Imagineindia Film Fest.

VOTE Imagineindia International Film Festival

2012-01-17T02:08:00.000-08:00

Kindly VOTE the project of Imagineindia Internationational Film Festival at the crowdfunding platform of Lanzanos. One step of your,s means so much for us!

http://www.lanzanos.com/caja/

Imagineindia screens films of Girish Kasaravalli in Vigo

2011-12-30T04:38:00.000-08:00

Throughout the month of January 2012, will take place at the Lumiere Cinema Club in the northern spanish city of Vigo a short retrospective of the filmaker from Karnataka (India) Girish Kasaravalli. ImagineIndia in collaboration with Rosebud Films organizes this retro on this important filmmaker from Karnataka, which is one of the most dynamic and emerging State of India. The film Club founded in 1993, has been at the same time, one of the most dynamic among the Galician film clubs.

The screenings will take place at the mentioned Film Club at Placer Street in Vigo, the following days:

01/09/12 DWEEPA
16/01/12 HASINA
23/01/12 GULABI TALKIES
30/01/12 RIDING THE STALLION OF DREAMS

Imagineindia Film Festival Barcelona 2011 (2 to 29 Dec)

2011-11-09T04:37:00.000-08:00

ImagineIndia Barcelona Film Festival celebrates this year it,s fourth edition. The best films showed at the 10 th edition of International Film Festival ImagineIndia in Madrid will be selected, being complemented with few films of previous editions.

The three previous editions of this festival in Barcelona have been a great success and the festival will continue with the same enthusiasm to give a showcase to films which normally do not reach the spanish screens, and show the less known face of Indian Cinema.

Indian cinema is experiencing huge change on it,s script, editing and production knowhow and growing up with Films which highlight controversial issues in the Indian society : woman and child abuse, terrorism, organized crime, quite different to the "Mainstream cinema from Bollywood", far from the glamorous musical numbers and luxury. Directors like Anurag Kashyap, Ram Gopal Varma, Dr. Biju, Ananth Mahadevan, Nandita Das, Mani Ratnam, etc... along the years have been presenting their best work at Imagineindia, breaking topics, with a more dynamic contemporary stance which even for the West could be not acceptable, immersed in a long confusion. Every film of Lars Von Trier is the "best ever" when "No Smoking" of Kashyap is "Exotic".

The opening Gala of the festival will be held on December 2 at the Film Institute of Catalonia in Barcelona, with the presence of Qazi Abdur Rahim (Director of ImagineIndia), Rafael Carrasco (Asian Films), Octavi Martí (Deputy Director Film). The Inaugural movie will be Riding the Stallion of a Dream of Girish Kasaravalli.

In addition to the exhibition of films there will be numerous side events related to Indian culture that will make this event unique in Barcelona.

PROGRAMME

Friday 2 December

Performance of Bollywoodian team : MAGICAL BOLLYWOOD

Saturday 3 December

19:15     Arranged Happiness (Daniela Creutz)

Sunday 4 December

16:30    Arranged Happiness (Daniela Creutz)

20:00    Riding the stallion of a dream (Girish Kasaravalli)

Tuesday 6 December

19:00    I am Sinduthai Sapkal (Anand Mahadevan)

Wednesday 7 December

22:00   The Way Home (Dr Biju)

Thursday 8 December

22:00     Dharm (Bhavna Talwar)

Saturday 10 December

16:30    Dharm (Bhavna Talwar)

Tuesday 13 December

20:00    No Smoking (Anurag Kashyap)

Friday 16 December

19:00    The Way Home (Dr Biju)

Thursday 29 December

19:00    Riding the stallion of a dream (Girish Kasaravalli)

Dates : 2 - 29 December
Venue : Filmoteca de Catalunya
Tickets : 3€

Organizer: ImagineIndia and Asian Films
Sponsors: Mortiz, Mayura and Sogo.
Collaborators: University of Barcelona, Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya, Coordinator of Film and Video Festival of Catalonia.

WOJCIECH J. HAS at Imagineindia 2012 (17 - 31 May)

2011-10-06T04:01:00.000-07:00

Wojciech J. Has at the eleventh edition of Imagineindia International Film Festival due to in May 2012. With the collaboration of : Instituto Polaco de Cultura and Filmoteca Española.

One of the most importante cult filmmaker from Poland, J. Has has been showed at Filmoteca Española more than 10 years back. In 2012 Imagineindia come back to this great polish director with the following films :

SARAGOSSA MANUSCRIPT
MEMOIRS OF A SINNER
THE WRITER
THE HOUR GLASS SANATORIUM
LES TRIBULATIONS DE BALTHAZAR KOBER

NEW ZEALAND as Invited country at Imagineindia 2012

2011-08-08T08:08:00.001-07:00

New Zealand will be one of the invited countries at the eleventh edition of Imagineindia International Film Festival 2012. Wilde nature, plain horizons, tough guys, remembrance of aborigin ancestors, makes of this filmography something special. Six film will be participating at Imagineindia, among them are :

THIS WAY OF LIFE (Thomas Burstyn, 2009)
One Man, One Cow, One Planet (Barbara Burstyn, 2008)
OPERATION 8 (Errol Wright, Abi King Jones, 2011)
THE INSATIABLE MOON (Rosemary Riddell, 2010)

This section has been curated by Gen Hewett.

View Trailer :
http://www.vimeo.com/27200104

BANGALORE International Film Festival (Calle for Entries)

2011-08-08T03:34:00.000-07:00

BENGALURU INTERNATIONAL FILM FESTIVAL - 2011

Profile

     We are pleased to announce the 4th edition of BIFFES, the Bengaluru International Film Festival, from 15th to 22nd December, 2011. This edition of the festival will be bigger in scope and ambition thanks to the Government of Karnataka, which has responded to the aspirations of the film fraternity of the state and announced annual budgetary funding and support for the festival. The event is being organised and conducted by Karnataka Chalanachitra Academy, founded by the government to promote cinema culture and education.
     For Bengaluru, the capital of Karnataka, to aspire to and emerge as an important centre of international film culture is in keeping with Karnataka's glorious heritage and the state's achievements in the fields of literature, fine arts and cinema. The Kannada film industry has made signal contributions to the quality and range of Indian cinematic expression and grown to produce over a 100 feature films every year. Films from Karnataka have won national and international recognition and critical acclaim at various film festivals.
     The 4th BIFFES will feature both Competition and non-Competition sections. Selection of the films to be invited for screening at the competition will be made by an expert committee and prizes will be awarded by jury panels comprising Indian and international members.

The Competition Section itself will be in four categories:

1. International category for feature films:

Awards instituted by Government of Karnataka; International Jury

Best film Award: GOLDEN BERUNDA
Cash Award of Rs. 10,00,000 (approx. US $20,000)

Best Director Award: SILVER BERUNDA
Cash Award of Rs. 5,00,000 (approx US $10,000)

Eligibility: Films made between: 1st Jan 2010 and 15th June 2011.

2. Asian cinema category

Award from Karnataka Film Chamber of Commerce; Netpac Jury

Cash Prize: Rs 2,00,000/- (approx: US $ 4,000)

Films made in the Asian Continent
Eligibility: Films made between: 1st Jan 2010 and 15th June 2011.

3. Chitrabharathi: Indian cinema category.

Award from Suchitra Film Society; FIPRESCI Jury

Best film award: SUCHITRA SANMAN

Cash Prize: Rs 2,00,000/- (approx: US $
4,000)

Indian language films.
Eligibility: Films made between: 1st Sept 2010 and 31st Aug 2011.

4. Kannada cinema category

Award: Karnataka Chalanachitra Academy; Film Societies' Jury.

Cash Prize: Rs. 2,00,000/- (approx: US$ 4,000)
Films in the languages of Karnataka
Eligibility: Films made between: 1st Sept 2010 and 31st Aug 2011.

Guidelines for both Competition and non-Competition Sections:

• Film submission formats: 35mm, Digi-Beta and international-standard digital
format
• Films must be sub-titled in English

Competition Section

o Films entered in competition sections of the other festivals in India are also
eligible.
o No screening charges will be paid for the films.
o One representative - Producer or Director or any authorized representative -
is entitled for travel (economy class- return airfare) and local hospitality at
the festival
o Entries are to be sent in the prescribed form (available on our website) along
with a DVD screener with English Subtitles.

We invite films for Non-Competition section also under the following
categories:

o World Cinema
o Retrospectives & Tributes
o Country Focus
o Special Genre
o Nostalgia

Do visit our website www.biffes.in for details about the film festival, guidelines
and entry forms.

Dates for Imagineindia 2012 (17-31 May 2012)

2011-07-19T06:20:00.001-07:00

Imagineindia International Film Festival 2012 will take place in Madrid from 17 to 31 May 2012. More than 13 venues / 60 films from all over the world, invited countries New Zealand, Australia, Taiwan, Poland / International Competitive Section / 40 Parallel Activities, make of this festival the most important feature film festival of Madrid.

Nandita Das recoge el Premio de Honor en Imagineindia 2011/ Nandita Das picking up the Honorary Award from Imagineindia Film Festival on Vimeo.

www.imagineindia.net PRESENTS : Nandita Das picking up the Honorary Award at the Closing Gala of Imagineindia International Film Festival 2011 from the director of the festival Qazi Abdur Rahim

Stock Formula in Bollywood

2011-07-19T04:39:00.000-07:00

If the makers of mainstream potboilers can talk of tried and tested formulas for hits, the producers of porn also have their own proven mantras for success :
COLLEGE EXCURSION : A group of overgrown college students on a field trip, find themselves inexplicably in the middle of a jungle and have to perforce shack up in a deserted guest house or hotel. Generally, the boys and girls are in equal numbers. While the girls pout and pirouette in front of the mirror, bathe in a waterfall or shower, and keep dressing and undressing, the boys busy themselves playing peeping toms, peering into keyholes or through the bushes ... till disaster strikes. The victim is the girl - either of a rapacious ghost in the building or of a mysterious entity who emerges from the jungle on full-moon nights. The heavens choose this very occasion to open up and amidst all the thunder and lightning, the terrified girls cosy up with the boys. Since the telephone and electric lines have conveniently snapped by then, there is no way for them to reach out to civilisation. And in their growing anxiety, with suspense building up, they suddenly discover they were born man and woman !!!!

DEREK BOSE

Grandioso Plano Secuencia (Main Hoon Na) from Imagineindia Film Festival on Vimeo.

Imagineindia screennings in Portugal

2011-07-07T10:48:00.000-07:00

Imagineindia International Film Festival will screen for the first time in Portugal. Two films of Guru Dutt and Abrar Albi, PYAASA and SHAHIB BIBI AUR GULAM, will be screened for the first time in Lisbon at Portuguese Film Institute in July 2011. These films had been previously shown at the Classic Section of this film festival in Madrid.

