Taking the festivities online

With the pandemic raging on, film festival organisers are making the most of the digital space.
 

Gaza Mon Amour, above, is part of the line-up for DIFF 2020. Passes to this year's online film festival: www.online.diff.co.in

Among the many communities barred from assembling by the coronavirus is that of devout Indian film buffs. Movie theatres have been shut for eight months, and even the very occasional new film ‘dropping’ on an OTT platform makes for sad, solitary viewing. Theatres cautiously reopened on October 15, but it might be a while before audiences, and thus filmmakers, risk a Friday release in the cinema. Even worse is the fate of that critical mass of film buffs who eagerly await the annual Indian film festival season, held from October to January, with big and small festivals taking place across the country. Given the new social distancing and hygiene norms, organisers have had to grapple with whether to go digital, cancel, or postpone and hope for the pandemic to reduce in intensity. The bigger festivals, which attract larger crowds and members of an international film fraternity, have almost all chosen the latter two options.

The Jio MAMI Mumbai Film Festival was the first to cancel its 2020 edition, rescheduling to October 2021. Two other highly-awaited festivals, the International Film Festival of India (IFFI) and the International Film Festival of Kerala (IFFK), have postponed. IFFI, organised by the Directorate of Film Festivals and the Entertainment Society of Goa, has been pushed from November to January 16-24, 2021, and IFFK from December to February 12-19, 2021.

The start of the lockdown saw an explosion of energy online with many film archives and commercial sites making selected films free to stream, like Criterion expressing its support for the Black Lives Matter movement by removing its paywall on classic black cinema. In June, when 21 festivals including Berlin, Locarno and Cannes, collaborated on We Are One, a free 10-day digital festival, MAMI contributed three films. Festivals like KASHISH, the Mumbai International Queer Festival and the International Documentary and Short Film Festival of Kerala held successful online editions. The Dharamshala International Film Festival (DIFF) ran an online Viewing Room for months, screening critically-acclaimed Indian and world cinema previously shown at DIFF.

“At that time, many said [the virtual] was the new normal. Online screenings got huge audiences as people were starved,” says Bina Paul, artistic director, IFFK. “But we are busier now, and the distractions are many. It is harder to take time out for an online festival.” There are also piracy concerns, especially for new films, since India has a particularly well-developed network of hackers. “Most crucially, people are realising that films are only part of the festival experience,” adds Paul. “That sense of community is not there online. For filmmakers, the feeling of the film finding its audience cannot come from a scattered, anonymous viewership.” Subasri Krishnan, curator of the Urban Lens festival (Delhi and Bengaluru) for the Indian Institute of Human Settlements (IIHS), agrees that a festival is a space of validation for independent and documentary filmmakers, and 100 people gathering in a dark room is integral to that. But IIHS is moving Urban Lens 2020 online, to be held over six days in December. “One cannot substitute for the other,” says Krishnan, but adds, “Real spaces can sometimes be exclusionary; an online festival may find new audiences. Also, geography becomes irrelevant.”

For DIFF co-founders Ritu Sarin and Tenzing Sonam, too, the prospect of attracting new viewers across South Asia makes their upcoming digital version exciting. “We love the warmth of the physical festival, but we realised that both for indie filmmakers ready with new films this year, and for viewers, there aren’t many options,” says Sarin. DIFF 2020, which will run online from October 29 to November 4 at Online.diff.co.in, is larger than the previous eight editions, with over 100 films screening over a week. Acclaimed international films include Babyteeth (2019), Air Conditioner (2020) and the Wuhan-set documentary 76 Days (2020). There’s an exciting new section of Indian documentaries and an extended programme of shorts, including Ashmita Guha Neogi’s CatDog, the only Indian film selected for Cannes this year. “Without the logistical constraints of time or venue size, we could accommodate more films. And we’re starting an Audience Award for Best First Film, which seems easier to achieve online,” says Sarin. “Next year’s festival may well be a hybrid of online and off.”

For smaller independent or crowd-funded film festivals, going digital can open up exciting possibilities, says Nitya Vasudevan, co-organiser of the Bangalore Queer Film Festival (BQFF). “There’s the prospect of inviting international filmmakers that we would find impossible non-virtually, while freeing up time and money spent on venue hire, brochures and tech. But as a queer festival, the roles it plays are many,” says Vasudevan of BQFF. But she may speak for all film festival regulars when she says, “People look forward to attending because it’s a space of intimacy: you can dress a certain way, have certain conversations you can’t have outside.”In true community spirit, BQFF is currently contemplating an audience poll of the festival’s regulars to decide on whether the festival should be held online in February-March, or wait until it can be held safely offline. Of course, the poll itself would be online.

Published in India Today magazine, 23 Oct 2020.

How the other half sees

My Mirror column:

Women filmmakers were a quiet revelation at this year’s International Film Festival of India, offering an alternative view of the world: the second of a two-part column.

Ioana Uricaru’s taut debut feature Lemonade stars Malina Manovici as Mara, a Romanian woman trying to move to the USA with her son

The work of women directors, I wrote last Sunday, seemed particularly strong at this year’s IFFI. The Bollywood based programming at the festival showed some cognizance of this, too, featuring a conversation with three women who have directed Hindi films: Meghna Gulzar (Talvar, Raazi), Gauri Shinde (English Vinglish, Dear Zindagi), and Leena Yadav (Parched, Shabd). The festival also screened Raazi, among the most fascinating films to come out of Mumbai in 2018. Reema Kagti’s hockey historical Gold was part of the open-air screenings of recent sports films in Hindi, while the 1993 classic Rudaali was shown as a tribute to its director Kalpana Lajmi, who passed away this year.


But it was women filmmakers from the rest of the world that I decided to focus on. Having begun the festival with Nico, 1988, Susanna Nicchiarelli's acute reimagining of the last two years of the life of the late singer Christa Päffgen, it seemed appropriate to catch the festival’s other biopic of a female performer: Emily Atef’s Three Days in Quiberon. Although also set in the 1980s, and similarly structured, focusing on three days in the life of German actress Romy Schneider a year before her death, Atef’s approach could not be more different from Nicchiarelli’s.

