For independent-minded Indian directors, film festivals offer an unmatched platform before they have been subjected to censorship and the demands of commerce. Festivals can provide a springboard for the careers of first-time filmmakers (or sink the prospects of veterans) as well as provide a showcase of the varied themes and narrative styles that the country is nurturing.
The Jio MAMI festival, which will run from October 29-November 5, hopes to do better at this than its rivals. More than 30 films and documentaries are part of the line-up, including titles that have been screened at foreign festivals. Among these are Visaaranai and Island City, both of which were shown at the Venice Film Festival; Chauthi Koot, which was exhibited at Cannes; Thithi, shown in Locarno; Umrika and Dhanak, which have done the rounds of the international festival circuit; and Kothanodi, which has been screened at the Busan and London events. Hansal Mehta’s Aligarh, which was also at Busan, will be the opening film at MAMI.
Some of these films will have the audio bleeps and cuts that have become an unavoidable part of the movie-going experience in recent months because they had already been censored before being selected. Although it is not mandatory for a production to have the Central Board of Film Certification’s blessings before being shown at a film festival, selectors and organisers do ask if such a certificate has been issued. The titles of films that do not have this certificate are sent to the Information and Broadcasting Ministry for a one-time exemption.
Umrika
Distributors and talent spotters looking for fresh Indian produce will have their hands full with the selection, which has been made by programmer Deepti D’Cunha and Bina Paul Venugopal, the former artistic director of the International Film Festival of Kerala and the head of the LV Prasad Film and TV Academy in Thiruvananthapuram. “The brief was to make the programming inclusive rather than Bombay-centric, and to reflect regional and independent cinema small and big,” Venugopal said. “There is no one-stop shop for Indian cinema, and hopefully MAMI will create that.”
Chauthi Koot
The Indian films are scattered across sections. The rules for the Competition section have been relaxed to include more than debut films. The 13 films on the list are Assamese director Manju Borah’s Dau Huduni Methai, Aadish Keluskar’s Kaul, Gurvinder Singh’s Chauthi Koot, Rahul Dahiya’s G ‒ A Wanton Heart, Mor Mann Ke Bharam by Abhishek Varma, Heer Ganjwala and Karma Takapa, Vetri Maaran’s Visaaranai, Ruchika Oberoi’s Island City, Manu’s Mundrothuruth, Bhaskar Hazarika’s Kothanodi, Nilanjan Datta’s The Head Hunter, Prashant Nair’s Umrika, Bauddhayan Mukherjee’s The Violin Player, and Shlok Sharma’s Haraamkhor.
“Many of these are stories located in the local milieu but they also have larger significance,” Venugopal said. “There are films from states like Chhattisgarh and Haryana, as well as from Maharashtra and Kerala.”
The hunt for a distinctively Indian voice is often been hampered by a host of concerns. Even independent films are unable to throw off the yoke of melodrama. Production values remain low, and consistency is a major problem ‒filmmakers who show tremendous promise in their first films collapse into mediocrity or simple fade out soon after.
“Bengali films, for instance, suffer from the burden of too much legacy, while one finds that in Marathi films, there is less pushing of the envelope,” observed Venugopal, who has overseen the showcasing of countless Indian films during her stint as festival director in Thiruvananthapuram. “Regional films are still not as well mounted as Bombay productions, yet it is the smaller industries that are throwing up interesting films.”
Raam Reddy’s Thithi, which was premiered in Locarno earlier this year, is the only Indian entry in the international competition section. The world cinema section includes Paul Thomas Anderson’s documentary Junun, a record of the collaboration between Radiohead lead guitarist Jonny Greenwood and Israeli composer Shye Ben Tzur in India. Another documentary is Original Copy, in which Georg Heinzen and Florian Heinzen-Gorb trace the twin wonders of the hand-painted posters and the single screen movie-going experience through interviews with the painters who create artwork at Mumbai’s Alfred Talkies.
There are many more documentaries and features in India Story. The documentaries are Shaunak Sen’s Cities of Sleep, Shivendra Singh Dungarpur’s The Immortals, Amit Dutta’s Even Red Can Be Sad, Rinku Kalsy’s For the Love of a Man, Abhay Kumar’s Placebo and Antariksh Jain’s The Train Leaves at Four.
The Train Leaves at Four.
The features in the section are Aligarh, M Manikandan’s Kutrame Thandanai, Bardroy Barretto’s Nachom-ia-Kumpasar, Sanal Kumar Sasidharan’s Ozhivu Divasathe Kali, Jayaraj R’s Ottaal, Babu Eeshwar Prasad’s Gaali Beeja, Pushan Kriplani’s The Threshold, Arun Karthick’s Sivapuranam, Makarand Mane’s Ringan, Suman Ghosh’s Peace Haven, Salim Ahmed’s Pathemaarry, Srijit Mukherji’s Raj Kahini, Ishaan Nair’s Kaash and Reema Bora’s Bokul.
The Discovering India section has Elisa Paloschi’s Driving With Selvi, Sturla Gunnarsson’s Monsoon, Rucha Humnabadkar’s For Here Or To Go and Sami Khan’s Khoya. The Indian cinema rampage does not end here. The After Dark section, devoted to horror movies and thrillers, will open with Bengali director Q’s Ludo. In the restored classics section, all the films except for one are Indian (Satyajit Ray’s Apu trilogy, Guru Dutt’s Pyaasa, Ritwik Ghatak’s Komal Gandhar). Eiichi Yamamoto’s Belladonna of Sadness completes the list.
Films that could not fit into the rest of the programming have found a spot in a section simply called Special Screenings. These include Pan Nalin’s feature Angry Indian Goddesses and Girish Kasarvalli’s documentary on Adoor Gopalakrishnan, titled Images and Reflections.