"EL SENTIR DE LA VIDA" at Imagineindia 2011

2011-07-02T11:24:00.000-07:00

"EL SENTIR DE LA VIDA" performed at the Closing Gala of the Tenth Edition of Imagineindia International Film Festival 2011 at Sala Caracol. ZELIA FERNANDES /Voice / CANDELA OLARTE /Percussion / SELMA LORO / Viola / JORGE HAZOMOON / Hang / RODRÍGO DÍAZ /Dance. All of them made of the Gala one of the best ever done and served us with one of the best moments of the festival,s Closing Gala.

El sentir de la vida en la Gala Imagineindia 2011 (4) from Imagineindia Film Festival on Vimeo.

www.imagineindia.net PRESENTS : The performance of "EL SENTIR DE LA VIDA" at the Closing Gala of Imagineindia International Film Festival 2011 at Sala Caracol.

Ananth Mahadevan bags 2nd prize at Imagineindia 2011

2011-06-25T08:47:00.001-07:00

Ananth Mahadevan bags the 2nd prize for Best Film at Imagineindia International Film Festival 2011 at the Closing Gala in Madrid for his film MEE SINDHUTAI SAPKAL.

Ananth Mahadevan recoge el 2º Premio/ Imagineindia 2011 from Imagineindia Film Festival on Vimeo.

www.imagineindia.net PRESENTS : Ananth Mahadevan, bagging the 2nd Prize at Imagineindia International Film Festival 2011 for his film MEE SINDHUTAI SAPKAL.

Nandita Das at Imagineindia 2011 (Spanish Film Institute)

2011-06-24T12:19:00.000-07:00

Nandita Das came to Madrid to attend Imagineindia International Film Festival 2011. This is her participation at Spanish Film Institute.

Nandita Das en Imagineindia International Film Festival from Imagineindia Film Festival on Vimeo.

www.imagineindia.net PRESENTA : Estancia en Madrid de Nandita Das, actriz y directora de cine de la India. Un alma pura quien da ganas de seguir viviendo en este mundo infesto.

www.imagineindia.net PRESENTS : The visit of Nandita Das to Imagineindia International Film Festival at Spanish Film Institute.

Photography : José Ramón

Edition : Stephane Grueso

Trailer Presentation : Manuel Priede

Music : Chris Garneau

Ballet Monica Tello at the Closing Gala of Imagineindia 2011

2011-06-24T07:57:00.001-07:00

The Ballet of Mónica Tello at the Closing Gala of Imagineindia International Film Festival 2011 at the Sala Caracol. Fussion - Flamenco is the presenting card of this Ballet.

Disfrutad del baile de fusión-flamenca del Ballet de Mónica Tello en la Gala de Clausura de Imagineindia International Film Festival 2011, que tuvo lugar en la Sala Caracol.

Ballet de Mónica Tello en Gala Imagineindia 2011 (3) from Imagineindia Film Festival on Vimeo.

Patricia Alvarez Dance at the Closing Gala of Imagineindia 2011

2011-06-19T10:21:00.000-07:00

You can view the dance of Patricia Alvarez at the Closing Ceremony Gala of Imagineindia International Film Festival 2011 :

Performance of Tanusree Shankar Group at Imagineindia 2011

2011-06-19T04:12:00.000-07:00

You can view the performance of Tanusree Shankar Group at the Closing Gala of Imagineindia International Film Festival :

http://www.vimeo.com/25227130

Videos of Presentations and Q&A at Imagineindia 2011

2011-06-11T06:53:00.001-07:00

You can view the presentations of the directors present at Imagineindia 2011.

1 Presentation and Q&A with Ananth Mahadevan (director of the awarded "I am Sindhutai Sapkal" along with the producers Sachin Khanolkar and Bindiya Khanolkar.

2 Presentation and posterior debate with Daniela Creutz (director of the third awarded "Arranged Happiness" with the actor Ashiq Dar and director assistant Gen Hewett.

3 Presentation of Nandita Das (Honorary Award) at Spanish Film Institute.

VIMEO : http://www.vimeo.com/user1281861/videos

YOUTUBE : http://www.youtube.com/user/imagineindia?blend=10&ob=5

Imagineindia continues with the showing of Indian Cinema at Spanish Film Institute

2011-06-11T06:00:00.000-07:00

Wednesday 8

20.00 X ImagineIndia

Sala 2 Char Adhyay / Four Chapters (Kumar Sahani, 1997). Int.: Nandini Ghosal, Kaushik Gopal, Shruti Yusufi. India.

Saturday 11

20.00 X ImagineIndia

Sala 2 Bhavni Bhavai (Un cuento popular, Ketan Mehta, 1980). Int.: Naseeruddin Shah, Smita Patil, Mohan Gokhale. India.

Sunday 12

20.00 X ImagineIndia

Sala 2 Pyaasa (Ansiedad, Guru Dutt, 1957). Int.: Guru Dutt, Mala Sinha, Waheeda Rehman. India.

Tuesday 14

20.00 X ImagineIndia

Sala 2 Sahib, bibi aur gulam (Amo, ama y sirviente, Abrar Alvi, 1962). Int.: Meena Kumari, Guru Dutt, Rehman. India.

Tuesday 21

19.30 X ImagineIndia

Sala 2 Bhavni Bhavai (Un cuento popular, Ketan Mehta, 1980).

Sunday 26

20.00 X ImagineIndia

Sala 2 Char Adhyay / Four Chapters (Kumar Sahani, 1997).

View PHOTOS and VIDEOS of Imagineindia 2011

2011-06-09T09:04:00.000-07:00

You can view more than 1000 photos and videos of the tenth edition of Imagineindia International Film Festival at the following link :

PHOTOS :

http://www.flickr.com/photos/imagineindia_film_festival/

VIDEOS :

http://www.vimeo.com/user1281861/videos

View all the photos of Imagineindia 2011

2011-06-06T02:46:00.000-07:00

Imagineindia International Film Festival has come to it,s end. 17 days of film scrennings, theatre, film presentations, dance, music, poem reading, etc.

You can view all the photos at :

http://www.flickr.com/photos/imagineindia_film_festival/

Coverage of Imagineindia by Spanish Television / Interview to Nandita Das

2011-06-04T05:01:00.000-07:00

You can view the coverage of the Spanish Television,s film programme "Días de Cine" and the interview to Nandita Das at the following link :

http://www.rtve.es/alacarta/videos/programa/dias-cine-edicion-imageindia/1119122/

AWARDS / Imagineindia 2011

2011-05-31T08:07:00.001-07:00

The official Jury of different sections has decided to award to the following films :

BEST DIRECTOR : Dr Biju Kumar

BEST FILM : The Way Home (Dr Biju Kumar)

Second Prize : I am Sindhutai Sapkal (Ananth Mahadevan)

Third Prize : Arranged Happiness (Daniela Creutz)

BEST ACTOR : Vijanath Biradar (Riding the Stallion of dreams/ Girish Kasaravalli)

BEST ACTRESS : Tejaswini Pandit (I am Sindhutai Sapkal / Ananth Mahadevan)

BEST MUSIC : Ramesh Narayan (The Way Home/ Dr Biju Kumar)

HOMAGE :

NANDITA DAS

LIFE ACHIEVEMENT :

JUAN PEÑA EL LEBRIJANO

Huge success of the Press Conference Imagineindia 2011

2011-05-15T04:58:00.000-07:00

The Press Conference of Imagineindia International Film Festival 2011 was a huge success with the attendance of some of the most important personalities of Spanish cultural arena. Among the participants we can count with FERNANDO TRUEBA (Oscar winner), EL GRAN WYOMING (Tv presenter), SERGIO PAZOS (Actor), FARAH HAMED (Actress), IMANOL URIBE (Director), DIEGO FERNÁNDEZ (Director of ICG), QAZI ABDUR RAHIM (Director of Imagineindia).

Lot thanks to all.

View the photos of the Press Conference :
http://www.flickr.com/photos/imagineindia_film_festival/

PARALLEL ACTIVITIES. IMAGINEINDIA 2011

2011-05-01T08:28:00.000-07:00

PARALLEL ACTIVITIES

Imagineindia 2011

Filmoteca Española : C/ Santa Isabel 3. Tickets : 2 euros

UNED Madrid : C/ Tribulete 14

Ateneo de Madrid : C/ Prado 21. Theatre Tickets : 10 euros

Colegio de Psicólogos : Cuesta de San Vicente 4-5

Casa Asia : Carrera de San Jerónimo 15

La Boca Espacio Cultural : C/ Argumosa 11

Intermediae : Paseo de la Chopera 14

Auditorio Joaquin Rodrigo : Aranjuez

Sala Caracol : C/ Bernardino Obregón 18. Tickets : 12 euros

Pza de Agustín Lara (Lavapiés)

1 EXHIBITION OF INDIAN GYPSIES (Kathputli Colony)

26 April – 22 May

UNED Madrid

Free Entry

2 TANUSHREE SHANKAR GROUP (THEATRE)

17 May, Tuesday

Ateneo de Madrid

20.00 h

Ticket : 10 euros

ABOUT TANUSREE SHANKAR’S DANCE TROUPE

Dancer and choreographer TANUSREE SHANKAR is the Artistic Director of Tanusree Shankar’s Dance Troupe in Kolkata. Based on the creative style, pioneered by the legendary dancer Uday Shankar, Tanusree has developed a kind of choreography known as “New Dance” which is creative and contemporary. The dances, set to the vibrant music of visionary artiste Ananda Shankar and others, are presented in a theatrical manner to reach out to audiences worldwide. The dances are a perfect blend of the rich Indian traditions and the more open outlook of the west – they are Indian in spirit, modern in presentation and universal in appeal.

The members of Tanusree Shankar’s Dance Troupe are accomplished dancers having performed both in India and in more than 40 countries. They have performed in many prestigious festivals, including Middfest International in U.S.A., the Womad Festival in U.K. & Canary Islands, and the Edinburgh International Fringe Festival in U.K. The dancers have participated in residencies, conducted by renowned international dancers and choreographers, like Jacqulyn Buglisi, Andre Tyson, Janet Kaylo, Jaan Freeman and more recently, Margaret Jenkins.

Tagore’s CHILD

Man’s journey from the darkness of ignorance, hopelessness and desperation of life, to the light of knowledge and understanding, is difficult, full of turmoil, doubt and treachery. It is only fragile hope and faith that takes him along. Even that faith seems inadequate to the rigours of this journey. Yet this faith carries him through to enlightenment and the newness of life represented by the child, full of innocence, simplicity and potential.