Three Days is a polite, measured affair that uses black and white cinematography to achieve an even greater distance from its characters. And yet the predicaments of both women being portrayed are strikingly similar, almost to the point of cliché. Both shot to fame early, with their looks and private lives garnering more media attention than their talent, as happens so tragically often with young women. We see them both in later life, chafing against the milieu that has made them who they are – but also trapped them in a kind of freeze-frame. If Päffgen is frustrated with journalists ignoring her current music, refusing to see her beyond the three songs she sang with the Velvet Underground, Schneider is distressed at still being seen, at 42, through the lens of a 15-year-old character she once played.


Both women feel imprisoned by their beauty. But while Päffgen has finally escaped that particular cage with the almost deliberate use of heroin, Schneider’s drinking problem (throughout the film, she is at a detox retreat whose no-alcohol rule she breaks hungrily) has not yet led to the loss of her looks – a fact that may help explain why Atef shows us a woman desperately unhappy, trapped forever in the flattering, invasive gaze of the camera.


The most bizarre thing in common between Päffgen and Schneider is the French actor Alain Delon, who had affairs with both women, and was the father of Päffgen's son Ari. Which brings us to a more significant fact: both women were single mothers, torn between their unstable, overly public lives and their dreams of mundane, stable domesticity.


In fact, the depiction of women bringing up children by themselves is what unites several of the female-helmed films at IFFI. Men are absent from these domestic worlds for reasons as disparate as the films. In Beatriz Seigner’s affecting Los Silencios (which I wrote about last week and which has since won a Special Mention award at IFFI), the protagonist Amparo has lost her husband to the Colombian civil war. We watch her having to stretch herself across the gender divide: the only job she finds is as a loader of fish at the harbour; at home she must offer her little son enough company to prevent him from seeking out unsuitable male role models.


Another kind of migration lies at the core of Ioana Uricaru’s excellent and harrowing debut, Lemonade, about a Romanian single mother trying to stay in the United States on the strength of a nursing degree and marriage to an American man who was until recently her patient. Here the demands placed on the woman are not about transcending her gender, but reducing her to it. No matter what she does, her personhood is irrevocably tied to her sex.


From Iceland comes another fine film featuring border-crossing and single mothers: Ísold Uggadóttir's And Breathe Normally. Uggadóttir makes the child the bridge between mutually suspicious adults – and then the border guard from Iceland and the illegal immigrant from Guinea Bissau turn out to have more in common than they realise.

In other films, the father is the one who travels while the mother is left behind with the kids. Thrown back upon their limited resources, these mother-child relationships are less well-adjusted. In Shireen Seno’s dreamily evocative if self-indulgent memorialising of a solitary 80s childhood, Nervous Translation, the absent Filipino husband works in the Gulf, and the wife guards her privacy fiercely enough to become annoyed when the child listens to her father’s recorded cassette-letters. Camilla Strøm Henriksen's somewhat overwrought Norwegian debut Phoenix also maps a fraught mother-daughter relationship, drawing an affecting performance from Ylva Thedin Bjørkaas as a teenager who wrongly imagines her absent musician father will rescue her. “I travel the world and I play music,” he tells his girlfriend. “Steady relationships aren’t my thing,” he tells his daughter.


“Have you never had a man who’s said, ‘Quit the show business’?” the surprised journalist asks Romy Schneider in Three Days in Quiberon. “No, I’ve never had a man like that,” she responds. Perhaps the lesson from these films is a different one: the women waiting for men to return, resolve, or rescue them will wait forever.
We must make our own worlds.

Published in Mumbai Mirror, 2 Dec 2018.

Screening the World

A personal report from this year’s edition of IFFI: the first of a two-part column.

A still from Beatriz Seigner's haunting new film Los Silencios (The Silences)

I write this column from the middle of the International Film Festival of India, the 49th edition of which is currently on in Panjim, Goa. The festival got under way with its usual quota of frustrating glitches — the shiny new interface for online ticket booking worked smoothly for about a day before giving many users (including myself) trouble; the stated categories of manual ticket booking counters were defied in practice (e.g. numbers of non-media people, even students in film school T-shirts, insisted on standing in the media ticketing queue); the redemption of online bookings on Day One was limited to a single counter, effectively punishing those who’d actually made bookings online. That has thankfully changed, and the young people working the ticketing machinery at Inox, Maquinez Palace and Kala Academy are getting slightly better at it with each day, thus making the queues move faster.

The festival’s programming this year appears to have surrendered more space than usual to Bombay filmdom. Two of these sessions have been dominated by filmi families: producer Boney Kapoor appeared with his and Sridevi’s daughter Jahnvi, who made her debut with Dhadak this year, while David Dhawan will have a session today called Dha-One with his son Varun Dhawan. Singer Arijit Singh, lyricist Prasoon Joshi and actor Kriti Sanon have also had sessions at the festival. These sessions are apparently intended to lure in Bollywood fans who have little interest in the world cinema or regional Indian fare that the IFFI is meant to showcase. But it’s not clear to me what the festival is doing to bridge the gap between Kriti Sanon watchers and arthouse cinema watchers. Merely bunging both categories of people into the same venue only rubs everyone the wrong way. And it’s not about dissing popular cinema: I’m a Hindi film buff, but I don’t see why one particular industry gets so much play on what ought to be an equal platform for all our many cinemas.

For any serious film festival goer, though, the main business of the day remains the choosing of the next day’s films. Many are here to catch Indian Panorama screenings at Inox Screen 2. Others might be tempted by a chance to see the late Vinod Khanna on the big screen (A well-chosen mix of his films features Achanak, Dayavan and Lekin, though Mere Apne would have been even nicer), or watch a (very small and predictable) selection of Ingmar Bergman classics, timed to commemorate his birth centenary this year.


