|
|
| |
| Third Kalpanirjhar International Short Fiction Film Festival 2005 |
The third edition of the Kalpanirjhar International Short Fiction Film Festival, organized by Kalpanirjhar Foundation and Goethe Institute / Max Mueller Bhavan Kolkata, and co-sponsored by Patton, was held at Max Mueller Bhavan, Kolkata, on 16 - 20 September 2005.
Filmmaker Mrinal Sen, painter Jogen Chowdhury, and musician Bikram Ghosh were guests of honour at the inauguration on 16 September 2005, which was also addressed by Dr Martin Waelde, Director, Goethe Institute / Max Mueller Bhavan Kolkata, Bhaskar K. Rajah, Deputy Director, American Centre, Kolkata, Nicolas Blasquez, Director, The French Association, Kolkata, and Sanjay Budhia, Managing Director, Patton India Limited, and Samik Bandyopadhyay, Trustee, on behalf of the Foundation. Mr S. V. Raman compered the programme. The speakers focused on the possibilities offered by the short fiction mode, the role of the corporate sector in supporting such Festivals to bring to view the new vistas opening up in cinema, and the different interfaces that could develop between cinema and the other arts, particularly music and visual arts. Mr Bikram Ghosh, the distinguished musician, composer and percussionist, promised to compose a theme tune for the Festival.
The inaugural ceremony was followed by the first session of the festival featuring a theme selection under the label 'Comedy/Black Comedy in Short Fiction', with new films from Germany, France, Brazil, USA and India.
|
|
The year’s special features included diploma films from La femis, National Professional School for Sound and Image, Paris, the Polish National Film School, Lodz; and the Film and Television Institute of India, Pune; the Prix Jeunesse International Suitcase for Tsunami Victims; and three national packages representing Germany (‘Short and Sweet’), US (US Independents; New Women Filmmakers), and France (Focus France). There were four new films from Kolkata, two by adman Sanjeet Chowdhury and painter Aditya Basak, and debut works by Chandan Bhaduri and Ruchir Arun, the latter telling the audience that his first work was directly inspired by the Kalpanirjhar Festival which he had been following over the years. The National Film Archives of India, Pune, pitched in, as in earlier years, with the rarely seen surrealist classic, Meshes in the Afternoon (1942), directed by Maya Deren and Alexander Hammid.
The year’s panel discussion focused on Acting in the Short Fiction Film Mode, with Kaushik Sen, popular young star of TV serials and telefilms and the experimental theatre, and journalist Rangan Chakraborty as the panelists, and Samik Bandyopadhyay as Moderator.
Audience polls made the following selections in the different categories. |
Overall Selections
1. The Boy, The Slum and the Pans’ Lids (Brazil), dir. Cao Hamburger
2. The Conductor (Poland), dir. Peter Vogt
3. The Act (USA), dir. Susan Kraker and Pi Ware
4. God’s Men (India), dir. Ruchir Arun |
Germany
1. The Schoolboy, dir. Edina Kontsak
2. Talks, dir. Mickel Rentsch
USA
1. The Act, dir. Susan Kraker and Pi Ware
2. Missing, dir. Kit Hui
Prix Jeunesse Suitcase for Tsunami Victims
1. The Boy, The Slum and the Pans’ Lids, dir. Cao Hamburger
2. Jacub, dir. Andrzej Maleszka
Kolkata selections
1. God’s Men, dir. Ruchir Arun
2. Eye-Spy, dir. Aditya Basak |
France
1. Pilou, dir. Claudine Natkin
2. When I Grow Small, dir. Agnès Baldacchino-Costa
Poland
1. The Conductor, dir. Peter Vogt
2. A Man Thing, dir. Slawomir Fabicki
FTII Diploma Films
1. Pre Mortem, dir. Wrik Basu
2. Punha, dir. Ganga M Mukhi
|
|
The Kalpanirjhar International Short Fiction Film Festival, as an entirely non-commercial venture, committed to offering film viewers and makers alike free access to films in this highly potential mode, has to seek unconventional means to raise funds to run the show – and that too with some professional and technical competence. This year an appeal to some of Kolkata’s leading painters brought forth excellent support in the form of a gift of 33 paintings for sale.
Most of the artists gathered at Khelaghar, a garden house at Mukundapur, in the outskirts of Kolkata, 1.3 km off the Eastern Metropolitan Byepass, on Saturday, 13 August 2005, for a daylong art camp in which they interacted and exchanged notes with one another even as they worked on their canvases. The setting was ideal, the weather pleasant with occasional drizzles.
Artists held up by prior commitments missed the warm camaraderie of the long evening meet of the painters at the close of the camp. |
|
Artists who contributed their works so generously to the package comprise Prakash Karmakar, B. R. Panesar, Isha Mohammad, Alok Bhattacharya, Jogen Chowdhury, Amitava Sengupta, Partha Pratim Deb, Manoj Dutta, Hiran Mitra, Tapan Mitra, Ramlal Dhar, Dipali Bhattacharya, Sohini Dhar, Mona Ghose, Jaya Ganguly, Ashok Mullick, Malay Chandan Saha, Pradip Moitra, Subrata Sen, Suvendu Porel, Samindranath Mazumder, S. Shankar,Santanu Bose, Debashish Chakraborty, Johar Dasgupta, Snehasis Das, Satyabrata Karmakar, Washim Kapoor, Chandra Bhattacharya, Sekhar Kar, Krishnendu Porel, Shyamkanu Barthakur and Swapan Polley.
Most of the works were done in acrylic on canvas, 70 x 76 cm; with the exceptions of those by Jogen Chowdhury, in colour pastel; Chandra Bhattacharya, in pastel and acrylic; Mona Ghose, in oil; and Krishnendu Porel, who worked on paper.
It was a wonderful gesture on the part of Kolkata’s painters in the cause of new experimental cinema with a human face.
The Festival had an afterlife in a series of screenings of selected packages of the best of the lot at Visva Bharati, Santiniketan; Jamshedpur (Jharkhand), Bally (West Bengal), Mumbai (Alliance Francaise / MMB), Hyderabad, New Delhi, and Colombo with several film societies and the Goethe-Institut taking the initiative. |
|
|
| |
|
