FILMS | PREMIERES | CONVERSATIONS | INSTALLATIONS

In its 5th year, Persistence Resistance brings together the documentary, the documentary filmmaker and the audience on the public platform. Presenting multiple screening and viewing practices, spread over four locations in Delhi, Persistence Resistance 2012 will premiere new works from India and the world and present some never seen before films and provide many opportunities for in-depth interaction with filmmakers.

9 – 17 February, 2012

February 9 – 11: British Council, New Delhi

February 10: Arts Faculty, Delhi University North campus
(in collaboration with margHumanities)

February 12 – 15: India International Centre, New Delhi

February 17: Goethe-Institut / Max Mueller Bhavan, New Delhi


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A Season of 30 film titles of experimental Indian cinema

A West Heavens project, in partnership with Magic Lantern Foundation, New Delhi
November 25th to December 25th, 2011,
Beijing-Shanghai-Guangzhou-Kunming

Curated by: Ashish Rajadhyaksha

Hosted by: Hanart TZ Gallery / Embassy Of India, Beijing / School of Intermedia Art, China Academy of Art

in collaboration with: Magic Lantern Foundation, New Delhi / Centre for the Study of Culture and Society, Bangalore / Consulate General of India, Shanghai / Consulate General of India, Guangzhou / Wenhui Daily / Center for Contemporary Cultural Studies, Shanghai University

Sponsored by: Moonchu Foundation / Pinnacle Group / ZEE TV

This film season showcases a range of recent Indian films, specially selected, assembled and subtitled, to make an argument about the moving image in India. It includes feature-length fiction films, documentaries and experimental video, alongside a reader, titled Persisting Visions: Pasts and Futures of Indian Cinema, that includes newly translated writings of a selection of over 30 years of writing on the Indian cinema.

Opening at 3:00 pm on Friday, November 25th at the Iberia Center for Contemporary Art in Beijing.

Screenings of over 30 Indian independent films and a series of forums on film and social thought will take place at the Iberia Center, the Beijing Film Academy, and the Ullens Center for Contemporary Art. Upcoming screenings in Shanghai, Guangzhou, and Kunming to follow.

Opening time and venue:
3:00 pm, November 25, Friday, Iberia Center for Contemporary Art,Beijing (Zone E06, 798 Art District, No.4 Jiuxianqiao Road)

More …

Review of ‘Father Son and the Holy War’ by Anand Patwardhan

In Ram ke Naam (1992), Anand Patwardhan made the world sit up and take note of his no-holds-barred take on the flavour of Hindu fundamentalism that culminated in the mindless violence at Ayodhya. Then he burrowed deeper into why, apart from being the result of a social tumult that powerful politicians sought to profit from, this conflagration came about in the way and at the time it did. Why did tens of thousands of common people -mostly men – from across the country answer the rallying cry of the politically motivated? …. Patwardhan explores whether the spiralling violence is mainly the result of this confrontational construct of manhood. It’s a rare narrative in a country that’s still plummeting in the name of religion. A must-watch.

Review of ‘Children of the Pyre’ by Rajesh S. Jala

This is yet another product of Enlighten’s march to shine light on – and, in most cases, bring back from oblivion – some of the best documentaries produced in India. … There’s a chilling directness to the film. The kids, high on something or the other, relish the fact their lives are scandalous to others. One of them tells Rajesh Jala’s camera: “I hope more people die and we get more shrouds.”

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‘Children of the Pyre‘ has been released in the retail market by Under Construction with Enlighten and DVDs of the film is available in all leading bookshops and video stores across India. DVDs of ‘Children of the Pyre’ can also be ordered online at the Under Construction website.

This film festival is a reality show with a difference. Persistence Resistance, a festival of short films and documentaries, has screened stark, often disturbing, sociopolitical realities for the past three years. Organisers Magic Lantern Foundation, a Delhi-based organisation, will now carry its cache of hard-hitting films to the UK, showcasing these at Goldsmiths University of London, London School of Economics, School of Oriental and African Studies, University of Westminster and Brunel University.

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Persistence Resistance 2011: Documentary Practices in India

London, 1 – 8 November 2011

Persistence Resistance is premised on the belief that documentary practices in any place actively participate in the shaping of our times. The strong history of documentary filmmaking in India and the continued explorations and experimentations with documentary form offer an extensive intellectual and creative platform to think through and debate current urgencies in South Asia as well as in the UK, Europe and elsewhere internationally.

In its fourth year, Persistence Resistance 2011 (held in New Delhi from 7-11 February) celebrated the independent documentary artists’ deep engagement with the myriad forms that the documentary affords. Through the personal to the conceptual, the essayistic, the poetic, the performative, the self-reflective or the fictional, engaging humour, philosophy, music, the law or social movements – they create distinct political voices and impulses for their audiences to engage.