The greater proportion of screenings, happily, remains recent international cinema. Beyond the fiction features in the International Competition section, there is the non-competitive World Panorama section, also consisting of international films made in the last year. The Festival Kaleidoscope section presents films made this year by the world’s most eminent filmmakers — this is where you go to catch Hirokazu Kore-eda’s Palme d’Or-winning moving through occasionally mawkish tale of fictive kinship, Shoplifters, or agent provocateur Gaspar Noe’s frenetic dance-and-drugs cocktail Climax, or the Turkish master Nuri Bilge Ceylan’s latest leisurely three-hour outing, The Wild Pear Tree.


For me personally, this year’s festival has been a revelation for the number of female directors whose superb work I’ve encountered for the first time. The very first film I saw was Susanna Nicchiarelli’s Nico, 1988, a portrait of German singer Christa Päffgen, who shot to fame for singing briefly with the Velvet Underground and later had a son with legendary French actor Alain Delon. Nicchiarelli’s film is equal parts melancholy and fierce, like its heroine. I knew nothing about Nico or her music, but Danish actress Trine Dyrholm makes Paffgen’s dark, heroin-fuelled energy a thing of beauty — even as Nico revels in having aged beyond the prime age of physical attractiveness: “I was never happy when I was beautiful.” It is a bravura performance: what we get is a woman who seems gloriously intense but also casually deranged, seemingly unseeing of the risks people around her take to enable her life. Her preoccupation with herself, the bubble in which she seems to live, is only really punctured by her tenderness for her teenaged son.

Another of my favourites so far has been Beatriz Seigner’s Los Silencios (The Silences). The film opens with a small boat edging slowly towards a jetty, in an inky darkness where water merges into sky. A mother and her two children — a girl and a boy — embark. As Seigner’s film proceeds, we learn that they are “migrants requesting refugee status”, a family fleeing the violence of the Colombian civil war and looking to settle down on this Brazilian island rather too fittingly called La Isla de la Fantasia.


The island is both surrounded by water and built upon it, and the atmosphere is hauntingly evocative: the draughty wooden houses standing on stilts, the women looking out of the square windows in their slatted wooden walls, the row boats gliding silently between them, the rain outside and the hearth fires within. Seigner, whose previous film Bollywood Dream tracked the Hindi film ambitions of three young Brazilian women, has produced here a slow, immersive work of beauty. The simplicity of its approach to its political context did not seem to me to take away from the film in any way. The warmth and attentiveness with which the camera treats both place and people — letting us absorb not just the faces of the central characters but also people who appear briefly, like the boy with one leg —seemed to me emblematic of a politics we need much more of: a humanising politics which sees each missing person as a person.

(To be continued next week)

Published in Mumbai Mirror, 25 Nov 2018.

Girls, Interrupted

My Mirror column:

Two disturbing 2017 films — one set amidst Norwegian Pakistanis, the other among Russian Jews — present gripping portraits of young women fighting to not be sacrificed at the altar of community.

A teenager brought up in Norway is suddenly transplanted to a Pakistani small town and finds herself the subject of prurient attention. “Why have you come here?” hiss her headscarf-wearing new classmates. Aware that she is on display, the new arrival tamely offers up what she thinks is the good-girl response expected of her: “I’ve come to learn about my parents’ culture”. But what’s flung back at her is a stinging accusation: “Not your parents’ culture! Your culture!”

It is a relatively minor moment in what is a film full of harrowing scenes. But that misrecognition goes to the heart of Iram Haq’s What Will People Say: What happens when your parents’ culture doesn’t feel like your own? One answer – a wrenching, difficult one – is that sometimes, then, your parents don’t feel like your own.
 
Haq’s film stars Ekavali Khanna and Adil Hussain as Pakistani immigrants who are happy to educate their daughter Nisha (the affecting Maria Mozhdah) and even imagine a career for her – until they come to suspect that she is leading the life of the Norwegian teenager: dancing, drinking, dating. At home, she obeys when told to wear a jacket over a revealing blouse; she serves snacks to the aunties; she pretends her texting exchanges are all about school work. But Nisha is indeed leading that life, just secretly. All hell breaks loose when her father discovers a boy in her room.

The film paints a depressing picture of the Pakistani community in exile, but it doesn’t ring false. If you’ve grown up in South Asia, you don’t need to be told that Haq based her film on a traumatic episode from her own Pakistani-Norwegian childhood to be convinced by Adil Hussain’s finely wrought transformation from loving, indulgent father to uncontrollably violent patriarch. The father who proudly displayed his academically bright daughter now feels only burning shame on her behalf: “Sab log hum par hans rahe hain.”

The community’s solution is to send her ‘home’ — to a country she has never lived in. Under the tutelage of her stern Phuphi (the always effective Sheeba Chaddha), Nisha learns to roll rotis, drape a dupatta and keep her head down. But the sexual awakening that was sought to be crushed in Norway happens instead in Pakistan, with worse effects. Now the only way to deal with such a wayward daughter is to marry her off, to trade her freedom in for the family’s honour.

Haq’s film was shown at the Dharamshala Film Festival in early November.

At the International Film Festival of India a few weeks later, I saw a stunning Russian film called Closeness in which, too, a young woman is sought to be clamped into conformity. Set in the late 1990s in the filmmaker’s hometown of Nalchik in the Northern Caucasus, Kantemir Balagov’s film won the International Critics’ Prize for best film in Un Certain Regard at Cannes. It centres on the tomboyish Ilana (the superb Darya Zhovner), who likes nothing better than helping her mechanic father fix cars. But as in Haq’s film, a young woman of a certain age must start behaving a certain way, and it is her mother who lays down those rules. In a celebratory family scene with strong echoes of WWPS, a sulky Ilana is made to change her overalls for a dress and help her mother in the kitchen.

