7th Chennai Film Festival 2019 : Filmmaker in Focus - Supriyo Sen

7th Chennai International Documentary and Short Film Festival 2019
6-10 Feb; jointly organised by MARUPAKKAM & Goethe-Institut, Chennai 

Filmmaker in Focus : Supriyo Sen

Screening Schedule

A Berlinale Talent (2007, 2008, 2009) and winner of Berlin Today Award and German short film award (2009) for his short documentary “Wagah”, Supriyo Sen is one of the well known documentary filmmakers from India. He has produced and directed feature and short documentaries like Wait Until Death, The Dream of Hanif, The Nest, Way Back Home, Hope Dies Last in War, Rupban – The beautiful, Wagah etc.

Supriyo has won 36 International awards for his films which include, Crystal Globe at Karlovy Vary Film Festival, Grand Prix at Bilbao International Film Festival, BBC Award at Commonwealth Film Festival, Black Pearl Award at Abu Dhabi Film Festival, National Geographic Award at Flickerfest, Golden Conch at Mumbai International Film Festival, Jury and Audience Award at Krakow, Tampere, Hamburg, Uppsala, Munster, Huesca, Winterthur, Damascus, Zagreb, IFFI (Goa), Rio-de-Janeiro, Parnu, Faito, Saguenay etc. He has also won three National Awards including Swarna Kamal (President’s Gold Medal) for the best Documentary of the year, 2007, for Hope Dies Last in War. His documentaries have been screened at festivals in Busan, Berlin, Sundance, Los Angeles, Karlovy Vary, Busan, Sydney, Traibeca, Amsterdam (IDFA), Hot Docs, Silverdocs, Nyon, Palm Spring, Krakow, Sheffield, Cork, Yamagata, Bilbao, Tampere, Uppsala, Indian Panorama (IFFI), Mumbai (MIFF), Kerala etc.

Supriyo has received grants from Sundance Documentary Fund, Jan Vrijman Fund (IDFA) and Asian Cinema Fund (Busan International Film Festival), DMZ Docs Fund, several times and worked with NHK, DW TV, Planet etc. and German, French American and Japanese producers. He has also made films for Films Division and PSBT and Goethe Institute.

Supriyo has served as juror in Busan International Film Festival, Taiwan International Documentary Festival, Eagle Awards – Indonesia, DMZ Documentary Festival (Korea), Kolkata International Film Festival, Dhaka International Short and Documentary Festival and Indian National Award selection (two times). Retrospective of his films was organized by Thiruvanantapuram International Short and Documentary Festival in 2009 and Persistence and Resistance – Independent documentary film festival, New Delhi.

Films:

Way Back Home (120 min; 2003)

In 1947 India achieved freedom from British colonial rule at the cost of dividing the nation into two.

Pakistan was born as a country for the Muslims. A million were killed in the wake of violent communal riots between Hindus and Muslims.

15 million more became refugees, amongst whom were the director’s parents.

After more than 50 years Supriyo Sen follows his parents as they visit their lost homeland in Bangladesh.

The mother tries to trace out one of her sisters who was abandoned during the holocaust of partition.

The film is about this journey, individual and collective memories and the historical consciousness arises from personal interactions and recollections.

Hope Dies Last in War (80 min; 2007)

54 Indian soldiers taken as Prisoners of War during the Indo-Pak war of 1971 are yet to return home.

While waiting for them, some of the parents died, some of the wives remarried and some children lost hope and committed suicide.

But the real ordeal has been for those who did not give up. For them life has become a tight rope walking between hope and despair.

But they have fought the mental battle of attrition for almost four decades and are still not willing to resign.

This film is a saga of these families' struggle, spanning three generations, to get their men back.

It records a tragic stalemate, sufferings of love and shining moments of humanity, courage and hope.


Wagah (13 min; 2009)

Every evening, the only border crossing along the 3323 km frontier between India and Pakistan becomes the site of an extraordinary event.

Border guards on both sides orchestrate a parade to lower the flags. Thousands of people gather to witness the ritual and afterwards the masses move

as close to the gate as possible to greet their former neighbours. The film looks through the eyes of three children who sell DVDs of the parade to the onlookers.

With a dream of crossing the border they remain quite unmoved by all the ‘patriotic’ madness around them.


