A personal report from this year’s edition of IFFI : the first of a two-part column.
I write this column from the middle of theInternational 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 toBombay 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’sLos 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.
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| A still from Beatriz Seigner's haunting new film Los Silencios (The Silences) |
I write this column from the middle of the
The festival’s programming this year appears to have surrendered more space than usual to
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
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.
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