Ilana is also carrying on a clandestine affair with a boy from the town’s Kabardian community, which has a tense relationship with the Jewish community to which she belongs. Where Haq largely uses marked shifts in body language to register the contradictions of her heroine’s life, Balagov unsettles us by alternating between the raw, barely-lit seediness of Ilana’s secret backstreet life and the family’s domestic interiors, whose rich rusts and deep greens have the dramatic shadows of a Caravaggio painting.

Nalchik’s Jews are different from Norway’s Pakistanis, but Ilana’s clash with her parents resonates strongly with Nisha’s. In one exceptional scene, Ilana’s mother instructs her angrily, “You won’t be with him. He’s not from our tribe.” Ilana’s response is fierce and wordless — she puts her hand to her mouth and produces a long ululation, mocking her mother’s use of the word ‘tribe’. Unlike WWPS, the crisis in Closeness is not bought on by Ilana’s sexuality – but her insistence on displaying proof it certainly causes the sensation she intends it to.

These are not films that will be viewed as similar, and indeed they are far apart in pitch and tenor. But both produce for us the disturbing figure of the young woman forced to recognise that she is not quite as human as her brothers; that her social value lies not in what she might desire —but only in who can be made to desire her.

Published in Mumbai Mirror, 10 Dec 2017.

Dharamshala International Film Festival: Why it's an unmatched experience for cinephiles

My long-overdue piece on DIFF, whose 5th instalment was held in Nov 2016.

It should be easy to write about the Dharamshala International Film Festival. Started five years ago by the wonderfully matter-of-fact Ritu Sarin and the almost shy Tenzing Sonam (partners in life and documentary filmmaking, whose long-term connection to the Tibetan cause led them to settle in Dharamshala in 1996), DIFF is the sort of experience that leaves you pinching yourself. How could some people you've never even met have created the film festival of your dreams?

The remarkable thing about DIFF, though, is that its dreaminess is real. Sarin and Sonam, Tibet activists for as long as they have been filmmakers, aren't the sort to create some airy-fairy fantasy world. The location this year was the Tibetan Children's Village: a Dharamshala institution that began in 1960 with fifty-one children from a road construction camp and a rug borrowed from the Dalai Lama. The school campus, built by the labour of generations of TCV students, is a 15 minute drive up from McLeodganj's central square, and lends itself well to the festival's well-adjusted local-global vibe. The bigger screenings are held in the school auditorium, with the resonant names of houses — Songtsen, Trival, Trisong and Nyatri — emblazoned on the walls, and its cavernous cement depths oft invaded by freezing draughts that should give potential snuggling couples just the excuse they need.

The films, too, aren't just a list of the Biggest-Coolest-Latest that money can buy, as the bigger festivals are increasingly becoming. What we get instead is a perfectly curated mix of fiction and non-fiction, Indian and international, features and shorts, with a sense of each film being chosen for its own sake, with no kowtowing to 'themes' — and yet a clear political-personal sensibility at work.

The documentary, for instance, gets more play here than it might at a different festival of the same size: this year, for instance, there were as many as nine feature-length documentaries to 17 narrative features. And in keeping with the festival's non-divisive spirit, non-fiction isn't relegated to a separate section like fiction's less-cool sibling. It appears that just this small change in approach — not making a big hoo-ha about documentaries, but simply adding them to the mix in no-fuss fashion — is enough to produce avidly enthusiastic full houses for them. Two of the biggest crowdpleasers I watched at DIFF, in fact, were non-fiction: the British filmmaker Sean McAllister's powerfully personal engagement with a Syrian-Palestinian family (A Syrian Love Story, 2015) and the Iranian director Rokhsareh Ghaem Maghami's documentary about a teenaged Afghan refugee becoming a internet rap sensation (Sonita, 2015).

The other thing to remember is that DIFF is a compact three-day festival, and the number of films is tiny in comparison with IFFI or MAMI or IFFK. I swiftly began to realise that scale is everything. Unlike larger film festivals, there are usually no more than two parallel screenings, with an occasional conversation competing for your attention. This makes it possible, at the end of each day, to feel as if you've actually shared a substantial chunk of experience with the young whippersnapper who's already screened at Venice and is invariably ahead of you in the bar queue, and with the lovely quirky American lady who mentions her knee replacement surgeries with enviable lightness, even as she matches you step for step down the stone staircase shortcut that connects one screening venue with another. This is it, then — the not-so-secret secret of community: smallness, sharing, and a resolute lack of hierarchy.

But what makes DIFF different, in the end, is not the superbly well-chosen films, the infectious warmth of apple-cheeked children running around in the winter sun, or even the lung- and mind-expanding air up in the mountains, where (as the terribly youthful director Raam Reddy put it so charmingly before the Opening Night screening of his film Thithi), “the soul feels close to your body”. What really creates the vibe of the festival is the people.

There is something particularly freeing about having people — whether new initiates or veteran filmwallahs — congregating all the way from Delhi and Kerala, Bombay and Pune and Bengaluru, to share cinema and conversation in a place which feels somehow unburdened by the weight of Culture with a capital C. There is a great deal of serious conversation, both political and artistic, but it is conducted in the generous spirit of bonhomie and constructive criticism. There are few 'big men' around, and if they are, they don't have the license here — or perhaps the yen — to throw their weight around. I wait warily when Saeed Mirza, whose films I have long admired, is encouraged to pontificate on the state of the nation. He holds forth (as is his wont, and as I remember him doing in a white kurta-pajama, sprawled on the Siri Fort lawns in a Delhi IFFI in the early 90s), but he sounds accurate, as if his own inner bullshit-detector is working better in the mountain air.

All successful film festivals are pilgrimages, and DIFF is no exception. Most vivid proof of this is provided by the veritable army of youthful volunteers who arrive year upon year, contributing their time and spending their own money to participate in the hectic yet orderly shramdaan that is essential to the festival's success. Some volunteers I met had no particular interest in cinema; several others were film-mad. Many of those I spoke to at some length shared a dilemma about the artistic life – can one ever make a living off it, or must one's art be honed independently of whatever what does to make a living?

