Singapore Film Festival in Delhi

                    
Singapore High Commission is organizing the Singapore Film Festival at the India Habitat Centre from 5 to 7 August 2016. This event is aimed to promote arts exchanges between India and Singapore, The three day festival will feature three films which will be followed by post-screening dialogues with the film makers. The events are all free and open to public. It is good opportunity for the Indian art community to be introduced to Singapore art and films, and for interaction between Singapore and Indian artistes.

                                    

                         

- - NDFS Desk   

Retro Summer Japanese Film Festival

The Japan Foundation, New Delhi presents “Retro Summer Japanese Film Festival” from 18^th July (Monday) to 23^rd July, 2016 (Saturday) at 6.30 pm.

Enjoy the Japanese Film Festival with Six Japanese movies back-to-back.

DATE	DAY	TIME	NAME OF FILM	DIRECTOR	YEAR	Duration  (minute)
18-07-2016	Monday	18:30	The End of Summer 小早川家の秋	Yasujiro Ozu	1961	103
19-07-2016	Tuesday	18:30	Sword of Doom 大菩薩峠	Kihachi Okamoto	1966	119
20-07-2016	Wednesday	18:30	Red Beard                  赤ひげ	Akira Kurosawa	1965	185
21-07-2016	Thursday	18:30	Kill! 斬る	Kihachi Okamoto	1968	109
22-07-2016	Friday	18:30	Samurai 宮本武蔵	Hiroshi Inagaki	1954	93
23-07-2016	Saturday	18:30	Godzilla ゴジラ	Ishiro Honda	1954	98

Short Synopsis:

1. The End of Summer: The film carries forward the lives of the Kohayagawa family, where each wants to do the best that he can for the family. The widower father- Manbei- often visits an old flame in Kyoto, causing concern in the family that he is not paying attention to the sake making company that he is going through financial troubles. With a venerating tone, this film is a reflection on old age, traditional values verses modern influence and mortality.
2. Sword of Doom: Ryunosuke is a sociopathic samurai without compassion or scruples. When he is scheduled for an exhibition match at his fencing school, the wife of his opponent begs Ryunosuke to throw the match, offering her own virtue in trade.
3. Red Beard: The Original book “Akahige Shinryotan” (Tales of Doctor RED BEARD) is the work of Shugoro Yamamoto. The entire film flourishes with the spirit of humanism centred on the magnificent character of RED BEARD. In Japan, where it is common to be playing more than one part at a time especially when shooting of one film is to be conducted over an extended period of time, this was an rare exception.
4. Kill!: Genta is disillusioned with life as a samurai, while Hanjiro is a farmer fed up with his powerless existence, who dreams of a glory days as a samurai. Kill! Is a comical exploration of a samurai life.
5. Samurai:  With his closest friend, Matahachi, Takezo (the town’s wild orphan kid) leaves his village to join an army on its way to battle. Takezo returns to the village and Matahachi’s family rejects his report and has him arrested for treason.
6. Godzilla: This 1954 original pioneered special effects filmmaking and inspired many remakes. Re-live this epic classic that introduced the most fearful of all movie monsters- Godzilla.

NOTE:  No reservations or passes required for any of our event. Entry is free for all. However, seats will be given on first come first basis.

प्रतिरोध का सिनेमा: ग्यारहवां गोरखपुर फ़िल्म फेस्टिवल

                                                                                                                                                   -एनडीएफएस डेस्क

             प्रतिरोध जितना ज़रुरी है, उसकी निरंतरता भी उतनी ही ज़रुरी है। मौजूद दौर में इसकी ज़रुरत और भी बढ़ गयी है। सिनेमा इसके लिए कितना प्रासंगिक और कितना सशक्त माध्यम हो सकता है 'प्रतिरोध का सिनेमा' आयोजन इस बात की मज़बूत मिसाल है।

दरअसल हम ऐसे दौर में रह रहे हैं जब आसपास की गतिविधियां और आयोजन न सिर्फ सारहीन, तत्वहीन और निरर्थक प्रतीत होते हैं, बल्कि थोड़ा पड़ताल करने पर मार्केटिंग और पीआर इवेंट साबित होते हैं। ऐसे में 'गोरखपुर फिल्म फेस्टिवल' से शुरु हुआ 'प्रतिरोध का सिनेमा' कैंपेन एक भरोसा देता है, ढांढस बंधाता है और हिम्मत न हारने की हिम्मत देता है। कोशिश कहीं भी हो, किसी भी रुप में हो... होती ज़रुर रहनी चाहिए।

