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.

Cinema in the City

My Mirror column:

Watching films in the theatre used to be a sensory experience that extended beyond the screen, tied to rituals of urban life. Now the screen floats free, and so do we.

I made my acquaintance with Trivandrum’s single screen theatres during my first visit to the International Film Festival of Kerala (IFFK) in 2011. In Godard’s Own Country (2012), a longform Caravan essay on the IFFK and Kerala’s love of world cinema, I described some of them: “There is Ajanta, dense with the smell of rose petals, and with a pedestal fan that whirrs incessantly; Sreekumar, with a treacherous set of stairs in its balcony; the twinned Dhanya (big) and Remya (small); and Sree Padmanabha, for whom becoming an IFFK venue has been crucial in regaining the respectability it had lost as a softporn theatre in the ’90s. (Sree Padmanabha went all out in 2011, creating a two-minute laser display that played before each festival screening. The effort won it the ‘Best Theatre’ award.).”

I didn’t mention in the 2012 essay why I gravitated to Sree Padmanabha: in the dense warren of streets behind it was the finest, most well-priced Malayali lunch joint in the city, the inimitable Mubarak, serving up unlimited mounds of piping hot rice, veggies and moru curry — to which, with the merest incline of the head, one could add a steady chain of seafood accompaniments: perfectly crisp matthi, spicy squid fry, or the most delectable mussels. By not being held in a private enclosed space like INOX in Panjim, or a government-created auditorium complex like Siri Fort in Delhi, IFFK allowed visiting viewers, like myself, to explore the city through its cinemas, discovering not just their characterful architecture but also eateries near them, just by following my nose — and the crowd.

I also didn’t mention how I first learnt about Sree Padmanabha’s pornographic past. A few days after IFFK, chatting with my Kollam homestay host, I discovered he had actually worked as its manager for several years, helping end its seedy phase! His father’s connection with it was older — he had watched films there his entire childhood, and even now no expedition to Trivandrum was complete without a solo visit to Sree Padmanabha, including a snack and a soft drink.

I haven’t been back to Sree Padmanabha since 2013, but think of it fondly. So I was delighted, on opening Yesterday’s Films for Tomorrow, a newly released book by the late film archivist PK Nair, to discover its prehistory. “It was in the early 1940s, the height of the War period. I must have been hardly eight years old,” writes Nair. “The venue: a tent cinema in Trivandrum’s Putharikandam Maidan, almost the same location as the present Sree Padmanabha theatre. Nearly half the hall was filled with immaculate shining white sand, probably got from the local beach. This was the lowest priced seating, classified as ‘floor’. Just behind was the ‘bench’ class packed with wooden benches, and further behind was the highest class with folding wooden chairs.”

Nair’s nostalgia is jocular and precise, listing the “half-wall” against which floor-sitters vied to rest their backs, the “women's barricades” for “your wife and kids” (the assumed viewer and reader is a man, of course), and the “hawker boys” who roamed freely through the hall, “canvassing aggressively” to sell their beedis and cigarettes, soda or peanuts during the many short intervals (A single projector necessitated five or six breaks between reels).

Given his father’s certified disapproval of cinema (typical of that generation of educated nationalists), Nair took to sneaking out when the family was asleep, begging the doorman at Sree Padmanabha or Chitra to let him in to the last hour of the late night show. “[L]ater I would catch up with what I had missed at a matinee show on the weekend.” “Perhaps such lopsided viewings in repetition enabled me to look at films more objectively and sharpened my critical faculties even as a school kid,” he muses.

Nair’s spare reminiscences reminded me of a more extravagant account of childhood film viewing: the late theatre doyen Habib Tanvir on Raipur’s Big Top theatre. Tanvir, like Nair, watched many films for free; he and his friends would slash the tent with a razor blade and sneak into shows where half the audience’s enjoyment came from the vulgar, funny running commentary provided by the co-owner, Chunnilal: “Oye, what are you standing around for, motherfucker, the villain will kill your heroine. Bastard, make the horse go faster, faster, you idiot!”