“There is an amazing range of themes – it is not content that is the problem, only its production,” Venugopal said.
Monsoon.
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The Jio MAMI festival, which will run from October 29-November 5, hopes to do better at this than its rivals. More than 30 films and documentaries are part of the line-up, including titles that have been screened at foreign festivals. Among these are Visaaranai and Island City, both of which were shown at the Venice Film Festival; Chauthi Koot, which was exhibited at Cannes; Thithi, shown in Locarno; Umrika and Dhanak, which have done the rounds of the international festival circuit; and Kothanodi, which has been screened at the Busan and London events. Hansal Mehta’s Aligarh, which was also at Busan, will be the opening film at MAMI.
Some of these films will have the audio bleeps and cuts that have become an unavoidable part of the movie-going experience in recent months because they had already been censored before being selected. Although it is not mandatory for a production to have the Central Board of Film Certification’s blessings before being shown at a film festival, selectors and organisers do ask if such a certificate has been issued. The titles of films that do not have this certificate are sent to the Information and Broadcasting Ministry for a one-time exemption.
Umrika
Distributors and talent spotters looking for fresh Indian produce will have their hands full with the selection, which has been made by programmer Deepti D’Cunha and Bina Paul Venugopal, the former artistic director of the International Film Festival of Kerala and the head of the LV Prasad Film and TV Academy in Thiruvananthapuram. “The brief was to make the programming inclusive rather than Bombay-centric, and to reflect regional and independent cinema small and big,” Venugopal said. “There is no one-stop shop for Indian cinema, and hopefully MAMI will create that.”
Chauthi Koot
The Indian films are scattered across sections. The rules for the Competition section have been relaxed to include more than debut films. The 13 films on the list are Assamese director Manju Borah’s Dau Huduni Methai, Aadish Keluskar’s Kaul, Gurvinder Singh’s Chauthi Koot, Rahul Dahiya’s G ‒ A Wanton Heart, Mor Mann Ke Bharam by Abhishek Varma, Heer Ganjwala and Karma Takapa, Vetri Maaran’s Visaaranai, Ruchika Oberoi’s Island City, Manu’s Mundrothuruth, Bhaskar Hazarika’s Kothanodi, Nilanjan Datta’s The Head Hunter, Prashant Nair’s Umrika, Bauddhayan Mukherjee’s The Violin Player, and Shlok Sharma’s Haraamkhor.
“Many of these are stories located in the local milieu but they also have larger significance,” Venugopal said. “There are films from states like Chhattisgarh and Haryana, as well as from Maharashtra and Kerala.”
The hunt for a distinctively Indian voice is often been hampered by a host of concerns. Even independent films are unable to throw off the yoke of melodrama. Production values remain low, and consistency is a major problem ‒filmmakers who show tremendous promise in their first films collapse into mediocrity or simple fade out soon after.
“Bengali films, for instance, suffer from the burden of too much legacy, while one finds that in Marathi films, there is less pushing of the envelope,” observed Venugopal, who has overseen the showcasing of countless Indian films during her stint as festival director in Thiruvananthapuram. “Regional films are still not as well mounted as Bombay productions, yet it is the smaller industries that are throwing up interesting films.”
Raam Reddy’s Thithi, which was premiered in Locarno earlier this year, is the only Indian entry in the international competition section. The world cinema section includes Paul Thomas Anderson’s documentary Junun, a record of the collaboration between Radiohead lead guitarist Jonny Greenwood and Israeli composer Shye Ben Tzur in India. Another documentary is Original Copy, in which Georg Heinzen and Florian Heinzen-Gorb trace the twin wonders of the hand-painted posters and the single screen movie-going experience through interviews with the painters who create artwork at Mumbai’s Alfred Talkies.
There are many more documentaries and features in India Story. The documentaries are Shaunak Sen’s Cities of Sleep, Shivendra Singh Dungarpur’s The Immortals, Amit Dutta’s Even Red Can Be Sad, Rinku Kalsy’s For the Love of a Man, Abhay Kumar’s Placebo and Antariksh Jain’s The Train Leaves at Four.
The Train Leaves at Four.
The features in the section are Aligarh, M Manikandan’s Kutrame Thandanai, Bardroy Barretto’s Nachom-ia-Kumpasar, Sanal Kumar Sasidharan’s Ozhivu Divasathe Kali, Jayaraj R’s Ottaal, Babu Eeshwar Prasad’s Gaali Beeja, Pushan Kriplani’s The Threshold, Arun Karthick’s Sivapuranam, Makarand Mane’s Ringan, Suman Ghosh’s Peace Haven, Salim Ahmed’s Pathemaarry, Srijit Mukherji’s Raj Kahini, Ishaan Nair’s Kaash and Reema Bora’s Bokul.
The Discovering India section has Elisa Paloschi’s Driving With Selvi, Sturla Gunnarsson’s Monsoon, Rucha Humnabadkar’s For Here Or To Go and Sami Khan’s Khoya. The Indian cinema rampage does not end here. The After Dark section, devoted to horror movies and thrillers, will open with Bengali director Q’s Ludo. In the restored classics section, all the films except for one are Indian (Satyajit Ray’s Apu trilogy, Guru Dutt’s Pyaasa, Ritwik Ghatak’s Komal Gandhar). Eiichi Yamamoto’s Belladonna of Sadness completes the list.
Films that could not fit into the rest of the programming have found a spot in a section simply called Special Screenings. These include Pan Nalin’s feature Angry Indian Goddesses and Girish Kasarvalli’s documentary on Adoor Gopalakrishnan, titled Images and Reflections.
“There is an amazing range of themes – it is not content that is the problem, only its production,” Venugopal said.
Monsoon.