इस  सिनेमा आंदोलन ने आम शहरी मध्य वर्ग को सिनेमा के जनवादी स्वरुप से न सिर्फ परिचित कराया है, बल्कि उसकी सार्थकता का भी अहसास दिलाया है। इस बार 'गोरखपुर फिल्म फेस्टिवल' का आयोजन 14 और 15 मई को हो रहा है। हर वर्ष मार्च के महीने में होने वाला ये आयोजन इस बार थोड़ा सा लेट हो गया है, लेकिन ग़ौर करने वाली बात ये है कि पूरा आयोजन हमारे और आपके निजी सहयोग से होता है, किसी कॉर्पोरेट स्पॉन्सरशिप या सरकारी ऐड से नहीं।*

सिनेमा में गहरे डूबे दर्शक हों या उत्साही आम मध्यमवर्गीय जन, हर बार इस आयोजन में ऐसा कुछ नया मिलता है, जो इसे यादगार बना देता है। गोरखपुर वालों के साथ साथ शहर के आसपास और दूरदराज इलाकों में रहने वालों के लिए भी ये आयोजन एक अमल बन चुका है, और वो हर साल बेसब्री से इसका इंतज़ार करते हैं। एक नज़र इस साल के शिड्यूल पर।

* अगर आप प्रतिरोध का सिनेमा: गोरखपुर फिल्म फेस्टिवल  को आर्थिक मदद देना चाहते हैं तो साइड पैनल पर लगा विवरण पढ़ें।

साभार: संजय जोशी, मनोज सिंह

The Poet’s Film in Cannes

               

 

The celebration of the best in cinema is on in Cannes. It is happening from 13^th to 24 May 2015. Here there are multiple fora to showcase the cinematic  genius of our times.  Short Film Corner is one of them, where Satat (Continued), a short film by Delhi based poet-filmmaker Devi Prasad Mishra is featured. It is the  assertion of independent cinema. We find joy in talking about the film, the film maker and the hope that such films bring about for the revival of meaningful cinema. - NDFS Desk

               

 

 

    The 18 minute long film Satat (Continued) has been featured in the Cannes Film Festival in Short Film Corner. Its director is Devi Prasad Mishra, who is the renowned Hindi poet and short story writer – he lives in Delhi. 

 

Satat (Continued) The Film:

 The film that features in the Cannes Film Festival is about two Indian adivasi children. In  the backdrop of the twittering  birds,  shriek of cranes and rumbling of mining at a distance the two village children are playing ‘gulli danda’ on a dusty village road.

Pedestrians, herdsmen, cyclists and motorcyclists pass by them. It does not bother the two playing lads. They go on with their game.

One motorcyclist is even suspicious of the camera crew that is apparently shooting the playing boys. He is the mining contractor.

 In a while one of the boys is called by his mother. He rides his bicycle and cycles out to reach his mother. The other boy walks a distance to drink water.  He comes back but the other boy has yet to surface from his not so distant home- he finally materializes but hurries down and upand down to the pond to tend to his fishing net in the nearby pond. Eventually the left-alone boy follows him and brings him back. The play starts again.

 The play may have interruptions and suspensions but it cannot be terminated. The play is metaphor of life that must continue.  The film is almost without the spoken words. It is tacit, imagistic, metaphorical, and poetic. It articulates itself through innocence of human presence and metaphor of continuity. 

How Satat (Continued) happened:

 

Satat happened accidentally- Devi was in a tribal belt on the cusp of Madhya Pradesh – Orissa border doing a communitarian documentary when he saw two village boys playing gulli danda. He immediately had a sketchy narrative popping up with a blurred beginning, middle and end. He talked to children and briefed them as to what he wanted. The film was shot endlessly through the glare of the morning and mid day sun as the game went on. He told his cameraman Tarique Mohammad that the film will go to Cannes and it did.  So he found the characters and the story then and there on the kuccha road; he made the non- actor Adivasi boys Sardar and Balchand to act in an impromptu, sketchy and uncertain cultural venture. It took him and his editor Ajmal Khan days and months to carve out a visual narrative and to put together the right images at right places. 