‘The Child’ is Rabindranath Tagore’s only poem written originally in English. Tanusree Shankar’s interpretation depicts a flowing, rhythmic, spiritual journey of Man through the ages, from the bondage of ignorance, ultimately to the freedom of enlightenment and self realization. At the same time, it may also be considered a celebration of the mother – the feminine principle in the universe.

CREDITS:

Recitation : Victor Banerjee

Concept & Choreography : Tanusree Shankar :

Music composed & orchestrated by : Debajyoti Mishra

Transcreation of Huns Schubert’s

Ava Maria in Bengali by : Kamaleswar Mukherjee

Music Engineer : Rabindranath Majee

Vocal Enunciation by : Srikanta Acharya

Lopamudra Mitra

Sukanya Ghosh

Mohua Das

Sarmistha Paul

Harmish Hossain

Arijit Chakraborty

Oliva Chakraborty

Paramita Bhattacharya

Joy Bhattacharya

Avik Mukherjee

Anashmita Ghosh

Music & Sound Programming : Debasis Shome

Percussions : Ratul Shankar

Joy Nandi

Music Associates : Sukanya Ghosh

Priyam Mukherjee

Mandira Bose

Lights : Dinesh Poddar

Costumes designed by : Abhishek Ray

3 FILM PRESENTATION : “KHUDA KUSHI” of Rakesh Mehta

17 May, Tuesday

Filmoteca Española

17.30 h

The film in Competition “Khuda Kushi” of Rakesh Mehta, will be presented by the actress Tanushree Shankar.

4 “PSYCHOLOGY and MULTICULTURALISM”

17 May, Tuesday

Colegio de Psicólogos

19.00 h

Presentation of the film “The way we are” (2008, Ann Hui - Hong Kong) by the collaborator of Imagineindia : SILVINA MONTEROS OBELAR

5 FILM PRESENTATION : “PINK SARIS” of Kim Longinotto

18 May, Wednesday

Filmoteca Española

17.30 h

Presented by : JESUS FERRERO / QAZI ABDUR RAHIM

6 PRESENTATION OF FILMS ON R. TAGORE

Screening of “Charulata”

18 May, Wednesday

Casa Asia

19.30 h

Presented by : MENENE GRAS / QAZI ABDUR RAHIM

7 PRESENTATION OF FILMS FROM Satyajit Ray Film and

Televisión Institute

18 May, Wednesday

La Boca Espacio Cultural

21.00 h

Presented by : JAVIER MUÑIZ (Film festival director)

8 FILM PRESENTATION : “Smoking Babas” of A. de

Braganza.

19 May, Thursday

La Boca Espacio Cultural

21.00 h

Presented by : QAZI ABDUR RAHIM

9 FILM PRESENTATION : “Our School” / “Gypsy

Woman”

21 May, Saturday

Ateneo de Madrid

20.30 h

Presented by : JOAQUIN BUSTAMANTE (ICG)

10 FILM PRESENTATION : “Wailing Wall” of Elyes Baccar.

22 May, Sunday

Ateneo de Madrid

19.30 h

Presented by : CHEMA RODRÍGUEZ

11 FILM PRESENTATION : “Dance Town” of Jeon Kyu Hwan.

23 May, Monday

Ateneo de Madrid

18.00 h.

Presented by : ROBERTO CUETO

12 FILM PRESENTATION : “Daayen ya Baayen” of Bela Negi

23 May, Monday

Auditorio Joaquín Rodrigo

Presented by : JUAN CARLOS ALCALA (UCM)

13 FILM PRESENTATION : “Romnia” of the gipsy director Pablo

Vega. Q&A with the Director PABLO VEGA.

24 May, Tuesday

Intermediae

19.30 h

14 FILM PRESENTATION : “Volga Volga” of A. Silvestrov/

P.Lavazov.

25 May, Tuesday

Auditorio Joaquín Rodrigo

18.00 h

Presented by : JUAN CARLOS ALCALA (UCM)

15 FILM PRESENTATION : “Dhallywood” of Javier G. Serrano,

Q&A with the Directors Javier G. Serrano / Stephane

Grueso.

25 May, Tuesday

Intermediae

19.30 h

16 FILM PRESENTATION : “I am Sindhutai Sapkal” of A.

Mahadevan. Presentation and Q&A with the Director

and producers : A. Mahadevan, Bindiya y Sachin Khanolkar

26 May, Thursday

Filmoteca Española

19.30 h

17 FILM PRESENTATION : “Color en Matruchhaya” of Ramón

López de Benito. Q&A with the director.

26 May, Thursday

Intermediae

19.30 h

18 FILM PRESENTATION : “Arranged Happiness” of Daniela

Creutz, with the presence of the Director and the actor Ashiq Dar

27 May, Friday

Filmoteca Española

19.30 h

19 FILM PRESENTATION : “Banaras Me” of David Varela, with the presence of the Director, Lola Martínez, Alejandro Mulattieri

27 May, Friday

Intermediae

19.30 h

20 FILM PRESENTATION : “Mahanagar”, roundtable with

MIGUEL MARIAS / NANDITA DAS

28 May, Saturday

Filmoteca Española

19.30 h

21 FILM PRESENTATION : “Shahib bibi aur gulam”.

Conversations about the film with NANDITA DAS

29 May, Sunday

Filmoteca Española

17.30 h

22 ACTIVITIES FOR CHILDREN

Staging of The Posmaster by alumni of St Mary School.

Reading of poetry of Tagore and Kazi Nazrul Islam (spanish and bengali children will read these poems in spanish and bengali)

Staging of “Indian Tales” by the Alumni of the Theatre Academy :

Teatro de la Academia AKATT, Sala Triángulo.

PRESENCE OF : NANDITA DAS, who will read poems in Bengalí.

29 May, Sunday

Pza de Agustín Lara

Time : to be confirmed

23 IMAGINEINDIA CLOSING CEREMONY GALA

With the presence of NANDITA DAS, SERGIO PAZOS, MARIA DE

MEDEIROS, TETE DELGADO, GRAN WYOMING, ALBERTO LUCHINI, ANTONIO SAURA, ANANTH MAHADEVAN, KAREN ZUSMAN, GENE HEWETT, DANIELA CREUTZ, ASHIQ DAR, BINDIYA KHANOLKAR, SACHIN KHANOLKAR, DIEGO FERNANDEZ, PABLO VEGA, and othersetc.

PERFORMANCES : Chandra Sound System, Monica Tello Grupo, Patricia Alvarez Danza, El sentir de la vida, among others

PREMIERE of the film on India by the great photographer : EUGENIO RECUENCO.

HOMAGE TO :

NANDITA DAS

JUAN PEÑA EL LEBRIJANO ( HONORARY AWARD)

SALA CARACOL

30 May, Monday

20.00 h

Ticket : 12 euros

PUBLICATION :

For the first time Imagineindia will be publishing poetry of KAZI NAZRUL ISLAM with the collaboration of EDICIONES AMARGORD.

BELA NEGI, participant at Imagineindia 2011 with "Daayen ya Baayen"

2011-04-20T12:09:00.001-07:00

Bela Negi, participant at Competitive Section in Imagineindia International Film Festival. She was born in in the Himalayan Indian state of Uttarakhand. She finished her schooling in Nainital before she moved to Delhi University for a B.A. Hons in English Literature. This was followed by a degree in cinema with a specialisation in Film Editing at the Film and Television Institute of India, Pune in 1997.

Nitric Films a production house run by Bela and her husband Subho produces ads, corporate films and has line produced ‘Daayen ya Baayen’.

‘Daayen ya Baayen’ is Bela’s debut feature film and has been written, directed and edited by her. In the past few years she has written a handful of scripts of which DYB has been the first to get made.

PINK SARIS / OFFICIAL SECTION 2011

2011-04-11T12:24:00.000-07:00

PINK SARIS (England, 2010)

Kim Longinotto

SYNOPSIS

‘ “A girl’s life is cruel...A woman’s life is very cruel,” notes Sampat Pal, the complex protagonist at the centre of Kim Longinotto’s latest foray into the lives of extraordinary women. Sampat Pal should know – like many others she was married as a young girl into a family which beat her often. But unusually, she fought back, leaving her in-laws and eventually becoming famous as a champion for beleaguered women throughout Uttar Pradesh, many of whom find their way to her door. Rekha, a 14 year old Untouchable, is 3 months pregnant and homeless – unable to marry her unborn child’s father because of her low caste. 15 year old Renu's husband from an arranged marriage has abandoned her and she's threatening to throw herself under a train. Both young women, frightened and desperate, reach out for their only hope - Sampat Pal. PINK SARIS is an unflinching and often amusing look at these unlikely political activists and their charismatic leader. In extraordinary scenes, we watch her launch herself into the centre of family dramas, convinced her mediation is the best path for these vulnerable girls. Her partner Babuji, who has watched Sampat Pal change over the years, is less certain...’

Director : Kim Longinotto

Producer : Amber Latif, Girjashanker Vohra

Camera : Kim Longinotto

Music : Midival Punditz

Cast : Renu Devi, Niranjan Pal, Sampat Pal Devi

Runtime : 96 min

Exhibition on Gypsies from India. Imagineindia 2011

2011-04-10T11:42:00.001-07:00

A Gypsy look : India

The images are often travelling companions, and sometimes enough to make us to part.

These photographs are of the kind which make us to move , and this time heading to India. A distant world yet too familiar. Without any effort, we can absorb the heart of a gypsy neighbourhood where happiness and misery are attributes sharing with the disease, youthfullness, pain, wisdom, innocence, goodness, art and the gypsies.

They are all so different and intense realities that make the neighbourhood beat full of life in this Roma community.

The photos caught this character and make it visible for its vibrant color and all that it bring with it : Music, smells, habits, rhythms, voices and tastes ... seasoned with a touch of curry.

Curator : Mª Gómez Ibarrondo

Photographer : Valentina Mugnaini

Organizer : Imagineindia International Film Festival

Venue :

Uned Madrid

C/ Tribulete 14

Tf : 91 467 58 71

www.uned.es

Dates : 26 april – 22 may

Free Entry

More Information :

www.imagineindia.net

Photos in FLICKR : http://www.flickr.com/photos/imagineindia_film_festival/collections/72157626032277370/

Vídeos in VIMEO :

http://www.vimeo.com/user1281861/videos

Presentation Trailer Imagineindia 2011-04-07

http://www.vimeo.com/21479724

Press Release (1) / Imagineindia 2011

2011-04-10T11:39:00.001-07:00

Press Release

Final countdown for the tenth edition of Imagineindia International Film Festival, in Madrid from 17th to 31st may 2011.