Swimming Through The Darkness  (76 min; 2018) 

Hailed from a poor family, blind boy Kanai Chakraborty chooses the daring life of a swimmer than becoming a singer and begging for living.

But his success in the sport couldn’t ensure him a job. Even at the age of 40, he has to continue swimming to retain a respectable identity.

He participates in the world’s longest swimming competition and tames mighty river Ganges covering 81 KM!

His success brings in temporary glory but Kanai continues stumbling off the water while sailing smooth on it!

The film chronicles the roller coaster journey of Kanai who constantly negotiates with destitution, desire and destiny while chasing his dream.

7th Chennai Film Festival 2019 : Artists' Cinema - CS Venkiteswaran

7th Chennai International Documentary and Short Film Festival 2019
6-10 Feb; jointly organised by MARUPAKKAM & Goethe-Institut, Chennai 

Artists’ Cinema : Curated and presented by CS Venkiteswaran

(Screening Schedule)

Moving image practices, especially since the advent of digital technologies, are expanding and enveloping every field. Today the State and Capital constitute the two biggest image producers and users in the world, for their panoptic surveillance cameras, fixed in every public and open spaces – streets, malls, parks, pubs, offices, transport stations, public transports etc - are constantly at work recording and collating images of everything and everyone passing in front of them. What does this torrent of images amount to and do to us? Today, how does an image-artist work with, through and in this flood of visual information and narratives? How does and can the artist capture Life from the Flow?

These films by artists working in various mediums try to grapple with the very texture, tone, flux and flow of images; they ponder and meditate, interrogate and excavate, counterpose and juxtapose visuals to invite the viewer to enter into certain kinds of intensities of interaction with images: it could be their profound concern with nature, interrogations about hegemonic notions that rule our lives and dreams, explorations into other modes of sexual orientations and experiences, excavations into and through time, reinvention of space etc.

Free from the dictates of conventional narratives, beginning-middle-end structures, meaning-making compulsions and the market impositions about audience expectations, these image essays invite the viewers into exciting journeys into other realms of perception and experiences of the visual.

C S Venkiteswaran is a critic, columnist, curator and documentary filmmaker from Trivandrum, Kerala.





Artists and their films:

Gigi Scaria -

Disclaimer
9 min; 2018

Disclaimer addresses the political reality of contemporary India through a set of tricks performed by a magician. Cups and balls is a famous attraction for any magic show. In this case, the magician takes us for a ride where we witness the transformation from a poor rural reality to a material success story that finally leads to the lynching and scattered dead bodies on the streets. We as citizens willingly give away the realities we possess/address in the hands of magicians who wipe out our realities with their dirty tricks and make us believe we are entertained throughout the show.

Lata Mani / Nicholas Grandi

De Sidere 7
38 min; HD; 2014
De Sidere 7 is an experimental work that interweaves performance, dance, poetry, storytelling and text to reflect upon aspects of desire. Shot in Bangalore and Delhi, the film scripts the work of five performing artists into a sensorially rich meditation on desire’s vexed status as at once, animating force, object of suspicion and ground of contention. De Sidere 7 is conceived as a videocontemplation: a formally plural, multilayered composition intended to be experienced as an integrated whole. The artist book plays with image, frame, text, process notes & artist-critic responses to stage an encounter with the film in print duration.

Nocturne I & Nocturne II
5 min; HD; 2013
The Nocturnes were made in context of the Cross Pollination Lab of the Peaking Duck Arts Network, an interdisciplinary group active in Bangalore, 2012-2013.

Vipin Vijay 

Small Scale Societies; 27 min 

Two living bodies have been installed and improvised within a museum space, scattered with archaeological artifacts, terracotta pots and shreds. The idea of archaeological imagination has been extended from the organized and tagged space of museum with the sense of linear historical time, to various evocative, yet less visited prehistoric sites in India – from the site of survival of human ancestors confronting the catastrophe of volcanic ash, deep down in the past in Andhra, painted rock shelters and megalithic sites of Chattisgarh, to excavation sites and neolithic burial grounds in Kerala, where the interplay of life and death, dream and reality, embodied sense of the ground and hallucinatory perceptions in altered states of consciousness, seem to merge together. As a concept and working principle, the digital visual images have been treated here often as a thin surface of reality with an unknown abyss beneath, where supposedly a plethora of unseen images remain frozen into darkness. At times layers of images have been thrust together using multiple digital tools, to suggest a way of illuminating and digging through that invisibility of the frozen images, an ambivalent effort towards the notion of digital rock art.