For one young Malayali man I met, volunteering at DIFF was a way into understanding how to run a film festival someday: “I want to learn, how do you get 200 people to work for you for free?” he grinned. For another — also visiting from Kerala but not a volunteer — DIFF was his first film festival. Engineer by training and entrepreneur by instinct, he's already sorted out a small business; now he's immersing himself in cinema because he's writing scripts for Malayalam films.

The lovely thing that makes DIFF a community, perhaps, is that it isn't just the volunteers who're grappling with that question of independence. Whether by choice or by design, the festival seems to attract filmmakers and writers and artists who're striving to keep creative control of their work — while not being starved entirely of the oxygen of popularity.

Published in Firstpost, 26 Nov 2016.

The Company of Strangers

My Mirror column:

What we miss out on by watching movies on our laptops, we regain by going to film festivals.

As Durga Puja and Dussehra melt quietly into another trafficky, teen-patti-laden Diwali, the year brings out its hidden trump card: the film festival season that is almost upon us.

First, the hotly-anticipated Mumbai Film Festival — a Bombay-style extravaganza of cutting edge world cinema with indie Indies, conducted under the suitably ‘we-aim-to-confuse’ rubric of MAMI — will run from the 20th to 27th of October. Kolkata has reserved the next slot, conducting its annual international film festival from the 11th to 19th of November.

Then the International Film Festival of India — a smiling sarkari behemoth that goes by the confusing diminutive IFFI — will happen in Panaji, Goa from 20th to 28th November. The year comes to an exciting close with the International Film Festival of Kerala (IFFK) which has announced its dates as being from December 9 to 16.

I started thinking about film festivals last week as I inwardly chastised myself for watching a couple of recent releases that I had missed seeing in the theatre, on my laptop. Being watched on a smaller and smaller screen — be it the television, laptop, tablet, or even the mobile phone — is, of course, the inevitable fate of more and more films these days. Even the most committed film-lovers have started to betray the medium — likely telling themselves, like all betraying lovers, that all relationships must change, and that surely, this is a more intimate experience than the one they had before.

There are several complicated things to think (and say) about our increasing closeness to our increasingly smaller screens.

But a conversation I had today with a playwright and theatre director set me thinking about what not going to the cinema means: more often than not, it means watching the films alone. My play-making friend is convinced that his plays are produced, in the end, in the conversations that take place around them: what your gushing friend said about the director’s last outing, what review you read last night on the play’s Facebook page, what you said to your already-irritated girlfriend as you both walked out dying to get some much-delayed dinner. These are all crucial to what you, months or even years from now, will remember about what you thought of the play.

This is, of course, also true of watching films. The film-watcher who sits down in the dark, cool expanse of the cinema hall is both solitary and aware of others like herself, sitting down to the left and right and behind her. We’re intensely aware of collective laughter, collective derision, and even more, of a collective hush. And that free-floating, un-targeted, nervous web of communication (in which we are enmeshed along with whichever strangers we happened to buy our tickets with) changes the film for us, whether we realise it or not.

Even so, there is a guarded anonymity with which we (post-)moderns enter that experience of stranger sociality. Very few people talk to the person in the next seat about the movie they're watching — unless they already know them.

In a film festival, I think our usual guardedness is exchanged for a particularly deliberate sense of community. Coming to the theatre and lining up in hopeful excitement to get into a screening — the latest Wong Kar-wai, or the unreleased Nawazuddin Siddiqui film made three years ago which faced censor trouble — is a recipe for queue conversations. Especially if you both fail to get in.

I have certainly made acquaintances at film festivals. Most of the time, the pally feeling lasts only for the duration of the screenings. But sometimes, just sometimes, over the course of a week, a film festival partner can begin to feel like your best friend.

The sudden intimacy should not be surprising: we have agreed, after all, to combine forces in that most important of life’s decisions — choosing films.

Published in Mumbai Mirror, 16 Oct 2016.

At MAMI: Surround Sound

Last Sunday's column for Mumbai Mirror:

Visiting Mumbai, the Delhi film-festivaller finds a metropolis in which the cinema seems more brute reality than dream.

I live in Delhi, where international cinema buffs have been left somewhat bereft in recent years. In 2004, the IFFI (International Film Festival of India), which used to be held in Delhi every alternate year, was whisked away to Goa. For a while, we had the Cinefan festival of Asian cinema, started by the indefatigable Aruna Vasudev and her Cinemaya magazine team in 1999. Taken over in 2004 by businessman and cultural impresario Neville Tuli, it ran for four exciting years under a new and expanded team, including the celebrated experimental filmmaker Mani Kaul as creative director. After its tenth anniversary in 2008, the Osian's Cinefan Festival of Asian and Arab Cinema was faced with a funding crunch, and went into hiding. It made a brief reappearance in 2012, but that's the last we've seen of it.

As a film columnist, I have the unfair advantage of being able to list film festivals under "Important Work Trip". So over the last few years, I've begun to make an annual pilgrimage: I've been twice to Trivandrum for IFFK, and twice to Panjim for IFFI. This year, for the first time, I went to Mumbai for MAMI. Mumbai is a much bigger city than Trivandrum or Panjim. And sure enough, the distance problem hit me on the very first day. I'd put down Phoenix Mills as the pickup location for my MAMI delegate card, but later found myself shacking up at a friend's in Versova. Arriving by train, I couldn't get off at Andheri Station. I had to sit tight all the way to Mumbai Central, get out and take a taxi back to Versova: just so I could pick up my MAMI card on the way! "Woh film festival chal raha hai, uske liye pass pick up karna hai," I said to my baffled cab driver, who was clearly wondering about someone wanting to stop at a mall with her luggage still in the car.