The Devi Prasad Mishra:

Known for his moral courage, reclusive poetic habitat, and his disdain for literary machinations Devi won two documentary projects from PSBT, and got National Award  for one of them The Female Nude.    He has almost completed a documentary feature All This Because. It is about the loneliness of womanhood amid the male dominated social prejudices, male gaze and male desires. It is about a rebel woman poet Jyotsana who eventually committed suicide. He has almost completed a  feature film Mahabhinishkramana ( The Great Going Out),  in shoe string budget, wherein the non- actor Adivasis have acted.  It busts the primary education system atrociously designed for the remote rural children.

 Having been awarded Sanskriti Samman, Bharat Bhushan Smriti Samman, Sharad BilloreSamman and chosen by one among thirteen faces by Illustrated Weekly of India for his poetry Devi follows Cannes phenomenon avidly watching its official selections over the years, the French Cultural Centre being the primary source. Even though he is not in Cannes due to his pressing schedules he thinks that it certainly is an exciting hub for filmmakers.  Here the best experiments and concepts  in cinema, and spirit of iconoclasm are exhibited left, right and centre, literally .

 A  film buff involved in running a film society in his home town Allahabad he now lives in New Delhi with his artist wife Hem Jyotika, and son Udbhav who is learning sculpture at Jamiaand making some  real weird music,  a small part of it Devi has used in his film Satat.

Devi started as a poet, he wants to live it out as a film maker, he quips. 

On Independent Cinema & Contemporary Hindi Cinema:

 

He feels that the true independent cinema is like writing poetry- you don’t have money, you are not paid for your cultural production, you are always discouraged to do what you desire to do, you are doubted as deviant, you don’t have a structured audience. So even if he has three screenplays almost ready for full feature length films based on his own three short stories he is sceptic about taking them to a pragmatic end. 

He feels that the present phase of Hindi cinema has discovered the rawness of underclass dialect and vernacular. But alas, except for Vishal and to a certain degree Dibakar no cinema director has a philosophical and ideological and political mooring. The new main stream Hindi cinema has generally ceased to be that stupid but it is  violence centric, or libertarian - it is forgetful of Ritwik and Satyajit Ray. It is Hollywood way where you have enviable performances, gangsters, spectacular scenarios, smart camera work, witticism at its best but no innate narrative. It only reflects the neo liberal market spirit. The underclass is being portrayed as Lampat. “If we can take a reference from contemporary cinema then what we need to be inspired from is the cinema of Dardene Brothers(France ) or Kaurismaki Brothers(Finland) or Mike Leigh(England)or AsgharFarhadi and JafarPanahi(Iran) or Nuri BilgeCeylan(Turkey),” he avers.

Saving the Apu Trilogy

The journey of the digitally restored version of The Apu Trilogy is packed with dark stories and years of near detective work by those determined to preserve some of Satyajit Ray's finest works. After the restoration, the film is releasing on May 8, 2015 in US. 
Aseem Chhabra finds out more from Peter Becker and Lee Kline, the two men behind the restoration.


Exactly 60 years ago, May 3, 1955, the Museum of Modern Art in New York City held the world premiere of Satyajit Ray's film Pather Panchali.

The story goes that Ray worked on a 24-hour schedule to get the print on the flight.
Ray did not accompany the film and the print that played at MoMA did not have subtitles.

But the film was a success among film connoisseurs.

The next year it was invited to play at the Cannes Film Festival where it won the Best Human Document award.

Two years later, the film had a theatrical release at the Fifth Avenue Playhouse in Manhattan where it ran for eight months -- something unheard of these days.
To mark the 60th anniversary of Pather Panchali, MoMA will host a screening of the film May 4.

Later that week Janus Films and the Criterion Collection will release brand new 4K restored prints of The Apu Trilogy -- first at the Film Forum in New York City and later at art house theatres in many cities across the United States.
It is a rare honour and a celebration for the three masterpieces that in many ways are the best-known Indian films in the West and elsewhere.

Despite the growing interest in Bollywood in Europe, Asia and even North America, a number of remarkable Indian indie films that have played in recent years at major film festivals, no other Indian filmmaker has earned the kind of recognition that was given to Ray.

There is a reason why the Japanese master Akira Kurosawa said the following about Ray: 'Never having seen a Satyajit Ray film is like never having seen the sun or the moon.'

But this journey of the digitally restored version of The Apu Trilogy is packed with dark stories, including a fire in a film laboratory in London that nearly destroyed all the original negatives of the three films and it involves years of dedicated and near detective work by experts and lovers of cinema who were determined to preserve the three masterpieces.