Nair and Tanvir’s memoirs reveal how inexorably film-watching was once tied to places and people — the physical experience of the theatre, the particular doorman or commentator, the food you ate after. Now a film can play anytime we want it to, often opening up on a screen that we carry around with us. Watching a film this way no longer leads us into the city; just back into ourselves.

Published in Mumbai Mirror, 25 June 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.

Speaking in Tongues

My Mirror column for 3 May, 2015: 

Why are we so resistant to subtitled films, instead of pouring our efforts into improving their quality and reach?

Mani Ratnam's film, O Kadhal Kanmani, was released in Delhi with subtitles.

Most people, when asked if they read translated books, are likely to say no. Yet, anyone who grew up reading in English has probably read Hans Christian Andersen (originally Danish) and the Brothers Grimm (originally German). They're quite likely to know Heidi and The Swiss Family Robinson - both Swiss-German classics, one from 1880, the other 1812 - not to mention Alexandre Dumas's The Three Musketeers (serialised 1844), and Antoine de Saint-Exupery's The Little Prince (1943), both from French. And The Adventures of Pinocchio, first published in Italian in 1883. And those who grew up in 1980s India are certain to have encountered books from the USSR (hands up, everyone who knows Dunno and his friends, or Baba Yaga the witch and Vasilisa the Beautiful!). 

And these are just the most obvious examples. Given how much of what we read as children was translated, how have we managed, as adults, to nurse a grudge against translated books? Who came up with the depressing notion that they're somehow "good for us" (read: no fun)? It's not an easy question, and there could be many answers. Maybe children are, despite appearances, more open to the unfamiliar than adults? Maybe children's books have less dense description, or simply less text, so translations are easier? 

Whatever the reason for most people's reluctance, it carries over to movies. Most people greet with utter shock the idea of watching a film in a language they don't speak. Or at least think of it as enormously hard work (repeat: no fun). Last month, two perfectly sensible, widely-read people responded to my recommendation of Court with a dubious "But it's in Marathi, no? Accha, it's subtitled?" Also last month, a Tamil gentleman seated next to us during a screening of O Kadhal Kanmani practically fell out of his chair upon learning that we did not speak Tamil. But that was precisely why I was so glad when Mani Ratnam's latest film, which my Twitter and Facebook couldn't seem to stop discussing, released in Delhi with subtitles: how often I've missed a big Tamil release because Delhi theatres ran an unsubtitled version. 

So yes, I don't watch a film if I have no way of knowing what the characters say. In that sense, I totally disagree with someone like Rakeysh Omprakash Mehra, who once dismissed my question about the impact of English on the making of Hindi cinema by declaring that cinema "transcends language". I think language matters in cinema, just as it does in life. But just as in life, while you might not want to live forever in a place where you don't know the language, surely you can't let that stop you from travelling to new places? I've always been an anti-dubber (I hate the weird sense of cultural overlay: the invariably overdone intonations, the mismatched accents - perhaps this is how some people think of translation). But I'm a subtitled film fan. 

I see subtitles as giving me access to a world I wouldn't otherwise enter - but like a polite, well-spoken guide, providing commentary unobtrusively, not drowning out the voices of the locals. If you know the original language, of course, subtitles will always be unsatisfying: like my Tamil-speaking friend who spent the interval telling me how OKK's subtitles were doing no justice to the romantic banter. And because subtitling is often done on a tight budget, many films eat up their characters' words, like that lazy interpreter who speaks one sentence to the speaker's four. (Even the otherwise exemplarily subtitled Court labelled some perfectly intelligible policewomen talking in Hindi as "Indistinct Chatter".) 

The writer and filmmaker Nasreen Munni Kabir, veteran subtitler of some 600 Hindi films (into English and French), is one of the few who've managed to not just specialise in subtitling but be credited for it. She told me that BBC's Channel Four, with which she works, re-subtitles every Hindi film it screens, because the existing ones are usually so dreadful. Another sort of creative response to bad subtitles is that of Bollywood blogger Beth Watkins, who runs a joyously crowdsourced tumblr called "Paagal Subtitles": recent prizewinning entries include "According to the post-modem report" (Holiday, 2014) and "I am surrounded by duckheads" (Mardaani, 2014). 

