A still from Original Copy
The Jio MAMI Mumbai Film Festival (October 29-Novemeber 5) includes such a heavy dose of non-fiction that at first glance, the final programme resembles that of a documentary event. Many of the films are about filmmakers, such as By Sidney Lumet and Fassbinder: To Love with Demands. (However, none of the three documentaries made on the occasion of Orson Welles’s hundredth birth centenary, including The Magician, is being shown). Here are our picks:
Cities of Sleep: Shaunak’s Sen’s stunning debut explores the reality of Delhi’s sleep economy.
By Sidney Lumet: Nancy Buirski, working on an unseen interview from 2008, adds clips from the modern American master’s films, including an early television drama, Serpico, Running On Empty, and Before The Devil Knows You’re Dead.
Placebo: Abhay Kumar’s diary of despair from the innards of a medical college in India is shot through with a sense of creeping horror and youthful angst.
Images/Reflections: One of the most prominent names of Indian parallel cinema pays tribute to a national treasure. Girish Kasarvalli’s celebrated debut Gattashradha was completed in 1977, five years after Adoor Gopalakrishnan’s own stunning first film Swayamwaram. Kasarvalli’s documentary Images/Reflections is divided into five chapters, each named after Gopalakrishnan’s films. Conversations with the Malayalam filmmaker, conducted along with critic CS Venkiteswaran, are interspersed with a commentary of the impact of Gopalakrishnan’s cinema.
Even Red Can Be Sad: Experimental filmmaker Amit Dutta’s biographical documentary on the images and ideas of abstract painter Raam Kumar has been rarely shown in India.
Fassbinder: To Love Without Demands: Christian Braad Thomsen’s documentary on the great German multi-hyphenated talent includes film clips, previously unseen interview footage, audio interviews, and conversations with regular collaborators Irm Hermann and Harry Baer.
The Immortals: Shivendra Singh Dungarpur’s unconventional homage to the magic of the movies reminds of why we love the medium and how we choose to remember it.
Leviathan: Not to be confused with the Russian drama from last year. This experimental documentary by anthropologists Lucien Castaing-Taylor and Verena Paravel is celebrated for its immersive look at the fishing industry in New England.
Original Copy: The father-son pair of Georg Heinzen and Florian Heinzen-Ziob have mounted a beautiful tribute to Alfred Talkies, one of the last surviving single screen cinemas in Mumbai, and the painters who create its colourful posters.
How To Change the World: Jerry Rothwell’s account of the early years of the international environmental organisation Greenpeace and the ideas and energies that informed their adventures.
Cartel Land: Mexico’s ongoing brutal drug war, fictionalised in the movie Sicario, gets the documentary treatment from Matthew Heineman. He follows a doctor who is leading a citizen’s movement against a cartel and a vigilante who polices Mexico’s border with America to fight back smugglers.
Ingrid Bergman – In Her Own Words: Not quite what the title suggests: director Stig Björkman recreates Ingrid Bergman through video footage, private correspondence and diaries shared by her daughter, the actor Isabella Rossellini.
Jia Zhangke – a Guy From Fenyang: Brazilian director Walter Salles gets the celebrated Chinese director, whose feature Mountains May Depart is also showing at Jio MAMI, to discuss his early influences, his ongoing battle with Chinese government censors, and his relationships with his actors and old friends from his hometown Fenyang.
The Pearl Button: Indefatigable Chilean legend Patricio Guzman has directed a companion piece to his 2010 documentary Nostalgia For the Light by exploring the importance of water in his nation’s imagination.
For the Love of a Man: Rinku Kalsy attempts to unpack the phenomenon that is Rajinikanth.