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

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

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

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

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

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’ )