Sadly,
film festivals in India have lost the importance
they once enjoyed, no thanks to the mushrooming
of film festivals in every nook and corner of
this huge Asian sub-continent. In Kolkata alone,
festivals run tail-to-tail into one another and
before you can say ‘end’ to one, another
one has begun. Yet, the Kolkata Film Festival
has a different flavour because the number of
cinebuffs this city has outstrips that of any
other city in India. The Nandan air is rife with
cigarette smoke that smarts our eyes before we
can elbow into Nandan I. The entire complex is
dotted with video cameras from satellite channels
asking every Tom, Dick and Harry their views on
the Festival. That, in very short, is the average
Bangali cinebuff, sorry, cineaste, excuse
me, cinema intellectual who has taken a sabbatical
from work from the 10th to the 17th of November
to make his daily trip to the Nandan complex.
Ask anyone about Ram Gopal Varma’s latest
film and he will throw you a look that will make
you wish you were Sita incarnate. Ram Gopal Varma?
What is that for God’s sake? Is it the name
of the latest BJP-brand cheese flooding Vardhan
Market? Or is it the name of Calcutta’s
newest IGP? There are few takers for the evening
shows at Nandan II because the venue and the slot
are reserved for Indian films. Nandan III had
also-ran films that this year included a batch
of documentaries on global warming that drew a
paltry audience.
 With
48 films from around 97 countries in the international
cinema section the serpentine queues outside Rabindra
Sadan and Nandan I did not happen, thanks to a
large section of the city’s culturally inclined
intelligentsia and much of the media having boycotted
the festival this year as a protest against the
violation of human rights and killings in Nandigram.
But this did nothing to dampen the spirit of the
common man enough to keep him away from his personal
slice of the celluloid action. The festival also
had screenings at Purbashree auditorium in Salt
Lake and will be followed this year by smaller
festivals in some of the state’s districts
such as Burdwan. The inaugural filmwas The
Violin, directed by Francisco Vargas of Mexico.
Through its deliberate realism; the film refers
to the guerilla conflicts that formed an integral
part of the Mexican political scene of the 20th
century. The history the film sends us back to
the peasant revolt of Guerrero in the 1970s, the
repressed voice that finally erupted in defence
of the rights of the Indian peasant communities,
taking both the reigning power and public opinion
by surprise. The situation has hardly changed
more than forty years since. It also recalls the
revolt of the Chiapas populations in the country.
In the main Cinema International section, Turkey’s
Nuri Bilge Ceylan and Israel’s Amos Gitai,
contemporary filmmakers, were a big draw. Ceylan’s
films reveal a tendency of the Western influence
towards a secular identity while Gitai, very popular
in India, is still experimenting with his camera.
There was also a ‘Discovery’ section
featuring Belgian actress-turned director Marion
Hansel who sources her films from literature and
Greece’s Yorgos Tsemberopoulos. From Hansel’s
screenings, two films that stood out in the entire
section were The Dust and Sounds
of Sand. The two films are polar opposites
in terms of content, form, approach and treatment.
But both tell moving stories that are at times
so brutally real that they shock the viewer. Argentina’s
Foreigner, directed by Ines de Oliveira
Cezar is a unique celluloid document on the fatalistic
attitude of people who permit their lives to be
ruled by superstition. Against the backdrop of
rocky and arid land where there is not a drop
a water to be drunk, the director uses silence
complemented with a well-orchestrated soundtrack
to express the emotional suffering of a girl targeted
for the kill by her own father because the people
believe that she is the reason for the lack of
water that can save their lives.
Four celluloid interpretations/transpositions
of Fyodor Dostoevsky’s works - Crime
and Punishment, The Possessed, A
Gentlewoman and The Gambler were
screened as part of the festival. Vittorio de
Sica’s Two Women was screened as
homage to Alberto Moravia who authored the literary
classic. Sir Lawrence Olivier’s tribute
came in the shape of the screening of Henry
V, Hamlet and Richard III.