Watch enough subtitled films and you will swiftly acquire the art of reading while also taking in the image. The only time I'm distracted by subtitles is when I don't need them, or they're in a language I don't know. But there can be unexpected pay-offs: two episodes' worth of House of Cards with French subtitles taught me more conversational French than a semester at Alliance Francaise. 

Of course, as with anything language-related in India, there's the usual elephant in the room: subtitles are only ever provided in English. I have never seen subtitles in any other Indian language -- whether it be for regional language cinema on Doordarshan (or more recently, on Lok Sabha TV), any film festival screening from Kolkata to Trivandrum, or the rare commercial release with subtitles, like OKK or Court, or the much-discussed subtitling of the "Urdu-heavy" Dedh Ishqiya in cities like Bangalore. Although I've long been pleasantly surprised by the varied audience at the International Film Festival of Kerala (and was appalled at Adoor Gopalakrishnan's desire to screen IFFK registrants for knowledge of English), Kerala's level of English-literateness does not extend to most of India. I cannot but agree with film critic Mihir Pandya's long standing suggestion that the government should fund the subtitling of all National Award-winning films each year, into all major languages. That would be a start. How else, really, will we ever listen to each other, outside the tiny echo-chamber of English?

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. 

Godard's Own Country: the IFFK and the oddities of Malayali cinephilia

A long-form piece, for The Caravan, on the International Film Festival of Kerala (IFFK) -- a window into the state's old love of world cinema and its changing relationship to a complex cultural legacy. 

The first thing I hear in Thiruvananthapuram is a Kim Ki-duk joke. A Malayali goes to Seoul and is wandering the streets of the South Korean capital. But no one seems to know where the famous filmmaker lives. Tired and disheartened, the Malayali is about to give up when he sees a house bearing the sign “Beena Paul has blessed this house”—and he knows his search has come to an end.

If that seems a bit hard to decipher at first, worry not. Like the film festival that spawned it, the joke depends on a sensibility that’s simultaneously international art-house and merrily, irrevocably local.

 It requires you to know who Kim Ki-duk is—an art-house director whose films often bomb at his country’s box office, but who is internationally renowned for his alternately savage and lyrical cinema (his Pieta won the Golden Lion at Venice this year). It also requires you to know who Beena Paul is—the Artistic Director, since 2000, of the International Film Festival of Kerala (IFFK), a woman of remarkable foresight and enthusiasm. It assumes you know that Beena Paul curated a hugely popular Kim Ki-duk retrospective at IFFK as far back as 2005, making him a household name in the state. And last but not least, it assumes (an ability to appreciate the irreverent marshalling of) local knowledge: many Christian homes in Kerala have a sign outside proclaiming ‘Jesus Christ has blessed this house’.

The religious metaphor has its place in the joke, too. The IFFK, whose 17th edition will run from 7 to 14 December 2012, is the largest secular festival in a multi-religious state. Every December, Kerala’s rather sleepy capital city, Thiruvananthapuram, plays host to what is arguably the most widely attended film festival in South Asia, with screenings in many theatres witnessing such a massive press of people, especially in the initial days, that people constantly joke about the IFFK-as-pilgrimage. “The first film I went to last year was at Ajanta, and the crowd outside was just a mob. People were mock-chanting ‘Swamiye Ayyapo’—because it felt like being at the Sabarimala temple,” said Praveena Kodoth, an economics professor at Thiruvananthapuram’s Centre for Development Studies.

The numbers are impressive. Last year’s festival, held from 9 to 16 December, had 9,232 registered delegates. “If you include media-persons, officials and guests, the number of people registered came to over 11,000,” says Beena Paul Venugopal.