Dubey ji, a bespectacled man with an air of the benign patriarch about him, seemed satisfied with this explanation at first. But for the next hour and a half, as we drifted slowly through the morning traffic, he emerged as a man of strong opinions. "Film festival Bambai mein hai, ki Hyderabad mein?" he demanded first, making me wonder if he might remember a time when the IFFI rotated through Delhi and the state capitals, often finding its way to Hyderabad. Then he asked what the venues were. Other than Regal, they were all multiplexes. Would they show Hindi films, was the next question. And how much did it cost, was the next. The sum of Rs 1,500 for a weeklong delegate pass had him shaking his head. "Hmm, sure, they may show movies all day, but an ordinary person can't watch all day, can they? So it is very expensive. There should be some free shows, or at least cheaper."

And with that Dubey ji launched into the familiar sad lament one hears so often: "I used to watch a lot of movies, but who can afford to go to halls these days? Now we watch them on TV. Which is fine, but you watch for a little while and then go to sleep. Anyway I don't understand the movies they make now." He didn't need much urging to tell me what he still watches in the cinema: Salman and Aamir films. Bajrangi Bhaijaan was good, said Dubey ji, and PK -- "jis mein Aamir Khan joker bana hai" -- was great. This predicament of Hindi cinema, its having been taken away from the poor, who were once a major constituency, is by no means limited to Mumbai. But there was something particular about having this conversation in a city which is still the home of filmi dreams.

The closeness of its ties to the film industry makes MAMI unlike any other Indian festival. Along with film critic Anupama Chopra as festival director and Kiran Rao as chairperson, MAMI's new Board of Trustees includes Farhan Akhtar, Zoya Akhtar, Karan Johar, Vishal Bharadwaj, Vikramaditya Motwane, Dibakar Banerjee, Riteish Deshmukh, Deepika Padukone, Ajay Bijli of PVR, Siddharth Roy Kapur of Disney, and Manish Mundra of Drishyam Films, new patron saint of independent cinema. Nita Ambani's coming on board as co-chair meant an opening dinner was hosted at the Ambani residence. I wasn't invited or anything, but by Day 2, when I got to MAMI, the world seemed awash with shared images of Antilla's chandeliered corridors and giant Vishnu statues. (Put that down as Filmi Dreams 2.)

I spent the week watching four or five films a day, mostly in the Juhu and Andheri venues, mostly with reservations but sometimes without. The online booking system gave the young and internet-savvy a definite advantage. Standing in the snaking queues, I heard some confused grumbling from older folk about how every show they wanted to book seemed always already full. Barring some exceptions like Cannes Palm D'or winner Dheepan, or films with particularly well-known directors, like Paolo Sorrentino's Youth or Noah Baumbach's Mistress America, the shows always fully-booked in advance and the longest queues seemed to be the Hindi indies. Especially the ones that came with some advance buzz: Vasan Bala's Peddlers; Ruchika Oberoi's Island City; the Nawazuddin Siddiqui-starrer Haraamkhor had many devoted queuers-up, who stayed in line long after it had become clear that the hall was packed. More so than any other fest in India, the indie-watchers here are also the aspiring indie-makers. Whether you got into a screening or not, you could always hang about eavesdropping on the unrelentingly contrary dissection of every film by Mumbai's avid aspiring filmmakers. (I present Filmi Dreams 3.)

And yet, as I charged purposefully from one multiplex to another, films seemed less and less like a thing of leisure, or even love. The city's dreams of cinema seem to hold it in a vice-like grip.

Published in Mumbai Mirror.

Picture This: Top of the World

My BLink column, published 15 Dec 2014: 

'Tis the season to be jolly for world-cinema buffs. A pick of five best films at the International Film Festival of India this year.

A film festival is about drowning your sorrows in cinema — and coming up with something like joy. Ever since we lost the International Film Festival of India (IFFI) to the bracing seaside air of Goa, and then witnessed the sad, stuttering demise of our locally grown Osian’s Cinefan, Delhi’s world-cinema buffs have been robbed of their annual rite of submergence. I’m part of this large, deprived population (and if you’re one of the snooty lot, reading this column in what you think is a more cultured city, you’d be surprised at just how many of us there are). I suffered silently for a bit, and then, as someone who makes a living by writing about cinema, decided it was legitimate to allow myself an annual winter pilgrimage.

In the last five years, I’ve been twice to Thiruvananthapuram, where Beena Paul Venugopal oversaw the most fabulously curated international festival in India until she resigned earlier this year (it would have been her 13th as the artistic director of International Film Festival of Kerala or IFFK) — and twice to Panjim for IFFI. This year was an IFFI year. And while the retrospectives weren’t as exciting as IFFK’s, Goa in November is a glorious thing, and even committed types like me who don’t wander too far from the stretch of road between Kala Academy and INOX can get our fill of prawn curry, sanna idlis and homemade coconut-jaggery sweets, thanks to the wonderful women’s cooperative stalls at the venue. Also, in Goa — where the state policy on alcohol is the happy opposite of Kerala’s ridiculous current one — Kingfisher gets to run a practically cost-price stall in the INOX complex, holding IFFI visitors in its warm, captive embrace. (Couldn’t get into the film you just queued up for? A beer is the answer. Insanely jolted by the film you just came out of? A beer is the answer.)

But the main thing about a film festival, of course, is the films. So without further ado, here are the best five films I saw at IFFI this year — in no particular order.

A still from Winter Sleep.

The Turks won the day, as they have often done at film festivals in the last decade, with two superb films. Nuri Bilge Ceylan, with his penchant for putting an increasingly complicated cast of characters under his dispassionate lens, served up the three-hour-long Winter Sleep, which won the Palme d’Or at Cannes this year. Partially inspired by three Chekhov stories, the film uses the eerie, striking landscape of Cappadocia for Ceylan’s leisurely unpacking of his signature concerns: the tension between age and youth, rural and urban, men and women, and of course, between the classes. A minor incident pushes the upper-class protagonists — an ageing ex-actor-turned-hotel owner, his youthful wife and his bitter, divorced sister — to examine the cocoon they inhabit, and each other. But as they squirm under Ceylan’s unforgiving lens, it becomes clear that the lives of others, to which they are ordinarily so oblivious, are not within easy reach of their charity. 