Aman Wadhan

Letter From Korlai ; 22 mins

“We’ve inherited hope – the gift of forgetting.

You’ll see how we give birth among the ruins.”

-Wisława Szymborska

Of the cattle that come to graze on the slopes leading to the fort of Korlai, I would ask, why do you not speak to me of your happiness but only stand and gaze at me? Their eyes appear to say, the reason is I always forget what I was going to say—but then they forget this answer, too, and stay silent so that the human being was left wondering before the sea, in the time of yellow grass.

I had first visited Korlai in 2009. A very dear friend of mine had also been there, separately, unbeknownst to me, around the same time. We were both haunted by something mysterious at work over there. We used to write each other about life, about cinema and languages, but we had never mentioned Korlai and its secret indifference, or our desire to return there. It wasn’t until a few years later, when an assignment brought me back to Korlai, that I could begin to speak about it. By then, my friend had disappeared from my life.

It was the walk to the fort I remembered most—following cattle trails, not the dirt road to the lighthouse, finding pockets along the hill which seem to put the whole world into perspective by revealing that the world is blue at its edges and in its depths; from these pockets one can see that this blue is the light that is lost, the colour of where you are not, where you can never go. These nameless places awaken a desire to be lost, to be far away, yet they can also become anechoic chambers where the silence of the Self becomes audible. You take a deep breath, and unto the dust bequeath yourself, to grow from the grass you love.

In the year and a half it took to make this film, to retrace my footsteps and start over again, Korlai, for all its endurance, kept on changing. I have not returned to Korlai ever since, though some of my friends have recently been there and sent me souvenirs. The continuity of memory falls short to measure the abyss between what it once was and what will remain of it in the near future. Though when I think of my long-lost friend, I feel how little some things change—the last stretch of white sand, the three trees, the cattle trails—even if I be not there—it would always be the same. May the grass make it known that wherever you are my friend, if you want to find me again, look for me under your boot-soles.

Film Synopsis

On India's Konkan coast, in the village of Korlai, a sense of quaintness pervades its Portuguese heritage, the Creole, the faces, and the fort. The filmmaker had visited this place once, as did his friend, of whom nothing is ever said. Years later, an assignment brings the filmmaker back to Korlai. Memories revive but what compels his wayward excursion this time is the elemental and the immemorial wherein his solitude finds refuge. In the time of yellow grass, with steps receding and prayers unanswered, a desire for oblivion forks the search for images of exile and belongingness. This experience surfaces through grainy 16mm images and an elegiac voice-over, which retrace a sense of remembrance, loss, perception, and time intersecting with an inner self and with history. A letter for Korlai also becomes a letter to a dear departed; and in reading this letter, in seeking a new way of inhabiting the world, a vision of Korlai emerges that is both attentive and phantasmagoric, a series of possible angles and tributaries that the viewer and traveller might possibly take.

direction, production: Aman Wadhan

cinematography: Niraj Samad

editing: Nachiket Waikar

sound: Bhanu Dhande

production company: Film and Television Institute of India

PARVATHI NAIR

Bubble 3.08 min

By the Mouth of the River 12.49 min

Ice Boil 6.00 min

Order 3.30 min 

Parvathi’s oeuvre has been called a philosophy of space and ways of inhabiting the spaces in which we live, often using science as a viewing prism. Parvathi uses the moving image as an extension of her drawing hand, and the camera becomes an inscriptive tool in such cinematic explorations as the trilogy Of Time and Space. Water as a continuing engagement is a through-thread in many of the films such as Freeze Boil and Bubble which are part of the “An Ocean in Every Kitchen ‘ series, or Haunted by Waters and By the Mouth of the River. Parvathi explores different aspects of this mysterious life-affirming substance that is created when stars are born. Nature needs to be treated as a stakeholder in her own right, in the age of the anthropocene, and the videos give voice to her many aspects– the poetics of water, its essence as the stuff of life, its magical transmutability, and its threatened status in today’s world. The work captures moving pictures through focussed and minimalist – but not reductive – detail, and how relationships between part and the whole are negotiated through the observation of such particulars.

