The Hindu Business Line : Cinefan with Dhrupad overtones

An afternoon at Osian’s Cinefan, with people making a beeline for the main auditorium would have meant, any other year, a big-ticket film. But the eleventh edition of the festival, which closed last week, has been a radical departure from the past. The main attraction, at Siri Fort One, is a discussion.

Gulzar, in his trademark white kurta-pyjamas, holds forth. He has been talking all day, but his energy is unflagging, and his conversation is much like the man — expansive, generous, according praise where it is due, acknowledging it graciously when it is his turn. Vishal Bharadwaj’s deference to his mentor is just so, but he is as much a star. There are three other people representing Kaminey, one of the five ‘Newstream’ films showcased at the 11th Osians — Samir Chanda, production designer; Amol Gupte, who may have discovered a whole new career as an actor; and Chandan Roy Sanyal whose terrific turn as a Bengali cokehead gave a whole new dimension to the Bollywood hoodlum.

Gulzar and Bharadwaj are frequently seen figures in print and TV. The newness came from the insights shared by the person who designed the look of Kaminey — Bombay Brooding rather than Mumbai Shining — and Gupte and Sanyal. The creative process that goes into making a film was being discussed on stage and a surprisingly full auditorium was listening intently.

Gupte talked of how Bhope Bhau, his Marathi chauvinist ‘bhai’, was executed. Sanyal recounting his Kaminey experience — his blooding in Bollywood — was the most refreshing.

After his first take, he told the audience, his director told him to junk all that ‘acting’. “Tu bas udd,” Bharadwaj told Sanyal, “tu udd”. Just fly. Just that single phrase unlocked the character for a newbie actor, and the result is evident on screen — Mikkel, part-time bad boy, full time junkie.

For a festival audience, obsessing over the next new cinematic discovery, frantically rushing from one theatre to another, it was an oasis which invited ambivalence: all this yak yak, when it should be constant blink blink, or rather unblinking viewing? The fest this year is very thanda, nothing’s happening, was a refrain this writer heard, both from festival junkies as well as those who show up because it’s the place to be seen at.

Sure, there weren’t the crowds that usually throng the venue — there were no lines which extended outside the gates, waiting to get in, no traffic snarls on the road outside. It was, this year, a quieter, more contemplative event, but this is what the festival organisers intended, not something that happened inadvertently.

A chat with Festival director Mani Kaul a day before the closing is revelatory. He was brought on board by Osian’s chairman Neville Tuli for precisely this purpose: to make the festival a confluence of the arts, a learning experience. The OLE series, Osian’s Learning Experience, was an attempt to do exactly that (apart from Gulzar, Bharadwaj and company, there was Anurag Kashyap and Abhay Deol with Dev D, Imtiaz Ali and Rishi Kapoor with Love Aaj Kal, Dibakar Banerjee and Manu Rishi with Oye Lucky, Farhan and Zoya Akhtar with Luck By Chance, and Rajkumar Gupta and Rajeev Khandelwal with Aamir).

The idea, says Kaul, was to get the young Indian filmmakers who were bringing a new sensibility into the mainstream cinema in contact with the audience. “I find the separation between theory and practice very painful. Here we were getting everyone — critics, writers, filmmakers, viewers — together. It’s a pity people are saying there was too much Bollywood, because we achieved such depth in those interactions, which I think of as a grand success for the festival.”

There were a couple of other differences between the earlier Osian’s Cinefans and this one: it went from muggy summer to early incipient winter, seven days instead of the usual eleven, and the focus was not so firmly on Asia and Arab cinema — it included films from all around the world. It was also heavily India/ Mumbai centric, with the OLE sessions programmed into the middle of the day .

Kaul, part of the Indian New Wave in the 1970s, has been out of the country for the past several years, on cinema faculties in the US and Europe. “The idea of teaching has always grabbed me, and I have been doing what I enjoy the most. Being here at Osian’s is an extension of that passion.” Having been both a student and teacher of Indian classical music has seen him evolve both as a recipient and an active participant: an early morning concert at the festival, for which about 40 people turned up, has been a particular joy.

Warming to his theme of building in difference, Kaul says that the idea of film festivals as they used to be, where you took in one film after another after another without pausing for breath, is now dated. In these days, when everything can be downloaded, everyone has already seen the films that won laurels at Berlin and Cannes and Venice. Which is why this Osian’s will be a blueprint for the future, where it will be about giving more, of everything, to a viewer, or a delegate. Take a look at the posters, listen in on artists talking about how they create cinema magic, participate in q and a sessions. And, of course, watch films.

Next year, says Kaul, Osian’s will be a full-fledged 15 days, and many more films. But the focus will be firmly the same — eclectic, broad-based, as well as cinematic, a confluence of all the rasas. Like his beloved Dhrupad.

shubhra.gupta@gmail.com