It’s the time of the year when my Twitter timeline wakes up at 8 a.m. for making their daily film bookings for the Jio Mami Mumbai Film festival With Star; and, if Wednesday morning was anything to go by, the ride ahead seems to be looking mercifully smooth.
Chaos, if any, would be in the viewers’ heads with a feast to choose from — which film to sign up for and which to give a short shrift to. The forecast ahead warns of some big clashes. So, on day one itself, even as the Asia premiere of Anurag Kashyap’s Mukkabaaz ( The Brawler ) — also the opening film — ensues at Liberty tonight, Darren Aronofsky’s much awaited psychological horror Mother! unspools at Regal the same evening. Sean Baker’s The Florida Project also plays at about the same time as does Aki Kaurismaki’s The Other Side of Hope . Ditto for Andrey Zvyagintsev’s Loveless , Joachim Trier’s Thelma and Sergei Loznitsa’s A Gentle Creature . And we haven’t gone past the obvious, big ticket titles yet. Much then will depend on an individual’s skilled negotiation of the maze called schedule — how one missed show here can be made up for with another there.
There is a similar madness in the method (or method in madness) when it comes to organising the festival itself. Or so a quick telephone conversation with its creative director Smriti Kiran would have us assume. There is no sleep, it is never enough even if you work 24x7. It is backbreaking, not a place for those without passion or who would crack under pressure. A lackadaisical attitude doesn’t work. “It needs passion and professionalism, it is blood and sweat investment,” she tells us. No wonder this was the year that the team realised that the “baby” needed a full-time mother and Kiran stepped in to do some serious tending.
The needle was moved last year in terms of operations and logistics. “This year it has been about consolidating and going deeper, making each vertical better, looking at the finer points in detail and creating value,” she says. So year round programming was launched to build the audience by pelting it with content. It was also about forging alliances to source content.
To an outsider, working for a festival might seem like a great job — watching best of world cinema, partying with celebrities. But what does it actually take? “You have to be like Arjun. Shut out the surround sound, put your head down and work. It needs relentless focus,” she says. You have to get films out of the jaws of the studios, by building trust and conviction. It is not about instant returns. “It is about institution building, the gestation period could be beyond our lifetime,” Kiran explains.
At the end of the day for its patrons it is all about the films on view and there are many to dive into this year. Ajji , Zoo , Ralang Road , Village Rockstars come with their own much deserved buzz but look closer at the India Gold section itself and you will find a film festival-virgin like Turup where the auteur happens to be, not an individual but a collective called Ektara that worked closely with residents of the working class settlements in Bhopal to tell a story close to their reality.
Yes, festivals are all about getting awed by the works of the maestros. So you have Abbas Kiarostami’s 24 Frames , Roman Polanski’s Based On A True Story and Richard Linklater’s Last Flag Flying to dig into. There's the big winner at Cannes — Ruben Ostlund’s The Square . But it’s even more satisfying to hit upon new names. It’s a bounty that keeps giving, especially if those newbies gain in stature over the years. So the international competition claims to feature the best debut films from all over the world. Among others, there’s the Cannes discovery of 2017, Montparnesse Bienvenue ( JeuneFemme ) that won the best first film Camera d’Or for Leonor Serraille who wrote the screenplay as her graduation project.
Women filmmakers and films on gender issues are happily in abundance. Six out of 13 films in the international competition have been directed by women. The Oxfam award for the gender sensitive film continues from last year and the festival felicitates veteran actor Sharmila Tagore with the ‘Excellence in Cinema Award-India'.
Sexuality finds a broader, nuanced platform with one of the big catches this year — Luca Gudagnino’s Call Me By Your Name . Meanwhile, ‘After Dark’, the section for low-budget horror and action thrillers continues into its third year. Marathi Talkies enters its second year with six feature films, all debuts and New Media zooms in on footage films. In its third year the ‘Half Ticket’ programme — oriented towards children — features one other programme apart from the competition, a separate set of films on the theme of friendship.
Published - October 11, 2017 10:17 pm IST
