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Festival Director Cary Sawhney
says: “It's terrific to have a world renowned
organisation like Tate Modern partner with us
this year and we hope this is the start of a long
association. The inclusion of experimental, artist
films in the festival’s line-up furthers
our aim to present as varied a picture of contemporary
Indian cinema as possible. It gives us the opportunity
to work with respected guest curators, in this
case, Shai Heredia, director of India's Experimenta
Festival. And, of course, to expand our audience,
since it is likely that the audience watching
these programmes will be different to that at
the high-octane gangster film or the RomCom.”
Heredia says, “There
is a thriving community of Indian Independent
filmmakers and artists who are exploring new film
forms and blurring genre boundaries. This community,
in my opinion, represents contemporary India,
not only through the radical form and content
of their work, but also through their artistic
spirit and commitment to creating new and alternative
ways of seeing. Interestingly, the context of
film academia in India has also begun to engage
and respond to this shift in filmmaking practice,
and one hopes that this will create a more contemporary
and nuanced film studies discourse in the future.”
“I’m always excited
to curate work for the Tate Modern as the audience
is usually extremely informed and very engaged.
I think that Stuart Comer, Film Curator at Tate
Modern, has really built the Tate film programme
into one of the strongest, most eclectic, and
experimental, museum film programmes, and I am
happy to contribute to this context of exhibition.
As LIFF focuses on showcasing only new contemporary
work, curated here is a programme of films that
represent some of the ideas, concerns and aesthetics
that Indian film artists have been exploring most
recently. The London Indian Film Festival plays
an important role in showcasing new non-mainstream
south Asian work. I think it is important for
audiences at diaspora film festivals to be aware,
and critical of the hegemony of Bollywood,”
Heredia adds.
| EXPERIMENTA INDIA
1 |
|
Saturday 23 June 2012
| 19.00
Duration | 57 mins
Tate Modern | Starr Auditorium
£5 | £4 concessions
PRESENCE
Ekta Mittal and Yashaswini
Raghunandan | India 2012 | Colour | Sound
| HD | 18 mins
Presence is the second
film from the Behind the Tin Sheets Archive.
Landscapes shift, people move from place
to place – time passes and spaces evolve.
Through this metamorphosis, new things try
to replace the old. Some remain and linger
and some go missing and disappear. We remember
and we also forget. Between this, we encounter
the invisible. This film reflects the subconscious
of migrant workers against an urban landscape
in metamorphosis. As they carry their stories
in and out of many cities, the cities bear
witness to these fragments. A point of impermanence
and permanence collide, in close proximity
with the filmmakers' haunt within the city.
Suspended from time and space, the familiar
begins to render the unfamiliar.
RESIDUE
Sonal Jain and Mriganka
Madhukaillya | India 2011 | Colour | Sound
| 35mm | 39 mins
This film was shot
in a redundant Thermal power plant in the
outskirts of the city of Guwahati. It forms
a response to the artists' interest in constructed
signs that can never be replicated or remembered
and in the relationship between matter and
memory. There is an endless circularity
and an unbearable silence — the pause
A point of impermanence and permanence collide,
in close proximity with the filmmakers'
haunt within the city. Suspended from time
and space, the familiar begins to render
the unfamiliar.
|
| EXPERIMENTA INDIA
2 |
|
Sunday 24 June 2012
| 16.00
Duration | 59 mins
Tate Modern | Starr Auditorium
£5 | £4 concessions
JAN VILLA
Natasha Mendonca |
India 2012 | Colour + B&W | Sound |
16mm transferred to HD | 20 mins
After the monsoon floods
in 2005 that submerged Bombay, the filmmaker
returns to her native city to examine the
personal impact of this devastating event.
The result is Jan Villa, a tapestry of images
that studies the space of a post-colonial
metropolis but in a way that deeply implicates
the personal. The destruction wreaked by
the floods becomes a telling and a dismantling
of other devastations and the sanctuaries
of family and home. In its structure, Jan
Villa is a vortex, drawing to its center
all that surrounds it.
CITY BEYOND
Shreyasi Kar | India
2011 | Colour | Sound | 35mm | 10 mins
City Beyond is a film
that speculates about the lives led by inhabitants
of a submerged civilisation. The superstructure
has been recently discovered in the crevices
of the ocean floor. The film moves through
the submerged landscape, gathering glimpses
of life, times and the end of a lost society.
THERE IS SOMETHING
IN THE AIR
Iram Ghufran | India
2011 | Colour | Sound | 35mm | 29 mins
There is Something
in the Air is a call from the periphery
of sanity. A series of dream narratives
and accounts of spiritual possession as
experienced by women 'petitioners' at the
shrine of a Sufi saint in northern India.
Drama unfolds via dreams, appearances of
djinns and disappearances of women. The
shrine becomes a space for expressions of
longing and transgression. The film invites
the viewer to a fantastical world, where
fear and desire is experienced through dreams
and 'afflictions of air'. The shrine is
a space where performance becomes the only
rule of engagement, and one can begin to
think about the possibilities that 'insanity'
produces.
|
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