1 PRESS CONFERENCE

The presentation of the festival at a press conference will take place at Ateneo de Madrid :

Date : 11 de may – 12.00 h

Participants : FERNANDO TRUEBA (Oscar winner), GRAN WYOMING (TV presenter), IMANOL URIBE (Director), SERGIO PAZOS (Actor), PEPE VIYUELA (Actor), TETE DELGADO (Actress) y ABDUR RAHIM QAZI (Festival director).

2 VENUES :

Spanish Filmoteque

Ateneo de Madrid

Intermediae (Matadero de Madrid),

La Boca del Lobo,

House of Asia,

Sala Triángulo,

Uned Madrid

Colegio de Psicólogos

Aranjuez Auditorium

La Tabacalera

College Sta María

Lavapiés Square

Sala Caracol

3 SECTIONS

Indian Section

Competition

Classics

Films from Satyajit Ray film and television institute

Documentaries

Spanish productions in India

Films related to the writings of Rabindranath Tagore

Asian Section

Out of Competition

International Section

Films about Gypsies

Australian aborigin films

FILMS

Indian Section will be represented in COMPETITION by 8 films by directors of different countries : India, Italy, England and Germany.

Girish Kasaravalli (Riding the stallion of dreams) who represented the trend of "New Indian Cinema", participates once more with a quiet peculiar story about a gravedigger who dreams. Rakesh Mehta (Khuda Kushi) y Dr Biju Kumar (The way home) talk about the contradictions and the consequences of blind terrorism trying to defend people against the injustice, oppression and poverty, which is not the case. Bela Negi (Dayeen ya Baeen) makes a great production about a daydreaming loser. Italo Spinelli (Gangor), the multiawarded Kim Longinotto (Pink Saris) and Ananth Mahadevan (I am Sindhutai Sapkal) talk about women, their struggle in our disbalanced society for dignity. Daniela Creutz (Arranged Happiness) will present her film on interracial relationship and arranged marriage in Kashmir.

In CLASSICS we will show emblematic films like : Barsaat (Raj Kapoor), Pyaasa (Guru Dutt), Shahib Bibi aur Gulam (Abrar Albi), Mahanagar (Satyajit Ray), Nagarik (Ritwick Ghatak), directors who represent the golden era of indian cinema.

From this year the festival will be showing a selection of films done by the students of SRFTI. This edition will include 11 shortfilms, a clear trend and concerns of new filmmakers from India.

In DOCUMENTARIES we have selected 4 films of Spanish production with Alfredo de Braganza (Smoking Babas), resident in India showing the world of the Sadhus, David Varela (Banaras Me), who has been shooting during one entire year to get the enigmatic atmosphere of Varanasi. Javier Gomez Serrano (Dhallywood), widely known documentalist, who enters for the first time in the Bangladeshi Cinema industry. José Luis Gutiérrez (Color en Matruchhaya) who talks about the heeling properties of the Art in an Indian orphanage : Matruchhaya.

Finally for the 150 anniversary of the indian poet Rabindranath Tagore, the festival is glad to present 4 classical worldclass films : Teen Kanya (Satyajit Ray), Char Adhyay (Kumar Shahani), Charulata (S. Ray) and Ghare Baire (S. Ray).

The International Section has two important subsections :

Films about Gypsies, with films of Mona Nicoara (Our school, Romania), Sheree Folkson (Gypsy Woman, USA), Pablo Vega (Romnia, Spain), Tony Gatlif (Korkoro, France). All of them showcasing the needs on education and exclusion they have suffered for ages.

Australian Cinema will be represented this year by films done on aborigins. Great films of worldly known directors like : Phillip Noyce (Rabbit Proof Fence), Rolf de Heer (The Tracker), Freddy Schepisi (The chant of Jimmy Blacksmith), Ivan Sen (Beneath Clouds) y Nicolas Roeg (Walkabout).

Asian Section will include 3 films caracterized by the social isolation of their main caracters : Dance Town (Jeon Kyu Hwan), Wailing Wall (Elyes Baccar) y The way we are (Ann Hui).

44 films that reflect the situations of exclusion, loneliness, friendship, abuse of power, children, women, as everyday in nearly every society.

SPECIAL GUESTS :

Tanushree Shankar Theatre (16 actors)

María de Medeiros (Actress, director)

Nandita Das (Actress, director)

Ananth Mahadevan (Director)

Sachin Khanolkar (Producer)

Bindiya Khanolkar (Producer)

Victor Banerjee (Actor)

Daniela Creutz (Director)

Ashiq Dar (Actor)

Gen Hewett (Producer)

Karen Zusman (Producer)

More Information :

www.imagineindia.net

Photos in FLICKR : http://www.flickr.com/photos/imagineindia_film_festival/collections/72157626032277370/

Vídeos in VIMEO :

http://www.vimeo.com/user1281861/videos

Presentation Trailer of the Festival :

http://www.vimeo.com/21479724

"Villains bore me" (S.Ray) by Alfredo de Braganza

2011-04-10T11:37:00.000-07:00

SOUND, CAMERA, ACTION! ‘A RAY OF LIGHT’

“Villains bore me”. Satyajit Ray (Calcutta 1921-1992) wrote once. In Camus’s The Plague (Fr. La Peste) a character says: “I understand everyone, so I judge no one”. Ray made us understand. In the sparest and the most refined of cinematic idioms, he gave us a world. If Joyce captured a man in full through the relentless description and analysis of a day in Dublin, Ray’s films are delicate vignettes sculpted in time recording an entire culture. New Yorker film critic Pauline Kael said about him; ”Ray sees life itself as basically good, no matter how bad it is”.

On a business trip to London in 1950, Satyajit Ray watched Vittorio de Sica’s Bicycle Thieves more than a dozen times. On the ship back to India, he wrote the screenplay for his first film; Pather Panchali (Song of the little road) It became the first movie from independent India to attract major international critical attention and won "Best Human Document" at the 1956 Cannes Film Festival, establishing Satyajit Ray as a major international filmmaker. Even today it is considered one of the greatest films ever made.

Forget the technical jargon of montage, mise-en-scène, fade-outs and jump cuts; Ray performed, better than any other Indian, the basic duty of a filmmaker. He communicated. He touched. The fun and games of Durga and Apu, the caring and sharing of the siblings; the candyman, the kittens, the rain dance and the loss of a sister and the inability of Apu to comprehend its enormity as he brushes his teeth without his sister Durga by his side. This film is about childhood but made through the filtered vision of an adult looking back which makes it that much more nuanced and philosophical.

Pather Panchali was followed by two films that continued the tale of Apu's life; Aparajito (The Unvanquished) in 1956 and Apur Sansar (The World of Apu) in 1959. The three films are together known as The Apu Trilogy. Whether it is the smile of a kid staring at the pompous village shopkeeper-teacher or the tragedy of a mother who has lost her young daughter; emotions are articulated without words and are all the more searing for that. You don’t need subtitles to sympathize with these people, you live along their feelings; it is all about visuals held together by silences and sounds to create feelings abidingly haunting.

If we take a clinical eye to Apus’s story nothing much happens to him that is out of the ordinary. His lower middle-class life is but a basis point in the statistical percentages of social studies. But Ray makes him Everyman; you see him grow from birth to fatherhood, and all you want is that he should be happy. His quest becomes yours. The important thing is not that he is a villager, not that he is a Bengali, but that he is a human being, a person, and that is the universality of the film.

For a viewer who had lived on a ‘healthy diet’ of Hollywood blockbusters or mega-budget Bollywood flicks and regard cinema as an escape, Panther Panchali then can become too real for comfort. This viewer can sense the slow rhythm from the beginning, not understanding the subtle emotions and even can get bogged down by the poverty and relentlessly tragic feels. In my opinion, the most important criticism which we can make to Ray is that he naively believes that people are fundamentally good and that his films are too well-crafted in contrast for example to the raw passion of Ritwik Ghatak and his spontaneous and stubborn frames. Nevertheless to say that like every giant, Ray suffered attacks from intellectual midgets, some of whom whined that the only reason he was so well received in the West was because of the negative picture his film showed of poverty in India. This is, of course, rubbish. Certainly the people in his films were poor and their lives were conditioned by that poverty. But poverty, in one degree or another is a fact of life for every large part of the world’s population. The people in Panther Panchali are engaged in the struggle to survive; but it does not impair their humanity!

I personally find a link between Ray’s film and a ‘magic’ scene from Guiseppe Tornatore’s Cinema Paradiso when the young boy Toto is fascinated as Alfredo (his projectionist friend) inclines the projector and lets the moving image travel out of the theatre to the wall of the town square. Martin Scorsese once said; “With Ray’s films you became attached to the culture through the people”. To watch Panther Panchali it is not about acting, camera frame, music (by Ravi Shankar), editing or sound. It is more than that; an unforgettable movie magic experience; a ray of light to your consciousness.

Alfredo de Braganza (Spain) is an independent filmmaker. He is regarded as the first Spanish person to shoot an entirely feature film on celluloid in India. He has done a Tamil feature film; ‘Maayan The Fisherman’ and a documentary feature in Hindi shot in the Himalayas; ‘Smoking Babas Holy Men of India’ (IMAGINEINDIA 2011 ‘Spanish Production in India’ )

BERLINALE TALENT CAMPUS / Shakeel Mohammed participating at Imagineindia 2011

2011-02-13T09:35:00.000-08:00

The six-day Berlinale Talent Campus is a creative academy and networking platform for 350 up-and-coming filmmakers from all over the world, aimed at Directors, Screenwriters, Actors, Cinematographers, Producers, Editors, Sound Designers, Composers, Production Designers and Film Critics.

Its theme for 2011: Filmmakers positioning themselves in today’s world of cinema.

One of the six applicants from India selected:

Shakeel Mohammed

Scriptwriter, Kolkata

When I was accepted for the sister Berlinale Talent Campus held at the Osian’s film festival in Delhi in 2008, I realised how rejuvenating and inspiring workshops and lectures are for an aspiring filmmaker. Attending Paul Schrader's workshop in 2008 was an eye-opener in terms of scriptwriting. It helped me greatly in writing the script of my diploma film, Doyam (Participant at IMAGINEINDIA FILM FESTIVAL), during my course at Kolkata’s Satyajit Ray Film and Television Institute Film Institute (SRFTI). For the following two years I have been applying to the Talent Campus. In my application, I submitted segments of the feature film script titled The Ghost of my Father, which I am currently writing - it was short-listed for the Hubert Bals Fund in 2010.