Each of them are highly stylized and typically
classical Shakespeare, stagy by contemporary standards,
and theatrical to a fault. This year, the festival
introduced two separate sections called Celluloid
Diamonds and Celluloid Pearls. 28 feature films
of five renowned directors were screened under
these sections. Among them was Shyam
Benegal, the guest of honour at this year’s
festival, with screenings of Ankur
(1973), Nishant (1975), Manthan (1976),
Bhumika
(1977), Suraj Ka Satvan Ghoda
(1992), Mammo (1994) and Samar
(1998).
There was Homage to Glauber Rocha, the famous
filmmaker whose films burst into Brazilian history
revealing a nation in agony, terrorized and naked
to the bone. There was a section for cinebuffs
under “All-time Greats” featuring
All Quiet on the Western Front (USA,
1930) and Closely Watched Trains (Czechslovakia,
1966.) Jean-Luc Goddard, the French filmmaker
who broke all narrative conventions of traditional
cinema to create a new language, was celebrated
with a screening of six films. Keeping him company
was Iran’s Abbas Kiarostami, one of the
most influential and controversial post-revolution
Iranian filmmakers also with six films. Argentinian
filmmaker Fernando Solanas, who was personally
present at some of his screenings, had a special
tribute dedicated to him with five out of his
total oeuvre of 25 films screened in this section.
 There
were contemporary Indian films in a separate section.
Among these were Ekti Nadir Galpo (2007),
the directorial debut film by production designer
Samir Chanda, Arup Manna’s Behind the
Screen directed by Arup Manna, on the pioneering
spirit of Aideu Handique, the heroine of the first
Assamese feature film Joymoti made in
1935, Agnidev Chatterji’s Prabhu Nashto
Hoye Jai shot in digital in B & W, Cyanide
that tries to capture the human drama that took
place in the last 20 days of the lives of the
LTTE assassins, Saira, on the brutal
gang rape of a television news reporter who ends
up in a lunatic asylum, Chitra Palekar’s
Maati Maye based on a Mahasweta Devi
novel and the now-celebrated Vanaja directed
by Rajesh Domalpalli on the 14-year-old daughter
of a poor fisherman who becomes a great dancer
through sheer grit and determination.
The Children’s Films Section had a wonderful
bunch of films selected from across the globe.
Other than Cinema International, there were screenings
of shorts, documentaries, children’s films,
Indian films and six films on global warming.
Among the Indian entries in the documentary section,
one must mention Ketan Anand’s Chetan
Anand, the Poetics of Film on his father,
Shubhankar Ghosh’s documentary on Bismillah
Khan called Yaad-e-Bismillah and an interesting
documentary from Belgium on Nemai Ghosh who has
photographed Satyajit Ray over the last 30 years
of his life and has a collection of nearly 100,000
negatives on the great filmmaker. The film is
titled Satyajit Ray Negatives – My Life
with Satyajit Ray. But a wrong screening
schedule spoilt the viewership for this screening.
The 13th KFF had its mandatory parallel festival
under the title New Forum of International Cinema
co-organized by Cine Central, the most active
film society in this part of the country, which
held its screenings at Metro. So this actually
makes two-festivals-in-one, an event perhaps no
festival in the country can boast of. It screened
80 films from 32 countries under the highlights
of Panorama of World Cinema, Spotlight on Chinese
Cinema, a session of digital video films from
Bangladesh, a centenary tribute to Maxim Gorky’s
Mother with Pudovkin’s celluloid
interpretation of the classic novel in celebration
of the play’s centenary. Frozen,
the inaugural film, directed by NRI Shivaji Chandrabhushan,
explores the problems of the displaced. The film
is the journey of a father and his daughter, seen
through the daughter’s eyes. It was shot
in the freezing cold of Ladakh in February 2006
over the continuous shooting span of 34 days at
an average height of 15,000 feet above sea level
where the temperature sometimes fell to –30
degrees. It is the director’s debut film
and is shot completely in Black & White. It
has some beautiful music and is a treat to watch.