Persistence Resistance in London would like to widen the spectrum of conversations between those films and their audiences, between filmmakers and viewers through a series of constructed conversations between academics and practitioners. It introduces archival and very recent works that have not been shown in London previously and it sets out to expand the ways documentaries offer us to think and to act. While we start with a focus on Indian documentary practice to create a more informed ground to explore its specific histories, styles and provocations, the aim is to explore further political and aesthetic affiliations across geographical locations and disciplines.

The collaborative effort between Magic Lantern and five academic institutions – Goldsmiths, LSE, SOAS, University of Westminster and Brunel University – made it possible to create an event that focuses on in-depth conversations between and amongst filmmakers and theorists, linked to screenings, round-tables and with plenty of time for open discussions with the audience.

Filmmaker guests Arun Khopkar, Deepa Dhanraj, Rahul Roy, Rajula and Shah Saba Dewan, from India, Yasmine Kabir from Bangladesh, as well as UK based filmmakers John Wyver, Mairead McClean, Mao Mollona, Margaret Dickinson and Simon Chambers and will be joined by, and be in conversations with, Alisa Lebow, Alpa Shah, Guilia Battaglia, Laura Bear, Lotte Hoek, Lucia King, Nicole Wolf, Partha Mitter, Radha D’Souza, Ravi Vasudevan, Ros Gray, Rosie Thomas, Stephen Hughes, Stewart Motha and Ziba Mir Hosseini.

We hope that Persistence Resistance 2011: Documentary Practices in India will be a celebration of both the plurality of the documentary practice and the ways of engaging with it.

All welcome and all events are free.

Schedule and More

aka One Day Ahead of Democracy

A Film by Amlan Datta

Date: 15 September, 2011
Time: 6:30 pm
Venue: India International Centre Main Auditorium

ENTRY FREE – ALL ARE WELCOME

A moderated discussion with the director would follow the screening.

BOM – aka One Day Ahead of Democracy

117 min, 2011

Directed by Amlan Datta

Supported by Sundance DFP, Jan Vrijman Fund (IDFA)
Co-produced with NHK (Japan Broadcasting Corp)
www.aheadofdemocracy.com

Malana, a remote village in the Himalayas, isolated from outside civilization for thousands of years has been fostering a divine existence in harmony with nature and a unique model of democracy of consensus. The hidden treasure of their governance has been trust and they have been selecting not electing!

Blessed by Lord Shiva good quality cannabis plant grows in abundance there. In the seventies came some white men who taught them how to rub the crème and drew them into hashish trade. Malana crème became world famous.

The rule of our modern day democracy has to be established, so Malana becomes a part of Indian electorate. In name of development the curse of modern world starts destroying their traditional culture and social practices. A united community gets divided and goes to vote for the Indian general elections.

A visual essay from the edge of the world with a universal message of trust, peace and eternal unity, a real life story of transition; an ancient civilization being invaded and obliterated by the modern democracy, narrated in an epic structure.

For those who may not know Amlan, he is a FTII graduate and in his very short life as a filmmaker he has won the national award twice. He co-runs Animagineer, a production company with a difference. This film took over 4 years in making.

Please do come. And if you are not in Delhi, please do tell your friends in Delhi who might be interested to see or write about the film.

…This paper was written with an interest to explore independent documentary filmmaking as an aesthetic practice in India and my own preoccupation with a certain kind of cinema that encounters the space of the home in the works of Southeast Asian filmmakers, particularly Supriyo Sen, Yasmine Kabir, and Nishit Saran.[ii] Through the use of confessions, dialogues with the filmmakers, electronic recordings, photographs and official documents, home as a space animates discussion about history, nation, gender, and sexuality; certain uncomfortable, lurking secrets begin to foreground newer narratives of private histories and interiorized struggles that are perhaps not a part of the wider public discourse. We thus land on psychological, physical, and filmic spaces within the metastructure of the home, and accessing each of them leads not only to a theoretical and methodological trespassing, but also to renewed spatial imaginations and ordering of social relations.

In India, the turn of the documentary from what started out as a modernist project of nation-building toward these subjectivities has not been an act of coincidence, but one marked by diversified flows of production, changes in social conditions of the nation and, to a large extent, women’s movements.[iii] My effort here is not so much to test the “independent” status of the documentary or the extent of its indexicality of truth, but rather to take the documentary as a vehicle of cultural production, knowledge, and interrogation, where the emergence of epistemological doubt occurs as a result of the awareness of the hegemonic aspects of the text…

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Date: 16th of September 2011 (5.30 – 7 pm)

Venue: IIHS, 808 Surya Kiran Building, 19 Kasturba Gandhi Marg, New Delhi 110001

The screening will be followed by a discussion with the filmmaker who will be present.

