“Cinema is the most beautiful fraud in the world” – Jean-Luc Godard.
The month of March was welcomed by the HSS Department with ‘Celluloid’, a vibrant two-day film festival organized by the Film Festival Committee on February 28 and March 1. Much anticipated and unabashedly unique, the festival happened after a year’s break and was the department’s first film festival outside the purview of the Film Club. It also raised interests and eyebrows alike for having a screening based on “Audience’s choice”.
The promotion and outreach kicked off one week ahead. The first major attention-grabber was the teaser of the Film Festival curated and edited by Vineet Wadia. Opening with a cheeky “censorship certificate” blending humour and sarcasm, it moves on to a montage of glimpses from acclaimed movies all over the world– spanning blockbusters and hidden gems. The posters for the festival were designed by Devamritha. A “poster board”, with a collage of movie posters put up outside the CLT, also intrigued passersby and drew crowds.
The inaugural event of the Film Festival drew not just students, but PhD scholars and our beloved professors as well. Welcomed by the Department Secretary, and The Department Legislator, the festival was officially inaugurated by Dr. Milind Brahme. The speeches reminisced the evolution of cinema in the last two centuries. “Cinema should make you forget you are sitting in a theater”, said Roman Polanski. 130 years after the screening of The Arrival of a Train, which had evoked panic in its audience to run for their lives, now hundred-odd passionate cinephiles had gathered inside the dark hall of CLT to be transported to distant continents, fantastical realms, and the impregnable complexities of human lives, all through the power of cinema.
The festival’s opened with the screening of Those 4 Years, a documentary by our own Dr. Joe Thomas Karackattu. It traces the arrival of Chinese prisoners to India around the middle of the 19th century. The film journeys across three countries, weaving the oral narratives of their descendants living in the Nilgiris with the historical archives in Hong Kong and Malaysia. In the Q&A session that followed, Dr. Karackattu talked about his motivation behind choosing the much-accessible visual medium of cinema for the documentation of this forgotten history, and the fervent journey of four years he undertook in the making of the film. The discussions were also enriched by the presence of professors Sreenath V, Solomon Benjamin, and Milind Brahme.
The afternoon lull was beaten back by Zootopia 2, directed by Jared Bush and Byron Howard. The screening which was based on an audience poll saw a packed auditorium with students from all over the institute. In this buddy-cop movie, the rabbit cop Judy Hopps and the fox Nick Wilde reunite to restore law and order in the metropolis filled with anthropomorphic animals. I believe that screening such a movie in a film festival breaks the rigid divides between the sacrality associated with high art and the banality associated with popular art. It opens up the elite spaces of film festivals to even those lacking the intellectual privilege to engage with art-house films.
Day Two opened with the segment “Afia” from Onir’s anthology I Am, which tells four life-changing stories from different parts of modern India. “Afia” discusses questions of identity and female agency, through the journey of a young single woman who longs to experience motherhood on her own terms. The panel discussion which followed, hosted by our PhD scholars Dheebika and Medhavi, sparked probing debates on destigmatizing sperm donation and single motherhood.
Asghar Farhadi’s “A Separation”, an Iranian social drama where a domestic dispute unfolds into a complex moral and legal crisis, exhibits the complexities of human relationships. Amid global wars and conflicts, Iranian cinema reminds the world that despite our diverse geographic locations, national identities or sartorial codes, in the very core of our beings we are governed by the same raw human emotions and drives.
The Film Festival lowered the curtains with the screening of Hayao Miyazaki’s Princess Mononoke. As the lights in CLT dimmed, Ghibli’s lush hand-drawn images transported the audience to a fantastical world set in medieval Japan. I remember how a year ago, the Internet and even our department halls were split over debates on AI mimicking and mass-producing Miyazaki’s hand-drawn art. Experiencing this movie yet again reaffirms that the soul of human imagination can never be replaced by AI.
This film festival offered a sweet escape from academic demands and dense readings. Huddled in CLT’s dark halls with friends and strangers, we were whisked to other worlds through the multisensory magic of cinema. Heraclitus has said, “You never step into the same water twice.” The same goes for movies too – we walk out of every screening with something within us changed forever, after sharing a few hours of mirth with deep self-reflection, lingering like a half-remembered dream.
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