I was born and brought up in Chhattisgarh (in central India), and studied for my BA there. I did not have many friends as a child. I enjoyed reading books and later watching films. By the time I was in my 12th standard I had made up my mind to pursue filmmaking as a career. I wrote to Pune's Film and Television Institute and also to Kolkata's Satyajit Ray Film and Television Institute (SRFTI) for admission and came to know that one has to be a graduate to apply. So for the next three years I watched one film every day and did my graduation in English Literature. Attending SRFTI was the best thing that happened to me - a great learning experience. Film school is a place where you get complete freedom and a chance to interact with many different types of people. The greatest boon the Institute offered me was that I got to make films. There is no other way to learn filmmaking. I am now looking forward to attending the real event at the Berlin Talent Campus. I hope to reap the benefits of sharing knowledge and experiences with the veterans and the greats and also my fellow filmmakers.

MARTIN SCORSESE on Satyajit Ray,s influence

2011-01-24T08:39:00.001-08:00

One of the great cinematic experiences of my life was in the very early sixties when I watched the complete Apu Trilogy in a New York theatre : Pather Panchali, Aparajito and The World of Apu. I was as totally absorbed as one would be reading a great epic novel. Satyajit Ray,s ability to turn the particular into the universal was a revelation to me. I was 18 or 19 years old and had grown up in a very parochial society of Italian-Americans and yet I was deeply moved by what Ray showed of people so far from my own experience. I was moved by how their society and their way of life echoed the same chords in all of us. I then sought out other Ray films like Devi, The Music Room, Two Daughters, and later Distant Thunder.

I was very taken by the style of these films -- at first so much like the Italian neo-realist films, yet surprising the viewer with bursts of sheer poetry. Ray.s use of music impressed me so much that I sought out and eventually found sound-tracks to his films, such as Ravi Shankar,s music from Pather Panchali.

Ray,s magic, the simple poetry of his images and their emotional impact will always stay with me.

Martin Scorsese

New York

SALMAN RUSHDIE on Satyajit Ray,s achievements

2011-01-09T05:05:00.000-08:00

Salman Rushdie :

"I can never forget the excitement in my mind after seeing Pather Panchali," Akira Kurosawa said about Satyajit Ray,s first film, and it,s true : this movie, made for next to nothing, mostly with untrained actors, by a director who was learning (and making up) the rules as he went along, is a work of such lyrical and emotional force that it becomes, for its audiences, as potent as their own most deeply personal memories. To this day, the briefest snatch of Ravi Shankar,s wonderful theme music brings back a flood of feeling, and a crowd of images : the single eye of the little Apu, seen at the moment of waking, full of mischief and life; the insects dancing on the surface of the pond, prefiguring the coming monsoon rains; and above all the immortal scene, one of the most tragic in all cinema, in which Harihar the poor Brahmin comes home to the village from the city, bringing presents for his children, not knowing that his daughter has died in his absence. When he shows his wife, Sarbajaya, the sari he has brought for the dead girl, she begins to weep; and now he understands, and cries out too; but - and this is the stroke of genius - their voices are replaced by the high, high music of a single Tarshehnai, a sound like the scream of the soul.

Ray will complete many more movies, but his already-completed achievement is astonishing; you could say that the entire oeuvre is, like the very first film, "a song of the little road", because Ray has invariably preferred the intimate story to the grand epic, and is the poet par excellence of the human-scale, life-sized comedy and tragedy of ordinary men and women, journeying, as we all journey, down little, but unforgettable roads.

Salman Rushdie

Conversations with JAVED AKHTAR (by Nasreen Munni Kabir)

2011-01-08T02:29:00.000-08:00

Nasreen Munni Kabir : What is the heart of a good conversation?

Javed Akhtar : Conversations have three levels : people, incidents and ideas. The lowest form of conversation is about people. When we go up one rung we reach incidents which have a slightly larger spectrum than talking about people. But the conversation which really matters is when we talk about ideas, because they are universal and live beyond time and space.

NMK : Could you tell me how you define the film dialogue and conversation?

JA : We must understand that a film has a time limit. We have to cover A to Z within say 90 min - so that,s a limitation. So you have to be economical with your words. Billy Wilder has aptly said, "Film dialogue should be like a poor man,s telegram". This is true of the way most scenes are written but sometimes you have to indulge in rethoric. Particularly in Indian cinema. But I consider film dialogue as edited and directed conversation. Good film dialogue is not conversation but a kind of representation of it.

NMK : When you were growing up, did films or books have a greater impact on you ?

JA : Books. Books. In my formative years, I hadn,t seen many films; books were more easily available. And there was a tradition of reading in the family, everybody read. There would be lots of books and magazines in the house and people would discuss them. So I read a lot. Films were expensive, one could see two films in a month, oh no, perhaps one film a month. But we could read as many books as we wanted.

NMK : Were these books in Urdu , English or Hindi ?

JA : Most of my reading was in Urdu. I remember I read my first English novel when I was 15.

NMK : Do you remember what it was ?

JA : The first English novel I ever read in my life was INQILAAB by K.A. Abbas.

NMK : That was a sophisticated choice for such a young person.

JA : I had read Gorki,s MOTHER in an Urdu translation when I was 13. All these writers - Gogol, Chekhov, or Pushkin - I had read them in Urdu by the time I was 15.

NMK : What about the other authors you read in your adolescence ? Which writer did you particularly like?

JA : Ibn - e - Safi. He was very good. His style of writing, his diction, his sense of humour. It is very unfortunate that Urdu literature and Urdu critics have not given him his due. It is a kind of cultural insecurity that we don,t have the guts to appreciate things which don,t fall in with conventional ideas of art. You need a Satyajit Ray to say that SHOLAY is a very good film. But an average film critic was hesitant to say so. In the same way, I don,t think Asia was or is capable of creating a Charlie Chaplin. They can,t.

NMK : Why not ?

JA : Because for that you have to accept that humour is respectable. Humour is a very serious thing. I don,t know why we have a strange high - brow attitude towards comedy in our country. We think humour is cheap and inferior. I think we have been deprived of happiness and pleasure for a very long time, so we think that anything that can make people happy or can provide pleasure is either a sin or taboo, or is of inferior quality. It,s believed that thins that are respectable have to be bitter, unpleasant, heavy and boring. i don,t know why.

NMK : But this writer, Ibn - e - Safi, what kind of humour did he have, was it ironic?

JA : No, he used to write thrillers like James Hadley or Earl Stanley. He was the first person who had a kind of western sophistication in his writing that was combined with all the richness of the Urdu language. He was Sherlock Holmes and James Bond rolled in one. He had big following.

NMK : What kind of impact do you feel a book has as compared to a film?

JA : Most of the time when I,ve read a book, and then seen it adapted to the screen, i have been disappointed. It,s not because film is an inferior medium, it,s not that. But when you are reading a book, the reader is participating. The images that are being formed are somewhere between the description in the text and the imagination of the reader. The reader takes the information, the data from the novel, and creates his or her own pictures. So obviously they are perfect for him or her. While in films, you don,t participate, you are given everything. you are just a spectator.

NMK : Do you remember the first film you saw as a child ?

JA : I must have been 3 years old when I saw my first film. Later I discovered the film was Nagina with Nutan and Nasir Khan.

JA : Films in India have a huge influence on their audience. Was this true of the 1960s, people were tremendously involved with cinema and when they,d see a film, they would react very strongly. In those days films had more defined genres. We used to have stunt films with stars like Nadia, Kamran, Ranjan, Dara Singh. The audience for these films were very boisterous, they,d shout and jump as they,d watch the action and express extreme pleasure when the hero would beat the villain. WILL CONTINUE .......

MRINAL SEN, Early Years (2)

2010-12-22T03:40:00.000-08:00

He studied chemistry at the Scottish Church College, which, he says, was "a hotbed of the radical students, movement". "Since the Scottish Church was a Protestant college, Prof. Mohit Choudhury would teach us the Bible," Sen recalls. "I love the Bible to this day. I treat it as a piece of beautiful literature rather than a religious tract," he adds. "There was a time when I was steeped into reading on a wide horizon of subjects and authors. As member of the Imperial Library (which later became the National Library), I read Firdaus, Fitzgeral, Nietzsche, Marx.

During 1937 - 1938, the International Brigade was created after the Spanish Civil War. The greatest of writers of all time formed a part of it. Stephen Spender and Hemingway were two of them. I chanced upon a long poem in this paper penned by Pablo Neruda who was then being chased by the police. It was titled, Fugitive from somewhere in America. Ralph Fox who died in the Spanish War at 36 fascinated me greatly.

During that time, I had seen a film of P.C.Barua and these experiences inspired me to write an article entitiled CINEMA AND THE PEOPLE.

Since the Communist Party of India was banned at the time, Sen,s political association were mainly underground. He became an enthusiastic and active participant in the activities of the Indian People,s Theatre Association (IPTA), founded around that time, a cultural organisation aimed at raising political consciousness among the masses against the British rule through theatre. Since the IPTA was known to be the cultural arm of the Communist Party of India. His involvemente with the IPTA brought him in close touch with the masses and also with artists who shared his political ideology and social philosophy. "I was deeply impressed that art could do so much for the people, that it could creat a certain climate." he reminisces.

"I wil not say whether I was more or less of a Marxist earlier. But I definitely know that I have moved from where I stood years ago. I have changed with age and experience. I have seen a lot, lost a lot, gained a lot and learnt a lot. I have a dialogue with myself and I carry it over to my art. Cinema is evolving all the time and evolving quite rapidly. The advantage in technology has a strong bearing on it. It changes the dimensions of the art. I too, have changed with time."

Interestingly, Mrinal-da, has never been a member of the Communist Party of India, in fact, he broke away from it in 1964. "I go my own way. I go by my conscience. I do not have to go by the mandates of the Party." he once said.

The Bengal Famine of 1943 left a deep impression on the Mrinal, just 20 years old. This impression has remained with him throughout his life. BAISHEY SRAVAN, was his way of purging himself of the traumatic memories of the time. The famine saw 5 million people starve to death in Bengal. "I cannot remember a single day when I did not have to step over 7 or more dead bodies, just lying there.... They just starved and dropped dead," he says. The riots in Calcutta on August 16, 1946, which took a heavy toll of innocent lives, also disturbed him deeply. These historical events and the city of Calcutta found expression, reflection, questioning and interpretation in many of his films.

Sen met and fell in love with Geeta, a theatre actress and have a son, Kunal. Sen says, "I was born of Bengali parents, I married a Bengali, and we live in a Bengali milieu. But there is hardly anything any longer which could be called truly Bengali or truly India or purely German. We live in a kind of bastard culture, which is great for me. I feel that, sooner or later, we would arrive at a stage where to find a cultural identity, to find cultural roots, will be an exercise in futility."

After studying sound recording at Aurora studios along with his experience in theatre inspired his very first full length feature film, RAAT BHOR, in 1956.

His journey through his own cinema too, has been marked more by diversity than by uniformity, even by stagnancy at times, when he stopped making films for 8 years. This, however, is precisely what makes him and his films so much the subject of debate, discussion and argument.

