvi.

5) Mati Manas
Dir: Mani Kaul; 35mm, 92 minutes, 1985
Edited by Reena Mohan

Three myths, common to different regions in India, run through the film. The myths not only contain details related to pottery and pot making but throw up clues pointing to changing techniques in pot production. Even more intriguingly, the myths contain the essence of a fundamental struggle between matriarchal and patriarchal societies.

Mati Manas (Mind of Clay) attempts to convey the sensuous experience of working in clay and the association with terracotta objects – tiles on a roof, earthen pots filled with water, toys, ritual icons – that most Indians experience and share from childhood.

The film does not attempt to either recount or interpret these myths but rather to evoke their flavour in living relation to contemporary sensibilities.

6) In the Forest Hangs a Bridge
Dir: Sanjay Kak; 16mm, 39 minutes, 1999
Edited by Reena Mohan

This is a film about an intense period of community life in the village of Damro - a time when bridges are repaired and homes are built. It is also about the spirit which imbues the community, and the ways in which change slowly makes its way to the heart of Adi culture.

7) Velvet Revolution
Dir: Nupur Basu; 57 min; HD; 2017
Edited by Reena Mohan & Nirmal Chander Dhandriyal

In this exciting collaborative film – Velvet Revolution - six women directors take their lens up-close to Women Making News. In a world riven with conflict and dictatorial regimes where journalists are constantly under threat of both, state and non- state actors, what drives these women journalists to do their jobs?