But what makes the IFFK remarkable isn’t so much the numbers as something else—a popular enthusiasm for world cinema that, far from being limited to the post-liberalisation English-speaking metropolitan elite that tends to dominate film festival audiences in other urban centres, seems to cut across class. The most obvious (but also most far-reaching) sign of this wide-ranging interest is the fact that the festival handbook, as well as the daily free newsletter brought out during each IFFK, are bilingual. In the case of the handbook, section headings and introductions are in English, but each film synopsis is provided in both English and Malayalam.  Venugopal is full of stories about running into festival regulars who come from all walks of life: auto rickshaw drivers in Malappuram, or Thiruvananthapuram nurses who take leave for IFFK. “The funny thing about Kerala is that… a film festival is not only judged by the quality of the films or the people who attend or even the press it gets,” Venugopal said in an interview published in 2011. “It is judged by whether it was a popular success, whether it was a people’s festival.”

IT’S ALMOST DE RIGUEUR FOR FILM FESTIVALS in India to feel like mass secular rituals: theoretically open to everyone—but requiring truly religious commitment from the elect. My first film festival experience was the 27th IFFI, held in Delhi in 1996. I was 19: a wide-eyed world cinema newbie willing and able to watch films from 9 am to midnight. But in the sarkari India in which I came of age, getting an IFFI delegate pass to the Siri Fort complex required you to prove that you’d been a film society member for over five years. So I began that IFFI watching as many films as I could at the ticketed public screenings, being enchanted by Wim Wenders’ Lisbon Story at Regal, mystified by Carlos Saura’s flaming flamenco romances at Plaza, and—to my eternal shame—failing to stave off sleep during Theo Angelopoulos’ stately Ulysses’ Gaze at Priya. Things were going well enough until the afternoon I skipped college to go watch Sai Paranjpye’s Papeeha    at Sheila, a cinema near the Old Delhi Railway station that I had never been to before—for good reason, it turned out. When the lights came on in the interval, I found myself alone in a hall full of men—Sheila regulars who made it rather clear that a female presence in the theatre was potential compensation for the disappointment of Paranjpye’s tame romance.

Daunted but indefatigable, I called a friend whose aunt was a high-up at Doordarshan, and begged her to share a delegate pass for Siri Fort screenings. Over the remaining days of the festival, my friend and I became experts at passing the card discreetly to and fro through the Siri Fort railings, confidently striding past suspicious guards, as well as occasionally charming small-time government employees within the hallowed gates into giving us an extra pass or two from the stacks they clearly weren’t using. It was all rather fun, of course. But my memory of that IFFI—and the equally sarkari      affairs I’ve attended since, in Delhi or Goa, where IFFI has been housed since 2002—is bittersweet. Youthful triumph at having beaten the system is coupled with the sad realisation that the system was one that enthusiastic film-goers inevitably had to ‘beat’.

Admittedly, more open-access models do exist. The one I know best is the Osian’s Film Festival of Asian and Arab Cinema, earlier known as Cinefan. Founded by Aruna Vasudev, the festival started out as open as well as free of cost. Having experimented with 20-rupee tickets a few years ago, Osian’s has now settled on a one-time registration system that gives anyone who wants one a free delegate pass to the whole festival, which is now housed in the Siri Fort complex. For anyone with memories of the artificial bureaucratic scarcity of the ’90s, the pleasure of this is palpable.

Unlike the privately-funded Osian’s, attending the IFFK is not free of cost. Delegates must sign up and pay a registration charge of R400, but this princely sum gets you a pass to eight marvellous days of film screenings, five shows a day. And somehow the fact of having paid that delegate fee seems to give people a nicely proprietary air. Even more radically, the festival has no ‘main venue’ reserved for VIPs or the press. Unlike Siri Fort in its IFFI days, or the Nandan complex in the contemporary Kolkata Film Festival, there is no privileged space that remains closed to regular ticket-buyers. Instead, IFFK screenings are spread across 11 different single-screen theatres in Thiruvananthapuram, all open to anyone with a delegate pass. Most wonderfully, whether the screening is of a Robert Bresson classic from the 1960s, a cutting-edge Turkish film or a controversial new Malayalam one, the theatre is almost always full. And if it isn’t, well, at least one can be sure that it isn’t because the passes have all gone to the undersecretary’s sister-in-law.

(Piece continues...)

Read the rest of it on the Caravan site, here.