Shoma Chatterjee

MRINAL SEN / Early Years (1)

2010-12-11T14:30:00.000-08:00

Mrinal Sen was born in Faridpur district in 1923, now in Bangladesh. It was a small town with distinct flavour of the countryside. The Sens were a large family with Mrinal - da being one among five sisters and 7 brothers. His father was a staunch nationalist and a champion of lost causes. He fought for freedom fighters who had gone underground and hardly stood a chance of winning once they were arrested. They lived in a sprawling house frequented by relatives of freedom fighters undergoing trial or waiting for the hangman,s noose. Thus the police often raided the Sen house.

When Mrinal - da was one year old, Deshbandhu Chittaranjan Das came to Faridpur to preside over the Provincial Ryot Conference -- that was to be his last speech. At the tender age of eight, Mrinal was arrested for having participated in a procession and singing the then banned Bankim Chandra song BANDE MATARAM. As he recalled later, "The police surrounded us, and many people ran away, but i could not, and I was arrested along with the others. I was the youngest of them all. The policeman, told me that I would be beaten to jelly because I was the youngest, and started crying. So I was in police custody for an hour or so and then people from my house came and took me back. That was my first encounter with the police".

"ours was not an economically affluent family. It was not poor either. It was numerically a large family. My father was a lawyer -- independent and upright without being arrogant. He was the leader of the Bar Commission in our small town. Throughout his career he made it his mission to lend active legal support to militant political activists -- "freedom fighters". Very few of who could escape death by hanging. My father suffered disbarment for 6 months when he boycotted the court session as a mark of protest against the arrest of Gandhi.

"My mother was a traditional housewife, loving and affectionate, the likes of whom there were millions in the country".
"From whatever I could collect from my parents I could see that my childhood was neither colourful nor retarded. I vaguely remember a couple of things that happened to me in my childhood".
One painful memory is of a sister, younger than him by around ten to 12 years, who drowned and died when she was five. A small bedi - a memorial - was built in her memory.
Sen recently happened to visit Faridpur with wife Geeta. "I was visiting tha place after a gap of 47 years. Everything had changed completely. I wanted to visit this bedi. By then, we had a hundred people following us. Someone came out of the crowds and said, "You are looking for that bedi, aren,t you? Come, I,ll take you there." So saying, he led me to the bedi, aged and forlorn with neglect, the only trace of a sister who died before I could know her better. I could not hold myself. I broke down", says Sen.

At 17 his parents sent him to Calcutta to study for a degree. "On the eve of my departure to the great city, I asked them if, so far, they had noticed any streak of genius in me." They felt awkward. I told them not to worry and quoted one of the greatest thinkers of the contemporary world who said : "All are genius up to the age of ten". My parents had to give me the benefit of doubt."

"As soon as I came to the big city, I was seized by a kind of fear. I confronted a crowd, a huge crowd, I felt lost. I felt I was standing alone in the crowd -- anonymous, selfabsorbed, indifferent swarms of people, even menacing and monstrous. The predicament of a small - town boy being suddenly thrust into an Alien world. I was an average boy of average intelligence. In retrospect, coming from a man who went on to make nearly 30 films between 1956 and 2002, this underscores how little Mrinal -da understood his own potential.

The initial response was depressing. but "I underwent a metamorphosis. Through increasing interactions of diverse kinds, with people around me, close to me and not very close, through continuous exposure to world events and domestic chaos piling up at an incredible pace, I was beginning to change." says Sen. he read the last manifesto of Tagore -- The Crisis of Civilisation. This make him see wisdom. With time, sen discovered that Calcutta had become an inseparable part of his entire existence. He had grown to love it. His growing love - hate relationship with the city, "till today, acts both as my stimulant and irritant. I am both touched and shaken by its vibrancy and youthfulnedd, its humour and flippancy, and indeed, by its tragic dimension, by its greatness and its meanness."........WILL CONTINUE.

SHOMA CHATTERJEE

Interview to KIM LONGINOTTO

2010-10-22T12:48:00.000-07:00

Kim Longinotto is a highly acclaimed, multi award-winning British documentarian. Her latest film Pink Saris celebrates an exceptional group of women fighting repression in India.

I'm attending this year's festival... with a new film, Pink Saris.

You should see my film if... you can. You won't be bored.

The best thing about film festivals is... getting to see lots of films that aren't usually around.

The worst thing about film festivals is... feeling overwhelmed by the amount of choice.

Film festivals matter in this day and age... because film is a window looking out on to the world around us.

The first thing that springs to mind when I think of London... Hampstead heath. I don't know why, I hardly ever go there.

If I could sit next to anyone during a festival screening it would be... Renu Devi Paswan.

The last film I saw was... Fish Tank (I saw it last night)

and it was... fabulous.

The filmmakers I'm most inspired by... Lukas Moodysson (particularly his early film Show Me Love), Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck (The Lives of Others), Shane Meadows, Stephen Frears (for My Beautiful Laundrette), the makers of Mad Men and The Sopranos - I could go on & on! I'll probably think of loads of others after this.

If I wasn't visiting the festival I'd be spending my time... seeing friends.

London Film Festival
Imagineindia

LONDON FILM FESTIVAL / IMAGINEINDIA : Interview to ANANTH MAHADEVAN

2010-10-16T05:19:00.000-07:00

I'm attending this year's festival... because my film I Am Sindhutai Sapkal is an official selection. It's a great feeling to be part of a festival renowned for showcasing the world's best new films.

You should see my film if... you want to see brought to life the true story of a woman who was twice driven to attempting suicide, but who picked up the fragments of her life to stage a miraculous comeback.

The best thing about film festivals is... they open a window to a world of films that you never knew existed.

The worst thing about film festivals is... trying to keep pace with all the good films - you're bound to end up missing quite a few.

Film festivals matter in this day and age... because technology is at risk of triumphing over substance. Ingmar Bergman and Jean-Luc Godard have become history; now more than ever we need to be reminded what the grammar of cinema is really about.

The first thing that springs to mind when I think of London... is a rich cultural heritage.

If I could sit next to anyone during a festival screening it would be... Steven Spielberg. Festival programmer Cary Rajinder Sawhney very kindly states in his synopsis that my film invokes The Color Purple.

The last film I saw was... The Secret in Their Eyes, the Argentinian film that won last year's Best Foreign Film Academy Award.

and it was... a deft human thriller that built towards a gripping finish.

The filmmakers I'm most inspired by... Akira Kurosawa, Satyajit Ray, Adoor Gopalakrishnan, Andrzej Wajda, Ingmar Bergman, François Truffaut, Federico Fellini, Abbas Kiarostami, Mohsen Makmalba.

If I wasn't visiting the festival I'd be spending my time... scripting my next movie!

London Film Festival / Interview to JOHN SAYLES

2010-10-16T02:07:00.000-07:00

Prolific American independent filmmaker John Sayles returns to the BFI London Film Festival with Amigo, an illuminating tale of invasion and resistance set during the Philippine-American War.

I'm attending this year's festival... happily.

You should see my film if... you’re interested in history or human behaviour.

The best thing about film festivals is... a chance to show your work.

The worst thing about film festivals is... spending time in airports.

Film festivals matter in this day and age... because distribution has gotten even more tenuous.

The first thing that springs to mind when I think of London... is rain.

If I could sit next to anyone during a festival screening it would be... Maggie Renzi.

The last film I saw was... Winter's Bone.

and it was... really well-made.

The filmmakers I'm most inspired by... are Akira Kurasawa and Mario Monicelli.

If I wasn't visiting the festival I'd be spending my time... making a living writing screenplays.

London Film Festival
Imagineindia

2010-10-09T12:06:00.000-07:00

Akira Kurosawa and Antonioni in India

I recalled a story which Ray told me when I visited India for a film festival quite some time ago. It was about a huge tree in India which measures approximately one mile in girth.

I wonder why I suddenly recalled that story. Perhaps, it is because I have always felt from the first time I met him that he is the kind of man who is like a huge tree. A great tree in the woods in India. Please grow more and more to become one mile in circumference. You are the only one who can become such a great tree.

Akira Kurosawa
Director

About MRINAL SEN, doyen of Indian Cinema

2010-09-15T09:36:00.000-07:00

BHUVAN SHOME

Mrinal Sen is a legend, a cult figure. He represents an era that reflects itself through him. He is the lone ranger in a field that is now filled with other people, other cinemas, and other worlds. But he holds on to his own principles. He is prominent at book exhibitions, plays, film festivals, special screenings, art shows for charitable causes and diplomatic parties.

The anger of yesteryear has given way to cynicism, to a sort of biting satire that is charismatic enough to attract you, yet scary enough to want to pull away from him. Age has invested him with the reverence that prevents you from attacking him with questions he may not like to answer. Problem is -- there is hardly a question he does not like to answer. His alacrity and his nervous energy surprise you, considering his age --- he is touching 90.

Spiking his answers with the right dose of barbed smiles and caustic one-liners, Mrinal Sen, the doyen of India,s parallel cinema, faces every question with the brashness and courage of a young soldier. He is warm and pleasant to be with because he is very anecdotal and is not inclined to didacticism. He does not threaten you with his intellectual inputs. "Anecdotes make life interesting. Theory is boring," he says. He quotes anecdotes all the way and each one is as good as -- if not better than -- the one that went before. He is an extremely unpredictable man. Just when everyone was convinced that he was suffering from a mental block so far as film - making goes, his last film having hit the screen in 1993, he surprised us all by making a beautiful film, Amar Bhubon (This, my land) in 2002, after a gap on 9 years.

Over the years, Sen has acquired the physical manifestations of a public image that is now an integral part of his persona. He sports longish sideburns, generously dotted with salt and a little pepper. He wears spotlessly white Kurtas. His spectacles are black-framed with angular corners that cannot hide the glint in his bright eyes. Thanks to a gall bladder surgery not long ago, his cigarette has been replaced with the ultimate insignia of the Bengali intellectual, the pipe. Of late, even the pipe is no longer visible.

Sen picks, awards left, right and centre. They dont matter to him any more. Much of his archival clippings, posters, press coverage and photographs are in France which bestowed on him the honour of Commander de L,orde des Arts des Letters. It also held a retrospective of his films, a rare honour for an Indian film - maker. USSR gave him the Soviet Land Nehru Award.

He has won numerous awards for his films at international film festivals like Cannes, Berlin, Moscow, Karlovy Vary, Chicago, Montreal and Carthage. The Government of India bestowed on him the Padma Bhushan in 1980 while the West Bengal Government gave him the Satyajit Ray Memorial Award in 1994.