Raj Kumar Santoshi’s Shahid Bhagat Singh
was part of the screening programme as homage
to the memory of Bhagat Singh. Insect Woman
(1963), an outstanding film by Japan’s Shoei
Imamura was chosen as homage to the great director
who passed away recently. Imamura uses a downtrodden,
wartime Japanese woman, Tome, to attempt a cinematic
answer to the question of what it means to be
Japanese: what is the condition of the Japanese
woman? The film is multilayered, working as a
feminist statement and a metaphor for pre-and-postwar
Japan simultaneously. The term Insect Woman
is a critique of Tome's life. An insect doesn't
learn and repeats mistakes, just as Tome does
in the film.
Thanks to Tareque Masud, one of the most internationally
renowned filmmakers of Bangladesh, film buffs
in Kolkata had the opportunity of watching a bouquet
of five digital films made by a batch of young
and men who are challenging the dwindling of cinema
in Bangladesh screened in the Forum segment at
Metro. These five films shot on digital are indicative
of a movement towards the production of good films
with original content made on shoestring budgets
that are taking advantage of the merits of digital
technology. The films are – Choturtho
Matra (Fourth Dimension) directed by Nurul
Alam Atique, Waiting Room by Mostafa
Sarwar Farooki, Gorom Bhaat Othoba Nichhak
Bhooter Galpo (Hot Food or a Ghost Story)
by Animesh Aich, Tiner Talowar (Toy Sword)
by Ashutosh Sujon and Scriptwriter by
Kamruzzaman Kamu.
The most significant screening of the Forum was
a retrospective of renowned Czech filmmaker Karen
Kachyna and the Spanish Julio Medem with eight
films and six films of each of these directors
earmarked for the festival screenings. Kachyna’s
Funny Old Man (1969) one of the films
chosen, is about a 60-year-old cyberneticist,
who was imprisoned in a Stalinist concentration
camp. He underwent a heart surgery that made it
possible for him live again but gave no hope of
getting his work and family back; it was a bitter
film which ends with a hopeful message.
The Focus on Cuban Cinema included six outstanding
films, one of them, Alsino and Condor
(1982) from Miguel Littin. Alsino has two dreams
in life. One of them is to escape the realities
of his war-torn Latin-American homeland by learning
to fly like a bird. The other is to meet the guerilla
leader Manuel. As the conflict between the guerillas
and the US occupying forces escalate, Alsino is
not one to give up on his dreams, come what may.
The problem with the Bengali intelligentsia in
Kolkata is that you are considered an outcaste
if you suggest even a hint of an inclination towards
a Mahesh Manjrekar film or the latest Gulzar
film. And if you talk highly of a Subhash Ghai
film, well then, you will be asked to commit suicide
– literally. Why, I ask, must the unique,
all-embracing, universal art from like cinema
be riddled with casteist labels of art and commerce,
of geographic labels of Indian and International?
Why create dichotomous worlds within an aesthetics
that is in essence, the same? Why use different
yardsticks to measure Jean luc Goddard and Buddhadeb
Dasgupta, tell me? By all means bring in international
films. But pray, do not marginalize our own films.
Few foreign critics are experts on Satyajit
Ray, Ritwik
Ghatak or Mrinal
Sen. But Kolkata will give you a whole lot
of cinema experts on Eisenstein, Bergman, Fellini,
Antonioni, Fassbinder, and the rest. Why? Because
we are intellectual snobs who have not been able
to shed our colonial ghosts. Because we consider
a Buddhadeb too mundane next to a Tarkovsky. Or,
a Shyam Benegal too ‘mainstream’ in
comparison with a Kieslowski. We squarely accuse
Aparna Sen
of using the camera for sexual titillation in
Paroma (1984).
But join the queue outside Rabindra Sadan to watch
the same intimacy in an Argentinian or Japanese
film. We draw and quarter Adoor for his very slow
camera in Mathilukal. Yet we raise Antonioni
to high heavens for his aesthetic use of pace
and space in umpteen films. Why?
Shoma A Chatterji is a freelance journalist
who specialises in cinema and gender. She has
won the National Award for Best Writing on Cinema
twice.
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