In a shot in the arm for three-year-old Auroville Film Institute (AVFI), 11 of its films have been selected for screening at the prestigious Mumbai International Film Festival (MIFF).
The films that will be presented on May 31 and June 1 at the 17th edition of the MIFF being held under the auspices of the Information and Broadcasting Ministry in Mumbai were shot by aspirants over three workshop series hosted by the Auroville institution.
“We are thrilled and proud of all our participant filmmakers... for the faith they had in their own stories and in Auroville Film Institute. Together, we were able to make films that matter to us”, said Richa Hushing, documentary filmmaker, and co-founder of AVFI.
“While this is no small feat for a relatively young film school such as ours, it is also an emphatic endorsement of the work we help create”, she said. “This reinforces our belief in the contemporaneity of AVFI’s curriculum design and overall approach to film-making”.
The entries were made over three workshop series, I See Ghosts (cinema and psyche), Lockdown-Unlock (chronicling pandemic times) and the Ladakh Documentary Filmmaking Workshop (deep ecology principles).
The films include Halaat (State of Being/Swanand Kottewar), Aalo (The Light/Soham Kundu), Daydreaming (Katha), Illusions of Nietzche (Neha Pande), Into the Water (Kymba Nijuck), Leftover (Annika Amber), If..If..If (Masudur Rahman), Midnight Mirage (Abhishek Stalinn and Vanshika Bhatnagar), Village of Warriors (Avinash Kumar), This Is My Home (Deepa Kiran), and attention attension (Azalia Muchransyah).
Incidentally, three of these films — Halaat, Daydreaming and Leftover — were among the four minimalist short films produced at AVFI by aspirant directors guided by the Auroville Film Institute that had made the cut at the CineMasala festival curated by the University of Lausanne, Switzerland, in 2020.
“One of the standout aspects of the AVFI curriculum is the integration of components into the teaching-training that encourage inner growth during engagement with the medium. The 3Ss at AFI represent the “self, surrounding and story”. While film-makers do tend to evolve over the processes of creation, we have incorporated experiential elements that guide aspirants along a journey of self-exploration,” said Ms. Hushing.
One of the fruitful collaborations was the workshop last year with the Himalayan Institute of Alternatives, Ladakh, where aspirant filmmakers learnt the ropes of film craft in the ruggedly charming region, its emerald lakes and moonscapes of the Lamayuru. “We believe that it is from a deep engagement between the self and the surrounding that arises the authentic story”, said Ms. Hushing.