Over the years, his films have won four Golden Lotuses. He bagged four Silver Lotuses as Best Director at the National Film Awards. He represented India at the UNESCO Comission to celebrate the centenary of cinema. His films have had retrospectives at many international film festivals. He has been a nominated member of the Rajya Sabha. In 1991, Sen was elected chairperson of the International Federation of Film Societies, taking over from Carlo Lizzano, a famous Italian director. He takes all this in his stride. The honours do not seen to have made a dent in his accessibility to the masses.

Shoma Chatterjee

SHANTARAM, 73 years of Filmmaking

2010-08-22T11:22:00.000-07:00

V. Shantaram lived a log and presumably a very happy life, just short of 90 years. Of these he gave 73 years to the cinema. He began his professional life on his entering his teens with the legendary singer and actor, Bal Gandharva,s theatre company as a gofer and odd job boy. Within a couple of years he found employment at a local cinema and shortly after he became an assistant to the photographer, Baburao Painter. Soon, Baburao turned to filmmaking. Shantaram used the opportunity to learn all he could about cinema. He assisted in direction, production and editing and also became the principal actor in several of Painter,s films while he continued to be an odd job man. He would act in 15 films over the next nine years, plaing roles ranging from impoverished peasants and opulent princes to gods of the Hindu pantheon. In 1929, he directed his first film, Netaji Palkar, a historical film of one of the heroes of Maratha history. All this while most of his contemporaries were going through school and college. Shantaram,s university was the film studio.

At the age of 28, already a veteran actor and director, he started the Prabhat Film Studio with three of his colleagues, Fattelal, Damle and Keshavrao. For the next 13 years Prabhat Studios would produce some of the most path breaking and memorable films of the Indian cinema, a large number of them directed by Shantaram.

His early films were mainly based on mythology and history; costume dramas, which were in vogue at the time. But a stint with UFA studios in Germany in the early 1930,s seemed to have affected him quite profoundly. His lighting style and the manner of framing his images changed dramatically, his work became more expressionist and the montage techniques he used put him well ahead of the other filmmakers of his time. More importantly, the subject matter of his films had a strong reformist intent and social concern. Anti – colonial, political overtones could be seen in several of his films during the decade of the 1930,s. This was perhaps the most creative period for Shantaram, Films that are acknowledged classics today like AMRIT MANTHAN, AMAR JYOTI, DUNIYA NA MANE, ADMI and PADOSI were made during his time in Prabhat. The other filmmakers who made some remarkable films at the time were Fattelal and Damle who together directed SANT TUKARAM, the very first Indian film to wing the highest prize at the First International Film Festival at Venice in 1936.

In 1942, Shantaram broke away from Prabhat to start his own film studio, the Rajkamal Kalamandir in Bombay. Most of the films that he made at Rajkamal became huge successes commercially, but critically they were not as well received as his earlier films. Some of the memorable films he directed at Rajkamal were : DR KOTNIS KI AMAR KAHANI, DO ANKHEN BARA HAATH and LOK SHAHIR RAMJOSHI (a musical based on folk theatrical form popular in Maharashtra). This film would eventually create one of the most successful genres in Marathi cinema.

Prolific as he was as a producer and director of cinema features, Shantaram helped to set up a Film Advisory Board for the Government of India as its Chief Producer during the war years. Shantaram continuesd to be an active filmmaker until the very end. The film, Jhaanjhar was under production when he died at the age of almost 90.

When Shantaram passed away in 1990 the Indian film business as an established industry was 77 years old. He was part of it for 73 of those years.

His first 15 films were made during the silent era. His las film was made when digital technology had made its entry into the cinema. He was not necessarily the best filmmaker that India produced, but he certainly was among its most innovative, with a curiosity and passion for learning that remained with him till the end of his days. Shantaram was at his best when he dealt with social issues albeit done with rather heavy doses of melodrama and sentimentality. A large number of his films were hugely successful.

If you wish to know the history of Indian cinema you only need to read Shantaram,s autobiography.

SHYAM BENEGAL

THE ONCE AND FUTRE LIVING DEAD

2010-08-21T05:32:00.000-07:00

The Once and Future Living Dead

A Fast Walk with Zombies and Other Revenants through Cine Fantom Times

Considering the Russian - Orthodox - obsession with the spirituality of the material world, the confrontational quality of godliness, it's not too surprising that death'n-decay're at the core of all things underground in the Soviet Union as well as Russia. Or: In the netherworld of all things post - from Communism to Modernism to the office -, the post mortem is the sole sign, even proof of life; the underground, the beyond has to be the zone of aliveness when daily life as such is dead: Zombies walked, ghosts spectred, cinema that made real(ist?) sense - avant-garde?, retro-garde?: fuck! that! in this fecid constant becoming - had to be a phantom.

Originally, Cine Fantom was a somewhat samizdat, homemade film magazine published for the first time in Moscow supposedly in 1985 by the late Igor Alejnikov. He and his younger brother Gleb were part of the Conceptualist Art-circles of the day, tinkering around with notions/practices like mail art etc. – and filmmaking, in a way nobody in the Soviet empire ever had made films yet, too, in a way that didn't feel alien in its obsession with violence and morbidity, as well as its absurdist sense of irony found when looking at things from just the opposite mind-angle. Just like, unbeknownst to them, several other people at that time did, most importantly: Evgenij Kondratev (nom de guerre: Debil), Evgenij Jufit and the (rest of the) NekroRealists in then-Leningrad-now-Saint Petersburg, and Boris Juhananov in Moscow.

All these people learned about each other mainly through their audience, common lore has it: They showed their works in all kinds of off-off-spaces/venues – (their own) apartments more often than not - where, sometimes, they were approached by viewers who told them about some other mad mavericks in this town or that, or just one ward away. Their backgrounds as well as artistic foundations were varied: the Alejnikovs, as mentioned, had a solid basis in the world of arts, ditto Jufit (painting, photography…) and Kondratev, whereas Juhananov, more a video- than a film-guy, came from the theatre (and psychiatrical work); as filmmakers, they’re all autodidacts, although Jufit and the Alejnikovs later were for some time adopted by major film studios: Jufit and the other NekroRealists, whose first essays were produced via an independent studio called Mžalalafilm, found shelter in an Aleksandr Sokurov-supervised experimental wing of Lenfilm, while the Alejnikovs were granted sanctuary in a somewhat similar arm of Mosfilm – alliances both doomed to fail, which they did, although they produced some of strangest works both fractions came up with: Jufit’s Rycari podnebesja (1989) and the Alejnikovs’ Zdes kto-to byl (1989) and Traktoristij-2 (1992), the latter being one of the most ‘generally readable’ works from the Parallel Cinema trenches.

It took until 1987 for Cine Fantom to become more than a notion: Starting for real with the first festival of independent cinema called, surprise!, Cine Fantom, it developed into an ever more officially recognized - if not necessarily but then again totally sanctioned - magazine-cum-screening-organizer which served as a forum for all kinds of shadow film and video activities in the Soviet Union – all that which is usually referred to as Parallel Cinema, a term coined by Igor’- some say Alejnikov, others Pospelov (a nowadays somewhat forgotten original fantom). That said: For all its transUSSR'ish attitude as well as its part-rootedness in the Leningrad/St.Petersburg underground, Cine Fantom was more a creature of Moscow than anything else: The alliances of the Moscovites with folks from anywhere else where mainly of a tactical nature – while the NekroRealists in their aloof less-being!-more-nothingness!-ways cum rather more classically materialist approach to cinema probably didn't mind using the more klischee-clusterfucking, hypersurrealism-prone dudes from the capital whose sensibilities seemed better synched to words and metaphors than images and the false safety of surfaces...

Over the decades, Leningrad/St. Petersburg developed it’s very own underground idiom, quite independently from the Moscovites – just take the experimental animations of Boris Kazakov, an epigone in the noblest and truest sense of Evgenij Kondratev, Oleg Kotelnikov and many an other tinker and thinker of things sratch- ‘n painted onto celluloide who - might have - belonged to the legendary group avant-garde outfit Severnyj poljus… Cine Fantom's heydays were the early Perestroika-years when exploring new ideas and aesthetics was something of a national pastime: Everybody incl. granny and her goat, they fondly remember, checked out these weird experiments in subversion, just to know what it is, this strange creature developing in their midst, this freedom-thing a lá Wäst.

The Alejnikovs as well as Jufit became international cause célèbres, while at home Sergej Solovev knighted Parallel Cinema in his classic ASSA (1987): the title itself is already an homage(-by-mimicry/appropriation) to Evgenij Kondratev and Oleg Kotelnikov who in 1984 made a short named AssA in which a dead chicken is ‘resurrected’ by running the material backwards (which, again, goes back to at least Vertov, etc.); more importantly, there’s a sequence for which Solovev re-mixed Kondratev’s Nanajnana (1986) with footage from Kotelnikov sporting shakily-shot scenes of performances at Puškinskaja 10 (Leningrad/St.Petersburg’s legendary cultural center) vis-à-vis weird hand-drawn and -painted images suggestings dreams and nightmares. (In 2009, Solov’ev presented 2-ASSA-2, a sequel to his cult classic that took a long, hard look at what had become of this underground’s dreams and hopes twenty years later – which is little, and most of that is the stuff too much of modern event culture is made of… Call it: a film-implosion.)

In 1990, the 17th issue of Cine Fantom appeared – the last one. Other attempts at a Cine Fantom-magazine would follow. All things Cine Fantom petered towards the mid-90s, with the plane crash-death of Igor Alejnikov in 1994 as a crassly slashed exclamation mark: End!; only Jufit developed a career inside his own system and aesthetic, even if his latest work, Pryamohoždenie (2005), a(nother) speculation about strange Stalinist experiments in quadruple-cloning (cf. 4, d: Ilja Hržanovskij, 2004), shows signs of an irritating interest in coming to terms with a wider arthouse audience.

Otherwise, other folks took over organising the unorganisable: from 1993-5, eg. a festival of underground cinema was held under the umbrella Exotica. That said: As cinema was always only one of several arts in which most of the fantoms created, they didn't really go astray, just shifted focus – Juhananov, e.g., became a kind of counter-paragon of Russian theater whose experimental offerings, adaptations of classics like Cehov's Višniovij as well as his own works like Povest o pryamostojašcem celoveke, folks still talk about; his theater group MIR, again, proved to be a breeding ground for new underground hopefuls, like Aleksandr Doulerajn who’d develop into a key-figure of Russian Parallel Cinema, or Andrej Silvestrov who’d turn into one of the most interesting video artists of the new millenium’s beginnig, or Olga Stolpovskaja and Dmitrij Trojtskij whose co-directorial feature debut effort Ja ljublju tebja (2004) became an international break-through film for a contemporary Russian indie-cinema (early Sundance cool with a Moscovite lip…).