PARTNERS IN CRIME

(94 min. HDV. Documentary. Hindi and English, 2011, India)

Who owns a song – the person who made it or the person who paid for it? Is piracy organized crime or class struggle? Are alternative artists who want to holdrights over their art and go it alone in the market, visionaries or nutcases? Is the fine line between plagiarism and inspiration a cop-out or a whole other way of looking at the fluid nature of authorship? When more than three fourths of those with an internet connection download all sorts of material for free, are they living out a brand new cultural freedom – or are they criminals?

Full of wicked irony, great music and thorny questions Partners in Crime explores the grey horizons of copyright and culture in times when technology is changing the contours of the market.

Metal heads who market their own music, folklorists who turn tribal aphorisms into short stories, music archivists who hoard and share everything they can gettheir hands on, anti-piracy fanatics who think piracy funds terrorism, a smooth talking DVD street salesman who outlines the efficiency of the illegal market, media moguls, lobbyists, “monetizers”, downloaders, uploaders, the biggest hit song of 2010 and the small time nautanki singer whose song it was inspired by – these places and people throng the world’s bazaar in which the film is set. Partners in Crime takes you through a story about art, crime, love and money to check if the times, they may be a-changing after all.

FEATURING: Vijay Dandetha, Thermal and a Quarter, Lawrence Liang, Demonic Resurrection, Pete Lockett, itwofs.com, Scribe, Rampat Harami & Rani Bala, Ram Sampath, Juma Khan, Irfan of Dil Ne Phir Yaad Kiya, FM Gold,CDrack.in and many others.

CREDITS:
PRODUCER: Magic Lantern Foundation EXECUTIVE PRODUCER Devi Pictures DIRECTOR Paromita Vohra CAMERA Shanti Bhushan, Bakul Sharma EDITOR Rikhav Desai SOUND Asheesh Pandya, Chris Burchell, Gissy Michael MUSIC Akshay Rajpurohit & Kuber Sharma

ABOUT THE DIRECTOR

Paromita Vohra is a documentary filmmaker and writer based in Mumbai whose films explore issues of politics, feminism, culture and desire. Some of her celebrated films are ‘Morality TV and the Loving Jehad: A Thrilling Tale’, ‘Q2P’, ‘Un-limited Girls’, ‘Where’s Sandra?’, ‘Cosmopolis: Two Tales of a City’ and ‘A Woman’s Place’. She is also scriptwriter of ‘Khamosh Pani’ (directed by Sabiha Sumar) which won the Golden Leopard at the Locarno Film Festival in 2003; ‘A Few Things I Know About Her’ (directed by Anjali Panjabi) which won the Silver Conch at the MIFF 2002; and ‘Skin Deep’ (directed by Reena Mohan). Her prose writing has been carried in various anthologies including Electric Feather: The Tranquebar Book of Indian Erotica, Recess: The Penguin Book of Schooldays and Bombay Meri Jaan, among others. She writes a weekly column in Sunday Mid-day. She is currently working on a book about love in contemporary India. Partners in Crime is her latest film. To find out more about her work you can visit www.parodevi.com

Click for more information on the film and to buy copies

Those who want to attend the film screening, please do RSVP to: skrishnan@iihs.ac.in

When an age-old song satisfies the metaphor of contemporary times, tracking its roots becomes imperative. Lal paharir deshe ja, raanga maattir deshe ja, idhak to ke maanai chena re — the folk song — originally attributed to an unknown baul artiste, has always been popular in collective memory. Soppy with emotions, the ditty has also been extremely hummable. The meanings and thoughts associated with the seemingly simple words and the absence of obvious artistic rules make it an ingrained element in Bengali sensibility and the subject of Delhi-based filmmaker Spandan Banerjee’s black and white documentary, You Don’t Belong.

Read full review

at Sonapani [www.himalayanvillage.com]

Festival created by: Gurpal Singh and Ashish Arora

A festival of some of the finest films screened at various editions of BYOFF and m.a.f.i.a. BYOFF (Bring Your Own Film Festival) is a festival for independent films held every year at the beach town in Puri.

m.a.f.i.a. (Musicians Artists Filmmakers Interesting log… Aajaao!) is an informal online community of musicians artists, filmmakers and interesting people (and those interested too!). Several amazing films have been screened at various mafia gatherings over a period of time.

A festival of a few of these superb films will be held over a weekend (9th to 11th September 2011) at Sonapani, a truly outstanding eco resort in the Kumaon hills. It is has a fabulous view of the Himalayas, and engages with Musicians and Artists from all over, having now become a cultural hub in the region. www.himalayanvillage.com

More on the Festival