The Hindu Business Line : Power to pan-Asia

Cinema is crossing borders like no other art form and becoming increasingly `pan-Asian' with partnership between countries. The sixth Osian's Cinefan festival affirmed as much.

As the sixth Osian's Cinefan festival wrapped up a couple of nagging questions, which had been surfacing through the festivities, became even more pressing. Is this festival of Asian films truly representative of the best and the latest in the continent, with its determined omission of contemporary popular Bollywood films? Also, with the International Film Festival determined to desert Delhi for Goa, will this be the only event that cinemagoers in the Capital can look forward to?

Asian cinema has steadily been gaining prominence and prestige in the last decade from a clutch of film festivals that have left an avid festival hopper spoilt for choice. The growth of Cinefan is a case in point. From a small beginning, the festival this year was a full-fledged 10-day affair, with over 90 films from 30 countries. There was also a flood of international visitors like never before, including actors and directors, and festival heads from such countries as Cairo, Cannes, Estonia, Hong Kong, Singapore, Bangkok and Munich among others. The main venue at the India Habitat Centre wore a busy look throughout, with audiences queuing up for hours outside the main auditorium, and people networking or catching up with each other in between screenings.

The enlarged scope of the festival can be attributed to its acquisition (as well as the magazine Cinemaya) by Osian's, India's first auction house for the arts.

Neville Tuli, the man behind Osian's, talks about the move as a `natural progression' to collect under one roof `all art associated with cinema'. Tuli, indefatigably pitched in with welcome addresses and crowd control, and wants to put on the same platform such activities as building institutions and intellectual capacities, and nurturing good cinema. One of the first things he did was to tell the organisers that they could dispense with the mandatory begging bowl, because most corporate houses tend to give money with strings attached, even if it is sharing poster space.

Funds to the tune of Rs 80 lakh were raised to bring in some of the festival's hottest movies and host several film personalities. The idea is to be able to do things on your own terms, without asking for any kind of patronage or charity. "You will see," he says, "Osian's Cinefan is going to count among the five biggest festivals in the world very soon." He also promises that the range of movies will become more broadbased and eclectic, and will include the best of Bollywood, as well.

That would be some time in the future. But there is no doubt that Delhi, often reviled as a city of philistines, has blossomed into a place where people will travel distances to catch a good film. Last year, queues extended outside Siri Fort, one of the venues, for the screenings of some of the Indian entries, which were supposed to have `hot' content. This year, the maximum crowd was for the retrospective of acclaimed Hong Kong director Wong Kar Wai.

Addressing a jubilant crowd, which had managed to find seats at the screening of one of his most eagerly awaited films, In The Mood For Love, festival director Aruna Vasudev marked the resurgence of interest in world cinema, saying, "Even a few years ago, there would have been about 50 people for a Wong Kar Wai film." But this year, they had to turn away disappointed hordes.

Apart from the Wong Kar Wai films, and a few movies in the competition section (patchy quality makes it the weakest section of the festival), other highlights included tributes to Guru Dutt, Iran's Mohsen Makhmalbaf, and the special screenings of political documentaries.

A still from the film Final Solution.

Rakesh Sharma's Final Solution, which has been facing a barrage of opposition from the Censor Board, found a berth at the festival, not at any of the main venues, but at the French Cultural Centre (documentaries and features which haven't been `approved' by the censors can be safely shown on foreign soil, so the filmmakers and festival organisers often find refuge in embassy screenings).

The film is a searing two-and-a-half hour documentary, pruned from an original four-hour plus length, on the genocide in post-Godhara Gujarat (it can be called `the aftermath of violence', but there is no doubt in the filmmaker's view, and ours when we finish with it, that it was genocide).

For the first time, people from opposing sides of the divide are brought face to face, and asked to comment on the goings-on. What emerges is a frightening picture of a fragmented State, and a polity that encourages hate and division amongst people who have lived in relative amity for decades, facing the frequent communal flare-ups with equanimity.

Another film that was on everyone's must-see list was Sabiha Sumar's Khamosh Pani. Shot extensively in Pakistan, with Indian actress Kirron Kher in the lead, the film wonderfully brings alive the pain of partition, and the people it left behind, forever captives of the borders.

Sumar deals with a serious subject without making it heavy, and Kirron's performance as a Sikh woman, stranded in a Pakistani village, being asked to prove her loyalty to her country and religion (she converts to Islam, and marries one of her captors), is superb.

As this collaboration of the talent in the two countries shows, cinema is crossing borders like no other art form.

Christopher Doyle, the man who has shot most of Wong Kar Wai's visually stunning films, affirmed as much when he came on stage to a warm welcome. Pithily describing himself "Australian by birth and Asian by adoption", Doyle said that this was a very exciting phase, as cinema was becoming increasingly `pan-Asian', with partnerships between countries, the way it happened in the West ten years ago.

From the sheer brilliance of some of these joint ventures on display at the Cinefan, all we can say is, more power to creative collaboration in Asian cinema.

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