In 1995, Cine Fantom was resurrected for the first time under the aegis of above-mentioned MIR’ean plus Gleb Alejnikov – as something like the experimental film-arm of the Moscow Cinema Museum. This went on till 2000. In the early third millennium, 2002, to be exact, the Fantom was back again – and stranger then ever: First, Cine Fantom tried to re-group in the Moscow Cinema Museum, but after a famously scandalous screening session head-lined “Better Porn than Never”, officialdom’s mighties turned uncollaborative. So, Cine Fantom became a non-structure: It exists as an idea plus social network that occasions events – an already established organizational force cum klischee, supported in this way or that by STS-TV where several of its key players could carve out (at least for some time) fat careers for themselves (above all Gleb Alejnikov who stopped filmmaking and serves now as the Fantom's organizational mastermind, Aleksandr Doulerajn and Olga Stolpovskaja); fittingly, some of the most fascinating and old school-Cine Fantom’y productions from the last years got made for TV, cf. Dulerajn’s full frontal trashy-nuts 20-part series Bunker (2004) – Lloyd Kaufman of Troma who’d been a guest of Cine Fantom would surely approve of this gem.

The development inside Cine Fantom, the whole Parallel Cinema-world, well, Russia in general, come to think of it, is probably best hinted at by looking at two quasi-remakes, the Alejnikov's seminal Traktoristij-2 and Pavel Labazov & Andrey Silvestrov & Vladislav Mamyšev-Monroe's irreverent masterpiece Volga-Volga (2006): The first, a true Perestroika-beast - and the Brother’s already second assault on the sacred tractor -, plays with, twirls, jerks around motives from Ivan Pyrev's classic of Stalinist enterganda Traktoristij (1939), while the latter invades Grigorij Aleksandrov's Volga-Volga (1938) by taking this darling of Sovtainment as such and changing only a few things around, like replacing the head of the film's star, Ljubov Orlova, with Mamyšev-Monroe's impersonation of her... The Alejnikov Brothers, during the years their country changed around and around, contemplated the notion - echt Russian: the folly of change as such: Traktoristij-2 is a sequel-as-remake, a study in aesthetic haunting, and how one can't just shed some old skin for a new one – the past is a construction one needs to work with - ever so gleefully iconoclastically - in order to get a grip on it; or: Even taking the piss is work. The film's cast presents something of a stand-of between the Old Guard and the avant-garde, with several Soviet stars in the lead side by side with icons of the underground – and it works, as a confrontation, with no quarter considered by any side.

Seventeen years later, it has become possible to campolustily indulge in the kind of aesthetics the Alejnikov Brothers needed to question: Labazov & Sil’vestrov & Mamyšev-Monroe reclaim the Soviet era for themselves, an impossible thing to do without taking an ever so pranksterish critical stance towards it, but also a necessity, for it would be a waste of history/lives/possibilities if one just wanted to forget about it; in a certain way, their Volga-Volga does similar things as a bunch of film historians and theoreticians have been doing in the last about-decade when they worked on reassessing the œuvres of masters like, well, Pyrev and Aleksandrov.

The past is also one of the many subjects of Boris Juhananov's hopeful monster Ludog princa (1986/2006-), an everything-at-once of documentary, fiction, essay, and if one can think of something else, just add it. The project, a video-roman of 20 chapters, was started in 1986, principal photography ended about '89, the basic conceptualization of how to deal with it all fixed in the mid-90s – and then, Juhananov stopped (and did other extraordinary videos), hundreds of tapes were lying around and starting to fade, some got lost, among them the chapter Godard (yes, there is significance and justice in decay).

It was only in 2005 that Juhananov started to finish his opus super-magnum – and what a whatthefuck!soever it became: A memorandum to an era whose protagonists are by now more often than not dead - that the image is so statograiny and already magnetopaled gives the whole damn thing a ghost photography charm -, as well an an exemplification of that era's theories/notions/ideals, in particular chapter #5, Nipponese, an exercise in what Juhananov calls 'fatal editing'. Two of the four chapters Yukhananov was able to finish first are, quite simply, extraordinary: #2, XO Game, and #3, Esther. The latter is a lamento-variation on the biblical story of Esther done as an allusion to the Chechen catastrophe(to come back then) as well as an essay over the ever-latent antisemitism in Russia and beyond (the credits quote Luther's ranting against the canonical status of the Book of Esther). As always, Juhananov took only a few choice elements - ranging from a Falco's Austro-pop-paean to a serial killer to a discussion with a Chechen writer going nationalistoballistic - and arranged them in such a way that they open each other up: The whole thing goes BOOOM with meaning and poetry.

XO Game, then, feels - looks, sounds, stinks really - as if someone just vomited out his soul-guts: It's a thick, rawest slice of Fuck You!, an acting-out of a sense of lostness in a country that's just not able to take whatever any more – Russia as a prison cell and a bomb is ticking, with people hemorrhaging words, walking blind in a visionless world. The main thing here, as well as in the other chapters so far, is the editing, live-giving however fatal it might be. Juhananov has a fine sense of rhythm as well as the kind of artistic ego that's capable of creating-by-chopping: Each cut is so decisive that everything happening in the image always feels just and there for a reason, no matter how amateurish it all looks – it's really more Punk than anything else, SovPunk, therefore inyerface,r than anything those Western sissies could ever gob up. Besides all that, XO Game is a most haunting experience: Not only are the images sometimes bordering on gone - cheap technology that took a hard hit from time and its desolate frolic: destruction -, but quite a lot of people seen are: gone. XO Game is the head stone of Cine Fantom.

These days, Cine Fantom is more a brand than an organization: a celebration of a fascinating past whose values and ideas/ideals shan't have been in vain. Besides having more or less regular shows with excessive after show-discussions (especially whenever über-orator Juhananov shows up…), Cine Fantom features all kinds of media works ranging from videos by artists like Jurij Lejderman or Olga Cherniševa to low-budget feature films like Petr Hazizov's forgetable Manga (2005). The presence of Hazizov shows quite well the kind of cultural/industrial ley lines along which the revenant Cine Fantom moves: Hazizov owns one of Russia's biggest CGI-outfits and is, like Gleb Alejnikov or Dulerajn, something of a force in the new world of Russian media.

Fittingly, Cine Fantomis mellowing a bit towards the middle ground and -brow, it seems: Dulerajn & Sergej Koryagin’s feature-length grotesque Ivan durak (2002) eg. feels, for all its bite and often cruel jest, positively charming and almost mild-mannered in its view of the world, while the Cine Fantom Screenings during the XXIX Moscow International Film Festival consisted mainly of works one finds in competitions of places like Locarno or Rotterdam (the most outré work on offer was easily Nina Šorina’s Nietzsche v Moskve, a fantasy about the Tyrant of Torino’s visit to nowaday’s Moscow). One should also mention that Cine Fantom isn’t cinema/video avant-garde’s centre anymore, but one of several players in the field – let’s only mention the International Kansk Video Festival (aka. The Thinking Man’s Cannes aka. The Eastern Kanne) which established itself as a prime force in underground cinema, Cine Fantom's partner eg. at a Russian Avant-garde Film festival in London, 2009; fittingly, Cine Fantom doesn’t seem to be interested in supporting as vast a range of experimental film or video modes of expression, their makers, even if they’re from around the corner – the works of Moscovite Viktor Alimpiev and his epigones like Marian Žunin and Sergej Višneskij eg. seem to mean precious little to them, ditto the mad movideo outbursts of Svetlana Baskova whose Zelenyj slonik (1999) shall for all eternity be considered a world underground art axiom…

Let’s say: Cine Fantom is the Russia avant-garde’s arrière-garde – they keep the overall project alive from the back and side-lines. As a paragon of artistic disobediance, they cast an almost impossibly long shadow over Russia’s alternative arts and mediae – essentially, they’re still the measuring rod.

OLAF MOELLER

FILM CRITIC

The making of SHANTARAM

2010-08-17T03:41:00.000-07:00

Shantaram Rajaram Vankudre, born in 1901, was the product of his time and milieu. Cinema was still in its infancy, regarded no more than a novelty, a passing craze. Any possibility of it developing into a serious art form seemed remote. Shantaram grew up with the medium to see it become the 20th century,s most potent art form.

Much of Shantaram,s education was in the university of life, moving from job to job. He worked in a railway workshop, then became a sign painter, a photographer,s assistant and finally an usher in a cinema hall in Kolhapur.

Movies had developed with lightning speed and whatever was shown, Shantaram watched avidly. Most of all he enjoyed watching D.G. Phalke,s films. In 1920 when Baburao Painter set up his Maharasthra Film Company, Shantaram took the first opportunity to join him as an apprentice. And caught the attention of Baburao and was cast in the role of Krishna in Surekha Haran (1921), till Baburao asked him to direct Netaji Palkar (1927).

In 1929 Shantaram formed Prabhat Film Company in Kolhapur and it,s first success was Gopal Krishna (1929). In quick succession five more silent films followd, Khooni Khanjar (1930), Rani Chandrasena (1931) and Zulum (1931). His films were marked by an inventiveness of visuals and camera movements. He was just as concerned about their social imports, even though the subjects he chose were either mythological or quasi-historical.

With the advent of sound, Shantaram did not rush into production to cash in on the new novelty. He reflected, "My first reaction to talkies was rather one of diffidence. I felt that they were just stage-plays". In 1932 he made his first sound film, Ayodhya Ka Raja. For colour processing he traveled to Berlin at the peak of Hitler,s popularity and got fully cognizant of the power of film as propaganda. What particularly impressed him was the technical virtuosity of the German cinema, evident in Lang, Lubitsch and Ophuls.

On his return made Amrit Manthan (1934), reminiscent of Luis Buñuel in Un Chien Andalou. Dharmatma (1935), social reform versus orthodoxy, clearly taken from Gandhi,s crusade. Shantaram seemed particularly concerned about the condition of women in Indian society, Amar Jyoti (1936), Duniya Na Mane (1937), Admi, the story about a prostitute, (1939) and his last film at Prabhat Films was Padosi (1941), about communal tension between Hindus and Muslims.

After his departure from Prabhat Films became producer at Film Advisory Board helping the government of India in its war propaganda, but stayed less than a year and joined Wadia Movietone where he directed Shakuntala (1943). The striking success of this film, which ran for 104 weeks in Bombay, permitted the impressive anti-Japanese "war effort" film, Dr Kotnis Ki Amar Kahani (1946).

The times had by now changed and so had audience tastes. There were also market compulsions and he had to make certain compromises. However he remained till the end a socially committed and self-sacrificing artist. One cannot resist the temptation of comparing him with Frank Capra whom he had admired. Both were about the same age and had struggled for survival to see their name above the title. Both believed in the final triumph of the human spirit.

B. D. GARGA