An Indian Autumn

However, a convergence of forces: state intervention, turbulent socio-political conditions, a progressive film school and an active film society movement created an explosive movement of parallel cinema in India. The films that emerged represented a cornucopia of cinematic experimentation with new forms of film narration as well as cinematic realism in diverse languages and styles yet with a shared view of cinema as art and social/political critique.

Indian New Wave was a movement peopled by remarkable filmmakers who made films that have left their mark on the pages of cinema history beginning from very important filmmaker Mrinal Sen’s satirical work Bhuvan Shome in 1969, the experimental work of Mani Kaul and Kumar Shahani and the more linear narrative style of Shyam Benegal to name just a few.

It is with great difficulty that we narrowed the list for this festival down to 14 films. There were two more films that were part of the original list: Sai Paranjpye’s first feature film The Touch (Sparsh,1980) that launched her career and K. Balachander’s musical melodrama Sindhu Bhairavi (1985), both of which we had to drop, as tragically we could not find any material that would be suitable for a cinema screening.

This is a recurring problem we face at Film Heritage Foundation where we find that so many films have fallen through the cracks over the years through neglect and apathy making it imperative that the preservation and restoration of films be taken up a priority if we are not to lose our films forever. This is the reason Film Heritage Foundation joined hands with The Film Foundation’s World Cinema Project and Fondazione Cineteca di Bologna to restore Aravindan Govindan’s poetic masterpiece The Bogeyman (Kummatty) and then took on the mantle to restore his cinema-verite styled gem The Circus Tent (Thampu) as no original camera negatives of these films survived and even the prints were in a precarious condition. It is with great joy that we now see these films enjoying a second life as they travel all over the world to be seen by new audiences.

We are so glad that we are able to include the restored version of Ritwik Ghatak’s A River Called Titas (Titas Ekti Nadir Naam,1973) in the festival this year as well as an older restoration of The Ruins (Khandhar, 1984) to mark Mrinal Sen’s birth centenary year.

The making of some of these films could be films in themselves. In the case of John Abraham’s Report to Mother (Amma Ariyan), it was the first film produced by the Odessa Collective started by the filmmaker and his friends as a people’s cinema movement aimed at freeing film production and distribution from market forces. They raised funds for the film by travelling from village to village per- forming skits and street plays and collecting money from the public. Love in the Time of Malaria (Hun Hunshi Hunshilal) Sanjiv Shah’s genre-defying absurdist satire on an intolerant regime that cracks down on dissenters was made on a shoestring budget and dropped out of circulation for decades. It is with great satisfaction that we bring it back to the big screen. Kamal Swaroop is at his iconoclastic best with the cult classic Om Dar-B-Dar – film that escapes definition.