-Aseem Chhabra in New York

 (Aseem Chhabra is a Freelance writer, programmer and professional moviegoer. He is also associated with New York Indian Film Festival and Silk Screen Asian American Film Festival.)

courtesy: www.rediff.com 
link: http://www.rediff.com/movies/special/exclusive-saving-the-apu-trilogy/20150429.htm

Al Pacino: ‘It’s never been about money. I was often unemployed’

The great actor, who turned 75 on 25th April, 

on fame, his tailspin at 22, and the enigmatic Michael Corleone.

by Francin Cohen in 'The Guardian'




I’ve learned to live without anonymity. I haven’t been in a grocery store or subway for years. It’s hard for my children to go out publicly with me. Fame is different now than it was 20 years ago – I don’t know what the hell it is now! If I have a rare time of being somewhere and not being recognised, it’s a luxury.
  

 It’s never been about money for me. There were times when I was young when I could have used money: after college I was often unemployed and at one time I slept in a storefront for a few days. But I’ve never been materialistic. Except that I am, of course, because my lifestyle makes me a spender!

My grandfather, James Gerardi, taught me about work. He was a plasterer and work – any kind of work – was the joy of his life. So I grew up wanting to – it’s what I’ve always chased. The joy of work is what keeps me going.

The conclusion of my teachers was that I needed a dad. I wasn’t an out-of-control teenager, but I was close. My parents divorced when I was two and my father wasn’t in my life from then. I wanted to be different with my children [Julie, 25, and twins Anton and Olivia, 14]. I wanted to be responsible to them, so I divide my time between two coasts.

Kids changed my perspective. Before I had my three, I’d walk around in my own head, not noticing anything. Acting used to be everything; now, because of them, it’s just a small part.

I’m not lacking in friends. We can all get caught up in our lives, our careers, but I’ve always understood there’s a certain tenacity needed for friendship.

The lowest point of my life was losing my mother, Rose, and grandfather – they died within a year of each other. I was 22 and the two most influential people in my life had gone, so that sent me into a tailspin. I lost the 70s in a way, but then I gave up drinking in 1977 and decided to focus on the work.

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I understand the value and power of social media, although I don’t really do it myself. I have a Facebook page that 5.4m people “like”. What does that mean? I don’t know, although I do appreciate that these platforms are good for getting your message out there.


Michael Corleone in The Godfather was and still is the most difficult role I’ve played. I didn’t see him as a gangster; I felt his power was his enigmatic quality. Unfortunately the studio couldn’t see that at first and were thinking of firing me. It was during my early career, a major movie with Marlon Brando, and no one other than Francis [Ford Coppola] wanted me for the part.



My grandparents came from a town in Sicily called Corleone. Fate? Yes, maybe – it’s very strange. But then life has so many twists and turns.

People think there is rivalry between me and Robert De Niro. I know Bobby pretty well. He’s a friend and he and I have gone through similar things. I love what he does with comedy; it’s pure genius.
I believe I have reached my stride, which is why I persist. As long as you have passion for the art, keep working, because age catches up with you.

Courtesy: The Guardian

अभी तो मैं जवान हूं... ज़ोहरा आपा के नाम

- Nilendu Sen

          In a series of interviews conducted by Khushwant Singh, and co produced by my friend Anusha Khan in the late nineties the most memorable was the one he did with Zohra Sehgal... After talking of life and times the old sardar frankly recounted to the ever so alive Zohra an instance in 1935 where he was enamoured with her, especially as she recited the iconic poem by Hafiz Jalandhari...Without blinking she recited the poem in her inimitably expansive style on the show -- on the wrong side of 80 years, she looked as though she was just about warming up... Abhi To main Jawaan Hun.. It was not so much a recitation as much as an emphatic assertion, an assertion that both the interviewer and the interviewee lived upto till they lived.. Gave me the goosebumps..

अभी तो मैं जवान हूं
सुबू उठा पियाला भर, पियाला भर के दे इधर
चमन की सिम्त कर नज़र, समां तो देख बेखबर
है मौत इस क़दर क़रीन मुझे ना आएगा यक़ीन
नहीं नहीं अभी नहीं नहीं नहीं अभी नहीं
अभी तो मैं जवान हूं

Mujh Se Pehli Si Mohabbat by Faiz, recited by Zohra Sehgal


Nilendu Sen is a very senior journalist, an enthusiastic filmmaker and filmbuff, a scholar and a novelist. This post has been taken from his fb wall.