Murali Cheeroth

Pledge; 3. 30 min

Through my work , I am trying to explore and understand the meaning of social pledge, through my memoire of childhood experiences. The idea of pledge has been developed through my conscious participation in political activities, for long. Idea develops over a long period of time, before it finds a political activity and humanitarian thoughts, so to speak…….

A sacred unity,

desire to engage the notion of the modern multi cultural nation.

Current political situation since leads the threads to do the reality check, understanding and how nation offer common man to take the fake pledge, which infected everyone. No single object remains unaffected.

Meaning: A thing that is given as security for the fulfillment of contract or the payment of debit and is liable to forfeiture in the event of a failure.

Sahej Rahel

Barricada

Barricadia begins in the year 2017 – with a group of protesters huddled inside a parabolic structure, learning and rehearsing songs together. Singing an ubiquitous CND campaign refrain, they rebuke the UK, USA, Israel, India, Pakistan, China and Russia for their failure to commit to global nuclear disarmament, repeating together in fugue: “Where were you? Where were you? Why weren’t you there?” The song has no audience except for the participants of the group, who are clearly not the intended target of the questioning.

The group begin to produce vocal harmonies then gently fall apart before joining together again, each individual now confidently knowing their part. This cloistered preparation of song is an important part of their resistance – not simply a production of propaganda for the cause but a process of creating affect, community and conviviality. This is resistance. Beginning with this strange scene, this exhibition explores how we encounter resistance, protest and the end of the world in culture, to question what might be blinding us to reality.

In Rahal’s film, we begin to witness that Barricadia is no more than a document of our world’s already-collapse, by means of various cultural and political episodes occurring throughout 2016. The documentary merges footage of modern and historic rituals and familiar yet unstable landscapes, composed across two parallel images, which occasionally shift and pull away from one another. In one scene we witness a right-wing rally filmed in Mumbai in 2016, sound-tracked loudly with Bollywood dance music. In recent years, this genre has been adopted by Indian Nationalists to bolster the popularity of far-right movements. Throughout this exhibition, the affect of music is key. Across charcoal and ink drawings, text and film narrative Rahal mocks the assumed authority of the male DJ, bringing to life a mythology where the DJ has the power to change the world, to cast away spirits and to protect. His depiction of the legends of the DJ, and elsewhere: the architect, the artist and the writer shows us we can’t escape from the paradox that culture also remains a structure of control.

Elsewhere, the tropes of apocalypse appear in their droves – proud monuments consumed by the soil, ruined buildings, darkness and decay, a ghostly ship leaving a shadowy harbour, a fenced neighbourhood, a strange procession, a forest refuge, caped figures, water rushing in. These tropes are so well-worn that we forget they also represent reality. Rahal’s work explores this apocalypse-aesthetic as a blinker for action - the end of the world is so abstract now that we can only continue to watch it unfold.

7th Chennai Film Festival 2019: Films from Tamilnadu

7th Chennai International Documentary and Short Film Festival 2019: Films from Tamilnadu

a still from Marupiravi MGR; directed by Kumar Rajaraman

The following films have been selected by our selection committee.

Films from Tamilnadu

1) Arunagiri 

Dir: Ambani Shankar; 10 min

A fun loving young man gets a shocking lesson from his mother.

2) Mounkia

Dir: Nelson Vasudevan; 9 min

A little girl who can't speak and hear; her mother is a music teacher.

3) Marupiravi MGR

Dir: Kumar Rajaraman; 16 min

An aspiring actor believes himself to be a reincarnation of late M.G. R., a famous actor and leader

of a state. 

4) Kathaiyin Nayagi

Dir: Charulatha; 16 min

The story revolves around an actress RENU who is trying to make it big as a character artist and the struggle she faces to get roles due to her DARK COMPLEXION.

5) Peranpudan

Dir: SP Mani; 26 min

A shortfilm that portraits the day to day challenges faced by a young adult with autism.

6) Ranam

Dir: Shalini Charles; 3 min

For someone wearing ornaments is symbol of pride. For some it reminds them the loss.

7) Kurumpadam

Dir: M. Saravanakumar; 17 min

When an aspiring filmmaker uses hidden camera to capture secrets of others, it can also evoke not so pleasant responses.

8) Yendro Oru Naal

Dir: Kishore; 13 min

An educated young man from rural area comes to a city looking for a better life. But he doesn't find any.