The other Turkish film, Silsile (translated as ‘consequences’, but I think of it as ‘a chain of happenings’, based on Hindi/Urdu), also catapults its oblivious rich characters into a series of events. Set in the mixed Istanbul neighbourhood of Karaköy, Silsile is more tightly focused on class. Compared to Ceylan’s slow deliberation and endless talk, Ozan Açiktan’s film might seem all thrilling set pieces and beautiful people, but it is razor-sharp. Neither film lets anyone off. 

I also loved writer-director Yi’nan Diao’s Black Coal, Thin Ice, a laconic murder mystery set in a cold, bleak Chinese industrial town. An alcoholic ex-cop gets interested in a woman who is a suspect in an unsolved case. The plot is gripping, and the mystery both gory and strange (the limbs of victims show up on conveyor belts in coal mines across the country). But what keeps the film running in your head long after are the haunting visuals — dimly lit, snow-packed tunnels, groups of ice skaters in a bleak silent outdoor rink, neon-lit bar signs. 

A still from Black Coal Thin Ice.

Continuing the winter theme (an unplanned effect of this year’s IFFI), my fourth pick is Force Majeure, Ruben Östlund’s brilliantly discomfiting take on masculinity and marriage. A Swedish family — husband, wife and two kids — on holiday at a French ski resort find the happy family veneer peeling off as the after-effect of a split-second moment of danger. It’s full of incisively observed moments of conversation that are often acutely, guiltily funny — but this is no filmed play. Östlund makes masterful use of his sheer white skiing locales, interspersing pin-drop silence with almost operatic moments without seeming gimmicky.*

Finally, there was Narges Abyar’s Track 143, an unexpectedly understated, moving portrait of a mother waiting for her son to come home from a war that has long ended. This is a film about a woman whose tenuous connection with the outside world, and with hope, is kept alive by a radio she ties around her waist. It is a film that does what no Iranian films had done for me before — gave me a sense of growing old with its protagonist, realising how the world can change while you cling to the past.

*Force Majeure is one of 9 films just placed on the Oscar shortlist in the Foreign Film category, in the company of another exquisite film from 2014, the Polish director Pawel Pawlikowski's Ida. 

Post Facto -- Unforeseen effects: Why I love film festivals

My Sunday Guardian column (written after IFFI 2014):

Queuers, conferrers and posers: Outside the INOX complex, at the 2014 IFFI in Goa.

It's hard to describe the lure of a film festival to people who've never done one. And yes, it is something you do. Like a drug. I'd never quite thought about it before I started to write this column, but clearly my subconscious has known all along — I often call myself a film festival junkie.

A film festival isn't somewhere you show up for an evening because you're bored, or something to which you make an obligatory social visit, politely applauding the efforts of the organisers. No, you plan for it in advance, having taken leave from work and from all social responsibility. Sure, you meet people, but the bright light of day soon begins to feel like something to scurry away from. It's in the velvety darkness, as the screen flickers to life, that you do, too. And as you go from one darkened theatre to another, cinema seeps into your veins.

In close to two decades of film-festivalling, I've often been asked how I can possibly absorb five films a day, or even four. Don't they start to bleed into each other? Don't I zone out by the third film, or fall asleep in the fourth? Doesn't every [worthwhile] film I watch make me want to pause for the day and analyse it, instead of rushing to grab a quick lunch and hurtling into the next film? In short, these people want to know, isn't the film festival the very antithesis of the ideal film-watching experience?

The answer to most of these questions is yes, of course, sometimes. Sometimes I zone out, sometimes I decide a particular film is the one to take a nap in, sometimes all I remember from a hectic festival day is a single climactic scene. But the films you remember are ones that have managed to stand out in a sea of images. And anyway, does the leisurely, sit-down, one-film-at-a-time mode really give a film its due? Of course films need free time — but doesn't the multiplex visit, with its absurdly powerful popcorn-and-soda ritual, muffle every film we watch with the unvoiced expectation of sameness? The film festival might seem frenzied, but it rescues film from the domesticated tedium of packaged leisure — by turning it into something a little like work.

And by juxtaposing all kinds of narratives, from all kinds of places, it reinstates some of the unruliness and unpredictability of cinema. Where else but at an international film festival could I go from watching a Russian postman on his rounds of a sleepy lake-edge settlement (The Postman's White Nights), to experiencing the joys and sorrows of a group of sightless Chinese masseurs (Blind Massage), and then on to Iran in the 1990s, waiting endlessly with a mother whose son never came back from the Iran-Iraq War (Track 143)?

Of course, I understand that there is such a thing as a festival film. Capitalism being the sophisticated thing it is, it has built the so-called "niche" into the market. If you've ever looked up films on the internet to decide what you're watching at a festival, you've read those Variety and Hollywood Reporter reviews with their pithy summing up of the film's chances. Here's one such evaluation of a Greek film I fell in love with at this year's IFFI: "It should appeal to festivals and distributors with a mainstream or more female-oriented sensibility as well as broadcasters of classy European fare." 

This film, called Mikra Anglia (Little England), is an atmospheric period piece set in (and shot on) the craggy island of Andros. The plot centres on two sisters who fall in love — unwittingly — with the same man. But this is no generic love triangle: after a point, we barely see the man. And then he dies (somewhere off-screen), and it is his death that tears the sisters' lives asunder. If this is a women's picture, it is so in the most gloriously literal way: Andros in the 1930s and '40s is almost entirely female, because most men are sailors, out at sea, sometimes at war, while the women hold the fort at home — often for most of their lives.

A festival can paint a portrait of a country you've never been to. The other Greek film I saw this year, for instance, would seem to have nothing at all in common with Mikra Anglia. Set in present-day Athens, Xenia is about two brothers who dream of winning a national musical talent search. The film uses their marginal status — poor, orphaned, half-Albanian, one of them queer — to highlight the fascist, racist intolerance of contemporary Greece: in one early scene, we hear street thugs harassing some unseen people with the line: "This is not your Bollywood".

