The 13th edition of ViBGYOR International documentary and short film festival will begin on Thursday with the theme ‘Rebooting New India’.
Agriculture Minister V.S. Sunil Kumar will inaugurate the four-day festival at the Kerala Sahitya Akademi hall.
Anuradha Bhasin, executive editor of Kashmir Times , will deliver the C. Saratchandran Memorial Lecture. A campaign on ‘Forest Rights Act’ promoted by ViBGYOR will be inaugurated by eminent environmental activists Amitabh Bachchan of the Hornbill Foundation, and Sobha Madhan of the Nilgiri Particularly Vulnerable Tribal Group Foundation.
Young director Leela Santhosh will be felicitated at the function. Mayor Ajitha Vijayan will preside.
Filmmaker and founding member of Women in Cinema Collective Asha Aachi Joseph is the festival director. R.P. Amudhan and P. Baburaj are curators.
Focus areas
The so called ‘recent past’, in many ways, ignores and intends to do away with the pluralistic traditions and experiences of an ‘old India’. Who will possibly be included and excluded in the ‘brand new’ corporate India? What relevance the age-old history of an enormously heterogeneous nation like India may have for people born in the post-globalisation and liberalisation period? When a democratically elected government amends the nation’s Constitution at its whims and fancy, unilaterally removing the autonomy of a State, and throwing a dragnet in another State to find out who is the ‘real Indian’ and who is not, are we not witnessing the slow death of democracy itself? These are certain questions that the 13th edition of the ViBGYOR International Film Festival wishes to address from a broader perspective, according to the organisers.
From 2006
The ViBGYOR International Film Festival, launched in 2006 in Thrissur, has evolved into a significant alternative space for issue based non-feature films and a meeting place for filmmakers, social movements, activists and the student community.
