India

Kaki is a 60-year-old widow who lives with her Nepali maid, Malti. The film takes place on one afternoon in their house where a flower blossoms in the balcony. Malti meets a boy (a sailor) from her hometown unexpectedly.Read More »

Synopsis
Amit Dutta recorded several conversations with Prof. B.N. Goswamy, an important art historian of India, covering his entire body of work. Interspersed with his talks were also some silences. This film draws upon some of those moments of silence and weaves them into a web of ideas and images that fill the art-historian’s mindscape.Read More »

Does India have a national cinema? Does it, indeed, require one? Mrinal Sen is not quite sure. Yet, his latest celluloid essay, And the Show Goes On, a British Film Institute-funded tribute to the world’s largest movie industry in cinema’s centenary year, is quite polemically categorical about what India’s filmic output should be.

But can it ever be what it ideally ought to be? Again, Sen, as is his wont, is not forth coming with a clear answer. His prescription, however, is rather unambiguous: cinema should confront social realities, no matter how harsh; it cannot continue being as cavalierly escapist as it is in India and yet expect to be taken seriously on the global stage. As film director and critic Chidananda Dasgupta says on camera: “India lives too much by myth and too little by fact”. That, for Sen, is where the problem begins. And ends.Read More »

The film is set in a village in the Indian province of Bengal during World War II, and examines the effect of the Great Famine of 1943 on the villages of Bengal through the eyes of a young Brahmin doctor-teacher, Gangacharan, and his wife, Ananga.Read More »

1. Et cetera
1997, 16mm, Color, 33 mins

‘Et cetera’ is a tetralogy of four separate films that seek to examine the various levels at which the reality of human existence functions. Shown at Dhaka Short film festival, 1999, and Cinema Nova Brussels, 2005.

Avikunthak’s foray into filmmaking was directly an attempt at playing with time — all the four films in Et cetera, are directly an attempt at engaging with real time, the fact that they are single shot, single take, unedited films. For him, as a temporal experience they are most linear cinematic narrative, most pure. These films, rather than sculpting in time, were slicing time. However video art has been more successful as an engagement with real time, he says, “I look at my films as an attempt at invoking ‘kaal’ as a metaphysical entity, rather than ‘kaal’ as a temporal category; Et cetera and Kalighat Fetish being articulation of such an invocation.”Read More »

In romantic Paris, two Parisians of Indian origin are in love namely Shyam or Sam and Roopa. Mystery and intrigue surround this romance, as Roopa is abducted and held by criminal mastermind Jack and his minions, who will trade her for a hefty ransom. Roopa has a look-alike in the shape and form of Suzy, who is sent in place of Roopa to ensure that the money is received, while the real Roopa is still being held captive. Sam must use all the resources available to in order to set Roopa free, but he will have a difficult time to differentiate between Suzy and Roopa.Read More »

A film trapped between two monologues. A lonely and abandoned wife’s fantasy comes to life when the paramour she invokes springs forth and transforms her reality. Shadows Formless is an interpretation of the Malayalam novella Pandavpuram by the distinguished novelist Setumadhavan from Kerala.Read More »

After years of fighting in the Naxalite guerrilla for the rights of the Indian tribes, Somi and her husband, handed over their rifles and surrendered in front of the State. They are now sharing a settlement with other former fighters, in an attempt to become civilians and grant their son a future.Read More »

Synopsis
Two travelers journey in search of a flying-craft that can deliver them from this world to other dimensions of existence, all the while voicing and recording their memories and thoughts.Read More »