But placing Xenia next to Mikra Anglia, one sees a country that remains recognizable in many ways — a place where family still counts for a great deal, where high drama is normal. Watching random films back-to-back can make you see patterns — a Chinese murder mystery and a Turkish romantic thriller emerge as unlikely partners in neo-noir; you begin to notice how often filmmakers in cold countries use snow and ice to create a sense of emotional desolation.

In a world of torrents downloadable at will, the film festival is no longer about enabling access. Choices, in fact, are limited by the programming. But what you end up watching at a festival can create unintended, powerful effects. It's as close as one can get to fate.

Published in the Sunday Guardian, 7th Dec 2014.

The Romance of the Single Screen

The demolition of Chanakya Cinema, December, 2008. Designed by PN Mathur (Photo courtesy Ram Rahman's blog)

My first memories of watching films in Delhi are rather hazy. I remember watching Masoom and crying, and being taken to see a film in which Rishi Kapoor sang a qawwali. If I really dredge the depths of my memory, the image that floats up is from when I was about five – an expedition with my father, to watch a ‘children’s film’. What I remember is not something from the film (it must have been in English, which I barely understood at the time), but the morning sun, a crowd of people and a poster with a picture of a girl and a dog, propped up at the entrance to a hall that I am convinced was Chanakya. The year was probably 1982.

Chanakya remained centrestage in my movie-going life through the 1990s, though Priya provided stiff competition. School expeditions to Priya were where a whole generation of girls were weaned into expressions of undying love by Whitney Houston in The Bodyguard. (The Terminator probably didn’t do as much damage to the boys.)

Last winter, I happened to be in Delhi when the NDMC managed to wrest control of Chanakya from its long-term leaseholders and decided that it would be demolished to make way for a mall-cum-multiplex. “Last day, last show at Chanakya!” said the city supplements. A friend and I showed up to say our farewells. We weren’t the only ones. Tickets were sold out. A huge crowd surrounded the hall – strangers smiling at each other, middle-aged men swapping memories with twenty-somethings. We finally bought tickets in black. Going out with a bang, I remember saying, with a tinge of something like pride.

But going, all the same. Most of the halls that people remember from the seventies and eighties have either gone, or shrunk: from the great, hulking, comfortable beasts they once were into unrecognizable glossy creatures with tinsel wings that shimmer in the night. I was young enough to celebrate the transformation, once: in my first year at college, I woke up at seven on a Sunday and braved a full-scale Delhi stampede to get a free ticket to the first-ever show at the city’s first-ever multiplex – PVR Saket, where once had been Anupam. But I didn’t quite realize then the shape of things to come. Within a few years, the multiplexes increased in number as well as clout. They managed, for example, to get rid of the clause that had required them to sell a small percentage of tickets at low prices (in PVR Saket in 1997, any seat in the first two rows was a joyful Rs 7).

I left Delhi soon after. When I came back, Alankar, my mother’s old favourite from long-ago Defence Colony days, had become 3Cs and Eros, where I had watched many an evening (while casting sidelong glances at the “morning show” posters) had disappeared. Where the hall had been was nothing but a crater – and the name. Like thousands of others, I mention Eros every time I give directions to Jangpura, where I now live. It strikes me that Eros is but one name in the vast geography of a city marked by absent cinema halls. Think of the hundreds of times you’ve jumped into an auto and pronounced tersely, “Savitri”, or perhaps, “Kamal ke paas”, or “Archana-wale road par”, with no need to say another word. Sometimes I wonder if the ease of that communication, that common language of the city, evokes an earlier time when cinemas were spaces that the middle class shared – if sometimes grudgingly – with the working masses. Everyone knew the difference between Regal and Rivoli and Odeon and Plaza, even if they were all in Connaught Place. In contrast, there is something untranslatable, incommunicable, about the difference between Citywalk and Square One – both are merely “Saket wale naye mall”. One reason why the autowala thinks they’re indistinguishable might be that he will never see the inside of either. But perhaps the real reason is that they are no different.

My nostalgia for the old halls isn’t blind – they were (and the survivors still are) cavernous, often dirty and predominantly male. Seediness came with the territory. You didn’t need to be bunking school or watching an A-rated movie to feel transgressive: if you were female, just being in a cinema alone was enough. The first time I went to watch a film alone was during IFFI 1996. I caught a bus from college to Sheila to see Sai Paranjpe’s Papiha, and bought a front stall ticket. It was an innocuous, feel-good tale about a forest officer amid tribals – but I will never forget the rousing reception I got from the men around me when the lights came on. Another memorable time I took a cousin and an unsuspecting French friend to watch a Govinda film at Stadium Cinema. The hall had clearly seen better days, but we were intrepid, and the tickets were Rs 20. It was only when a worried-looking ticket checker set about finding us seats with his flashlight that we realized a) that only a third of the seats were unbroken, and b) that there no other women in the audience, let alone foreign ones.

Multiplexes, for all their cookie-cutter aesthetics and ridiculously overpriced snacks, probably do make life easier for women who can afford them. But most single-screen cinemas in Delhi seem to be going the Stadium way: interesting variations include Imperial in Paharganj, which now fills up every night by showing 80s multistarrers for twenty bucks a ticket, and Moti in Daryaganj, which has tied its fortunes to the rising Bhojpuri tide. Some few have managed to survive the transformative years without losing their identities completely – one model is that of Priya, which keeps afloat because it’s part of the PVR family. But another model is Delite, now divided into Delite and Delite Diamond, its wooden panelling and illuminated, jewel-like ceiling clearly a labour of love for its owners. The neebu pani and samosas and photos of Dilip Kumar visiting the hall in its older avatar make people describe it as retro. Yet the place is as far from being a museum as possible, with the crowds rolling in every night. Clearly there is a space for something that’s beyond the multiplex – why aren’t there more people seeking to fill it?

Published in Time Out Delhi Vol 2 Issue 8 (July 11-24, 2008)