Arunmozhi, Jeeva Ponnusamy and Josephine David
Selection Committee

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?

7th Chennai Film Festival 2019 : Werner Herzog Retrospective

7th Chennai International Documentary and Short Film Festival 2109

6-10 Feb; Goethe-Institut / Max Mueller Bhavan, Chennai

Werner Herzog Retrospective

1) Land of Silence and Darkness  / Das Land des Schweigens und der Dunkelheit
Colour, 85 min., 1971

The Land of Silence and Darkness tells about the destiny of blind-deaf people, who – due to their lack of perceptive faculty – seem to be almost unable to interact with their surroundings in a creative way. The movie helps us to understand the dramatic situation of these people, who are locked in their darkness but still struggle to build up a connection between their existence and the outer world.

The documentary focusses on the daily life of blind-deaf 56-years-old Fini Straubinger but also covers the stories of other blind-deaf people that Fini gets to meet in an unpretentious, moving way.

2) Little Dieter Needs to Fly / Flucht aus Laos
Colour, 80 min., 1997

Driven by his wish to become a pilot in the U.S., 18-years-old Dieter Dengler leaves his hometown in the German Schwarzwald. After joining the Air Force, he starts a career as a fighter pilot at the US-Navy. When his airplane gets shot during a mission in the Vietnam War, Dengler is been held captive. Only under great difficulties he manages to escape to Thailand and back to his unit.

Werner Herzog meets the former fighter pilot in his new domicile in San Francisco. Together they visit his old home in the Schwarzwald and travel to Far East, where Herzog asks Dengler to reenact stations of his escape. A follow up tells about Dieter Dengler’s funeral on a soldier cemetery in Arlington in 2001.

3) God’s Angry Man / Glaube und Währung 

Colour, 44 min., 1980

God’s Angry Man (Literal translation of the German title: “Faith and Currency“) is a documentary about the U.S.-American television preacher Dr. Gene Scott. Almost every day Scott talks about his ideas of Christianity on T.V. In the first place they are about gaining enormous amounts of financial donations. Therefore – according to Scott – great income signifies a “religions” triumph.

Werner Herzog accompanies the controversial Dr. Scott who has been accused of tax evasion, fraudulent conversion, defamation and blackmailing several times. The director abstains from personal judgment on Scott: The statements of Scott and interviews with his family serve the viewer to form his or her own opinion.

4) Wheel of Time / Rad der Zeit
Colour, 80 min., 2002-03

Werner Herzog observes Buddhist ceremonies and rituals in three places: At Bodh Gaya (India), Mount Kailash (Tibet) and Graz (Austria) and specifically focusses on the Kalachakra-Initiation, held by the Dalai Lama. The documentary shows the first film record of secret Buddhist rituals ever and covers footage of a pilgrimage to Holy Mount Kailash in Tibet as well as exclusive interviews with the Dalai Lama.

5) The Wild Blue Yonder
Colour, 81 min., 2005

An alien reports about his escape from a solidified planet in a far galaxy. He tells about his attempts to settle on earth and finally discloses his secret knowledge on how to travel in the opposite direction. Seeking for new living space five astronauts travel to space and explore the abandoned planet, the “wild blue yonder”. When they return home after 820 years they find the world being deserted.

7வது சென்னை பன்னாட்டு ஆவணப்பட & குறும்படவிழா 2019 : சிறப்பு அம்சங்கள்

7வது சென்னை பன்னாட்டு ஆவணப்பட & குறும்படவிழா 2019 : 6-10 பிப்ரவரி, மாக்ஸ் முல்லர் பவன், சென்னை



சிறப்பு அம்சங்கள் :

