Flavour of world cinema in the hinterland

The recent international film festival in Aurangabad proves how disciplined planning and coming together of film enthusiasts can make a difference in small towns

Away from the hype and glamour, the slick networking and marketing overdrives of the best known film festivals on the circuit are smaller, modest, relatively newer festivals set in smaller towns. All heart and soul with quiet moments thrown in too, they offer a completely difference experience of the annual business of watching films as a collective, communal activity.

These festivals derive their ethos and energy from the unique character and regional impress, ground level interconnections and relationships of the cities they are located in.

The 8th Ajanta Ellora International film festival (AIFF) formerly known as the Aurangabad international film festival held in the city’s high tourist season last month falls in the latter category.

Its modest, gentler, small town pace and personal touch does not mean that the appetite or taste for cinema is in any way defined by provincialism of any kind or aversion to certain themes. In previous editions of the festival the popular audience poll for the best film has gone to a film like Adults in the Room, a striking political thriller on the economic collapse of Greece by the Greek-French 80-year-old auteur Costa-Gavras made in 2019.

Within hours of its inauguration this year too, the screening of the Spanish Tengo Suenos Electricos (I have Electric Dreams) by Valentina Maurel, which traces the turbulent clash of emotions in a 16-year-old girl looking to move in with her estranged father even as she struggles to make sense of her own emerging sexuality in a difficult world, was overflowing with delegates, students, locals and visitors. It was clear that audiences in this town in Maharashtra’s Marathwada region better known for its homegrown industrialists, agriculture and unfortunately recurrent droughts too, were back after a 2-year hiatus.

Local and homegrown

Busy local doctors, advocates, retired pensioners, teachers from local colleges doubled up as industrious volunteers at the AIFF. Bureaucrats, shop and business owners and hordes of students from as far as Vidarbha, Pune, Kolhapur and Mumbai constituted the crowds that were seen at the screening of roughly 40 odd films, Masterclasses and talks.

The categories created to present and schedule films are an indication of festival team’s universal passion for good cinema. The set of films were bunched as Indian Competition, World Cinema, Asian Best, Special screenings and Satyajit Ray Screenings as well as films by students of the local School of Film Arts at MGM University and films made by emerging filmmakers from Marathwada.

Festival director, Ashok Rane, a veteran of the film society movement and a film academician, is pleased. He explains that since 2018 he and his team have been at the forefront of organising film appreciation courses in the run-up to the festivals an outreach that spans more than 30 colleges. “In every part of India and in smaller towns too there are people deeply interested in cinema. They may be scattered but they are there. They just need to be mobilised”, he says.

Among the films shown were the Apu trilogy, first time viewing in any Indian film festival of the compelling story of Khabar Lahariya women journalists from Bundelkhand in Writing with Fire directed by Rintu Thomas and Sushmit Ghosh, Akyrky Koch (Road to Eden) by Bakyt Mukul and Dastan Zhapar Uulu from Kyrgyzstan, Les Magnetiques by Vincent Mael Cardona from France as well as Iranian filmmaker Jafar Panahi’s latest Khers Nist and the delectable Naanera by Deepankar Prakash which won the best film award.

Perhaps fittingly the best film award in the competition section went to this unexpected gem from Jaipur, a city not really known as a centre for filmmaking. Naanera is a film on a young man’s travails when he and his mother are forced to relocate to his maternal grandfather’s place following his father’s sudden death. Here he feels oppressed by the overpowering solicitude and interference of his uncles. The film is a splendid piece of social satire, storytelling and a tragi-comic commentary on the institution of the great Indian Family and its much flaunted values.

Kannada film Koli Esru (Chicken curry) directed by Champa P Shetty won an award for its lead actor Akshatha Pandavpura and Anik Dutta’s Aporajito on the making of Pather Panchali by Satyajit Ray won an award for its lead actor Jeet Kamal.

Sowing an idea

The festival was founded in 2014 and was the brainchild of Nandkishor Kagliwal, the founder and Chairman of the Nath Group business house in Aurangabad. A prominent business leader and philanthropist with a track record of establishing several educational and other social sector institutions in his hometown, Kagliwal works with a very collaborative framework. “An idea needs nurturing in its early stages and once it takes root all you have to do is empower people and they come together to give their best”, he says.

In its initial four years the film festival was running a package of films received from writer and director Jabbar Patel at the Pune film festival. It was with the arrival of Festival director Ashok Rane in 2018, and the coming together of cinema enthusiasts from all parts of the state that the festival began to acquire an identity of its own. Rane, was no newcomer to Aurangabad and had been teaching a film appreciation course at the Babasaheb Ambedkar Marathwada University theatre department since 2003. This course had since grown over the next decade to become a full fledged one-year certificate course in filmmaking, further adding to the underlying and growing ranks of young cinema enthusiasts in the region.

The founding of the School of Film Arts at MGM University from the pioneering Mahatma Gandhi Mission Trust (MGM) that has served education and research in the region for over four decades, is also a by-product of the film festival and the synergies it has facilitated. Since 2018 the film school has offered local film aspirants the opportunity to be mentored by visiting film directors and leading technicians who are part of the jury or special invitees for the festivals. This in turn spurs a greater interest in cinema among all stakeholders.

Creative director of the AIFF Shiv Kadam who doubles as head of MGM School of Film Arts, says that the proximity to film greats like Adoor Gopalakrishnan and veterans like the well-known cinematographer-director Dharam Gulati and Bishwadeep Chatterjee, sound technology expert who served as jury this year, is a great boon. “ We receive great help and support from the best film minds in making our syllabus and planning future film projects”, says Kadam.

He too is pleased with the quality of participation and the gradual but unmistakable upgrading of audience interest in the form.

Another plus in its favour is the manner in which the AIFF has aligned with the aspirations of young filmmakers and social activists alike. Mumbai-based writer and film director Dyanesh Zoting came back to his hometown to lend a helping hand while Nilesh Raut of the Yashwant Rao Chavan Prathistan and his team’s organisational skills ensured a smooth and quietly efficient festival experience for all. It is specially heartening to hear Raut say that he does not look at the festival as an event. “We look at it as a dialogue between all those interested in cinema in this region, as a process and our vision goes further into the future”, he says.

Yet another objective of the key vision for the film festival was the promotion of Aurangabad and the region as a shooting location. As the festival came to a close, two films were already beginning shoots in the vicinity with enquiries for international productions too.

The AIFF is a text book case study of how to implant a love for cinema and nurture and sustainably grow a film festival, embedding it in the local with the possibility of linking up with bigger ideas into the future.

(The author is writer, curator and co founder of First Edition Arts.)