It’s been a packed week for filmmaker Mani Kaul, at the helm of Osian’s annual film festival Cinefan, which began this Saturday in Delhi. He talks to Neha Bhatt about the festival’s highlights and the shaping of “new cinema” in India.
You are new to Cinefan. How was the first innings?
I always enjoy great moments of teamwork as a filmmaker. The Osian’s Cinefan team is more experienced as a festival team — I am just nine months old in this business. If there is a contribution I have made towards this edition of the festival then it is in recognising the birth of an idea, whatever its source, and letting it flower.
There is a special focus on Indian films in this edition of the festival.
Indian cinema has turned a page. An Indian film festival must recognise the development — period. The prospect of a meeting between the new mainstream and independent cinema is gathering momentum in India. The coming closer does not mean that a line between them will be obliterated. On the contrary, it means there is going to be, between the two, a stronger argument. The two will learn from each other and the consequent debate will make us progress.
Filmmakers like Anurag Kashyap, Vishal Bhardwaj and Imtiaz Ali speak on “new cinema”. Isn’t it too early to label it so? Are audience sensibilities really changing all that much?
The emergence of newer, exciting and “thinking” directors will naturally generate a debate between the mainstream and what we have termed NewStream at Cinefan this year. It isn’t as much an issue of audience sensibilities as it is about the potential of a growth-stimulating debate that will benefit all concerned, including the audience.
What do we have from outside India at the festival this year?
It was at Cannes this year that I first saw the Romanian film Police, Adjective, then Happiest Girl in the World and Hooked. These three films indicate a renaissance of cinema in Romania — great humour and irony. The three films I have mentioned create a deeply troubled landscape of a crumbled old order of communism in Eastern Europe and its confused confrontation with new capitalist consumerism. An ordinary film would be a parasite on that subject (of “the old and the new”), exploit the subject and get exploited by it. These films, however, articulate the persistence of old remnants in the new order by way of making them over-tonal in experience, as a kind of resonance behind the narrative, instead of harping or even dramatising it like a theme. I promise there are many other wonderful films to be seen at Siri Fort between October 24 and 30 — aage parde par dekhiye!
It’s interesting that the jury comprises experts from fields outside cinema.
Absolutely. Experts from fields outside cinema are, as expected, natural connoisseurs of the arts, and they will objectively sense the invisible content in the visible material of cinema from the perspective of their respective disciplines.