1) ஜெர்மானிய மூத்த இயக்குனர் வெர்னர் ஹெர்ஜாக் ரெட்ரோஸ்பெக்டிவ் - திரும்பிப்பார்த்தல்
2) தில்லியைச் சேர்ந்த மூத்த இயக்குனர் / படத்தொகுப்பாளர் ரீனா மோகன் ரெட்ரோஸ்பெக்டிவ் - திரும்பிப்பார்த்தல்
3) ஆனந்த் பட்வர்த்தன் : தொடக்கவிழா சிறப்பு விருந்தினர்
4) கொல்கத்தாவைச் சேர்ந்த கவனம் ஈர்த்துவரும் இயக்குனர் சுப்ரியோ சென் : சிறப்புப் பார்வை
5) 9 பெண் இயக்குனர்கள் எடுத்த படங்கள் : தொகுப்பு - அர்ச்சனா பத்மினி (கொச்சி)
6) ஓவியர்கள் எடுத்த படங்கள் : தொகுப்பு - சி எஸ் வெங்கிடேஸ்வரன் (திருவனந்தபுரம்)
7) காந்தி - காந்தியத்தன்மை - சினிமா விமர்சனம் : தொகுப்பு - அம்ரித் காங்கர் (மும்பை)
8) பன்னாட்டுப் படங்கள் :தொகுப்பு - அமுதன் ஆர்.பி. & மாக்ஸ் முல்லர் பவன், சென்னை
9) இந்தியப்படங்கள் : தொகுப்பு - அமுதன் ஆர்.பி.
10) தமிழ்நாட்டுப்படங்கள் : தேர்வு - அருண்மொழி, ஜீவா பொன்னுசாமி & ஜோஷ்பின்

வருக! வருக!

அமுதன் ஆர்பி
இயக்குனர், 7வது சென்னை பன்னாட்டு ஆவணப்பட & குறும்படவிழா 2019

7th Chennai Film Festival 2019 : Gandhi, Gandhiness and Cinema Vimarsha : Curated and Presented by Amrit Gangar

Chennai International Documentary and Short Film Festival 2019
6-10 Feb; jointly organised by MARUPAKKAM & Goethe-Institut, Chennai

GANDHI, GANDHINESS AND CINEMA VIMARSHA
 Curated and presented by Amrit Gangar

Curatorial Note

The year 2019 combines two 150th birth anniversaries – of Bāpu and Bā! It is Mohan-Kastur (MK) 150! Mohan never liked movies but yet he remained one of the most filmed persons in the world, wherever he went camera followed him. Narrative films continue being made around his persona in India and abroad. He remains a phenomenon. And he never liked cinema.

What is, however, relevant is Gandhiness; being close to Gandhian ethos and praxis. What are the factors that could essentially constitute Gandhiness? How could they be applied to making life and films in the changing environments of overwhelming consumerist forces and globalization in the Age of Technology? How could the omniscient and omnipresent moving image be a negotiating agent? Could the ancient Indian wisdom perceive the all-pervading embrace of the Trinity of Jnāna (Knowledge), Abhyāsa (Practice) and Vairāgya (Detachment)?

Are there films and filmmakers and artists who believe in the rigor of austerity and yet produce profound thoughts through cinematographic minimalism? The holistic Gandhiness becomes more enduring and illuminating than the so-called Bollywoodian Gandhigiri.

In his 150th birth anniversary year, how could Bāpu be evoked and invoked in a more interactive way through cinema? In the process, this curated event will turn into a kind of an interactive workshop.

Vimarsha = Deliberation

Amrit Gangar is a Mumbai-based author, curator, film theoretician and historian, working in the field of cinema for over three decades. He has worked both on production and creative sides of a number of film and video installation projects from numerous European and Scandinavian countries. Besides his curatorial engagements, for the past decade he is engaged with his theoretical concept of Cinema of Prayoga and has presented it at various venues including the Tate Modern, London; Pompidou Centre, Paris, etc. He had conducted a master class on Cinema of Prayoga for Ph.D. students at the Sorbonne University, Paris.

Amrit Gangar has authored and edited several books on cinema in English and Gujarati, two of which have been awarded by the Gujarat Sahitya Akademi. He was artistic consultant along with Marina Abramovic on Total Masala Slammer, a dance-theatre production directed by Michael Laub, produced by Hebbel Theatre, Berlin. He was also a production executive on the Lars von Trier-Jorgen Leth collaboration, The Five Obstructions besides being part of Classic Incantations: The German Film Orchestra Babelsberg Performs A.R Rahman during the Germany Year in India, 2011-2012.

Over the years, he has been conducting many interactive film workshops all over Gujarat. Gangar was Indian correspondent for ARTiT, a Tokyo-based bilingual art journal and the Film International published from Tehran. At present he is on the Editorial Board of the bilingual monthly Chalachitra Sameeksha published by the Chalachitra Academy of Kerala