No Stopovers

Today, before Raaghav Dar (third year direction student) can remove the previous tour’s airline tag from his baggage, he is told his film has been selected for another film fest. At the recent Aspen Short Film Festival in the US, the 27-year-old’s film Bombay Summer bagged an honorable mention citation for the Bafta-LA award of excellence, adding to the film institute’s swelling kitty of awards from across the world.

In February, Dar and his Bombay Summer, a student exercise about a day in the life of an artist from Bihar and a domestic help, set in a shanty in Mumbai, did the rounds of the Clermont-Ferrand Festival—known as the Cannes of shorts. It was the only Indian film to be selected for both the Aspen and Clermont festivals. ‘‘I feel great about our work being appreciated. Wherever women have seen the film, they’ve connected with it,’’ says Dar. The film was also screened at the Potsdam Festival in Germany.

It will be screened at the Commonwealth Festival in Manchester and then do a circular tour of the UK for the ‘Best of Shorts’, which comprises the pick of the Commonwealth Fest. The film is also slotted to tour Rome and elsewhere. Besides, Dar went to Kathmandu where his documentary The Race was screened at the Film South Asia last September.

Dar is not an exception in his batch. His classmate Amit Dutta, 26, travelled to Moscow and Siberia, where his film They Remained in the Shadows was screened. Next was the Oberhausen Festival in Germany, where his film Keshkambli was shown.

His was the only Indian film to be showcased at the oldest and biggest short film fest in its 50th year. ‘‘It’s one of the world’s best festivals for experimental films, and I was one of the youngest film-makers there. So interacting with older film-makers was an enriching experience,’’ says Dutta, a third year direction student.

Students are going abroad so often that classmates joke about demanding a direct train to Berlin. This spurt in foreign travel owes mainly to the creation of a separate budget provision at FTII.

‘‘Earlier, even if a student took the initiative, he or she would find it difficult to go unless the festival authorities agreed to meet the expenses. Now, we have a Human Resource Development scheme in place to fund students and faculty who participate in festivals,” says FTII director Tripurari Sharan. As a result, the institute is also actively sending entries to festivals, he adds.

All the films competing at international fora were made when the students were in their second year. And while participating in competitive festivals has built confidence, it has also enabled students to gain insights into international film schools and find out where they stand among peers across the world. Rupak Das, who went to Moscow and Poland last year and later to Potsdam, found he could easily relate to the film school in Poland because it was a government institution and had been asked to raise its own funds. ‘‘Infrastructure at the FTII in terms of labs and cameras available is at par with that internationally,” he says.

But while most films made there were slick technically, they looked nearly the same, according to Das. ‘‘Our films were much more different from each other than theirs,’’ he says. The Indian students—Das (Chronicle of a Death Foretold), Umesh Kulkarni (Darshan), Ganga Mukhi (Antaheen), Ajita Suchitraveera (Notes on Her), Manisha Dwivedi (Avchetan)—whose films were selected for the Poland festival are from different parts of the country and their films reflect this diversity.

Suchitraveera’s film addressed the Naxal issue and Dwivedi’s dealt with the theme of alternative sexuality. Darshan is about a little boy waiting for the sight of a devi, while Das’ is a reaction to the government’s threat to privatise FTII. Mukhi’s film is an adaptation of a short story about a clerk who says no to everything. ‘‘The films from FTII may not be high on production value but they reflect a search for meaning,’’ says Dutta. ‘‘Festivals help you see what other people are doing stylistically and technologically and what their concerns are,’’ says Dar.

While direction students were top contenders for the frequent traveller award, cinematography students Malini Dasari and Pankaj Kumar were selected on the basis of their films to attend the prestigious Budapest Cinematography Master Class, conducted once in two years. There were 36 students from across the world. ‘‘The infrastructure at FTII is at par with world schools, maybe a notch higher,’’ says Dasari. ‘‘At FTII, we shoot on 35 mm colour in our second year, while most of them would do that for year-end projects,’’ she says.

Perhaps the most coveted recognition was bagged by Dwivedi. At the 10th International Film Festival in Lodz, Poland, she served as the sole student jury member. Besides, a producer also approached the national award winner with an offer to make Avchetan into a feature-length film after watching it in Poland. Dwivedi has been inundated with similar proposals in India and abroad.

A Canadian TV channel expressed interest in buying the rights to Bombay Summer after the Aspen fest. A Spanish TV representative watched Dar’s The Race in Kathmandu and made an offer too.

The tangible benefits are there for all to see and applaud, but there’s something else too. Dutta learnt that no boundary exists in cinema when a Russian film-maker and artist came up to him and gave him a gift of his paintings after watching his film.

Das struck up a friendship with a Chinese student. ‘‘It was the first time I was communicating with someone who didn’t speak English and vice versa,’’ he says. And Dar won’t forget the woman who couldn’t read the English subtitles but hugged him after watching Bombay Summer at Clermont, exclaiming: ‘‘Très Bien, Très Bien (Very good, Very good).’’