F for Fake (USA)
(90 min; 1977; English)
Director: Orson Welles
Written by Orson Welles, Oja Kodar

Orson Welles’s final completed film is a ground breaking blend of fact and fiction that dazzles audiences to this day. He began with footage shot by François Reichenbach for a documentary on professional art forger Elmyr de Hory, a Hungarian-born, Ibiza-based master of Picasso, Modigliani and Matisse replicas.

Welles soon discovered, however, that Hory’s would-be biographer, American ex-patriot Clifford Irving, was himself the forger responsible for the notorious fake Howard Hughes diaries. Welles incorporated new footage, with major contributions from his then-companion, Oja Kodar, into a dizzying, delightful “film essay.”

SUMMER SONATA: A FESTIVAL OF OPERA, BALLET AND CONCERT FILMS
Dedicated to the Memory of Dr. R.P. Jain

Curated by Sunit Tandon and Samaresh Chatterji

Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky: The Nutcracker
(104 min; 1994; dvd)

Kirov Ballet at the Mariinsky Theatre, St. Petersburg
Choreography: Marius Petipa
Kirov Orchestra
Conductor: Victor Fedotov

With Larissa Lezhnina (Masha/The Princess), Victor Baranov (Nutcracker/The Prince); Piotr Russanov (Drosselmeyer) 

One of the most loved ballets of all time, with a ravishing score, performed by the company for which it was written. This version uses the adaptation of the Petipa choreography and libretto devised by Vasily I. Vainonen.

Introduced by Sunit Tandon

PHYSICAL PROGRAMME

Launch of Maharaja Krishna Rasgotra’s new collection of poems, followed by a discussion

Discussants: Amb. M.K. Rasgotra, former Foreign Secretary of India and author of the book; Prof. J.S. Rajput, former Director, NCERT and writer; Shri Hemendra Mishra, Chief Content Creator, Hindustan; and Shri Mahesh C. Sharma, former Librarian, MEA and Librarian, Indian Council of World Affairs

Chair: Amb. Shyam Saran, Life Trustee IIC and former Foreign Secretary of India

10 Years of SRI: A decade-long journey of creating digital tools for Sanskrit

Speaker: Martin Gluckman, founder Sanskrit Research Institute (SRI), Auroville. For the past decade, SRI has been creating digital tools and educational resources for the Sanskrit language that are used around the world for furthering Sanskrit studies and research

Chair: Dr. Sudha Gopalakrishnan, Executive Director, IIC-International Research Division

For the past decade SRI has been producing digital tools for the Sanskrit language and more recently the Khoe-Sān languages of Southern Africa. Martin Gluckman will present some of the works of the past decade and what is currently being worked on at SRI.

SRI is a volunteer-powered institute based in Auroville in India, dedicated to developing tools for the Sanskrit language

A new series of lectures organised by IIC-International Research Division with the support of Ministry of External Affairs

Registration link

The Harambee Factor: India-Africa Economic and Development Partnership

By Gurjit Singh (Macmillan Publishers India Private Limited: 2022)

Discussants: Shri Dammu Ravi, Secretary (Economic Relations), Ministry of External Affairs; Amb. Gennet Zewide, former Ethiopian Ambassador to India and former Education Minister of Ethiopia; Shri Vir Sanghvi, journalist and commentator; Shri Suhas Borker, Editor, Citizens First TV (CFTV); and Amb. Gurjit Singh, former Indian Ambassador to Germany, Indonesia, Ethiopia, ASEAN and the African Union; Chair, CII Task Force (Trilateral Cooperation in Africa); and author of the book

Moderator: Amb. K.P. Fabian, Distinguished Fellow, Symbiosis University

Registration link

A three-part documentary series presented by Alastair Sooke, taking an in-depth look at the art of the Roman Empire. In the documentary Sooke sets out to "debunk the myth that Romans didn't do art and were unoriginal". This is based on the view that Romans heavily incorporated Greek style in their art, and hence produced nothing new or original. 

Episode 3: The Empire Strikes Back (59 min) | Click here to watch
Director: Tim Dunn

In the third and final part of the series, Alastair Sooke charts the decline and fall of the Roman Empire through some of its hidden and most magical artistic treasures. He travels to Leptis Magna in Libya shortly after the overthrow of Gaddafi and finds one of the best preserved Roman cities in the world and the cradle of later Roman art. Sooke discovers glorious mosaics which have never been filmed before, but also finds evidence of shocking neglect of Libya's Roman heritage by the Gaddafi regime.

His artistic tour takes him to Egypt and the northern frontiers of the empire where he encounters stunning mummy paintings and exquisite silver and glassware. As Rome careered from one crisis to another, official art became more hard boiled and militaristic and an obscure cult called Christianity rose up to seize the mantle of Western art for centuries to come.

https://www.dailymotion.com/video/x30xwqf

Dancer (UK) | Click here to watch
(85 min; 2016; English/Russian/Ukrainian
Director: Steven Cantor

Recipient of the Critics Award, Barcelona-Sant Jordi International Film Festival 2017

Ukrainian-born "bad boy of ballet" Sergei Polunin became the Royal Ballet's youngest ever principal dancer at the age 19. But two years later - at the height of his success - he walked away from it all, resolving to give up dance entirely. Steven Cantor's Dancer tracks the life of the iconoclastic virtuoso, from his prodigal beginnings in the Ukraine to this awe-inspiring performances in the U.K., Russian, and eventually the U.S., where he went viral after David LaChapelle filmed him dancing to Hozier's "Take Me to Church." Yet beyond celebrating the raw talent and wild ambition of Polunin, Dancer considers how wealth and success may not be enough when it comes to finding personal and professional identity.

https://vimeo.com/496354413

Waban-Aki: People from Where the Sun Rises (Canada) | Click here to watch
(104 min; 2006; French/English with subtitles)
Director: Alanis Obomsawin 
Producer: National Film Board of Canada

Alanis Obomsawin takes us home to her Abenaki community of Odanak, Quebec. She skillfully weaves the richly-textured history of her formerly prosperous basket and canoe-making community with an exploration of contemporary Aboriginal identity and official 'status'. The Abenaki once numbered over 50,000 with a territory that stretched across New England, the Maritimes, and southern Quebec. Both their territory and numbers have been drastically reduced through wars and diseases, but their biggest threat today falls between love and legislation. Through the colonial mandate of the Indian Act, First Nations children continue to lose their Aboriginal status when their parents marry outside of their community, threatening their links to their culture, and even their rights to live in their family homes. Through a series of intimate interviews, elders and young people candidly share their stories, grounding us in the realities of their lives and the complex future of all Aboriginal people.

https://www.nfb.ca/film/waban-aki_en/
 

An eight-part BBC series in which British art historian Dr Gus Casely-Hayford explores the pre-colonial history of some of Africa's most important kingdoms.

Episode 1: Nubia (59 min) | Click here to watch
Director: David Wilson

The first episode looks at Nubia, in what is now northern Sudan, a kingdom that dominated a vast area of the eastern Sahara for thousands of years. Its people were described as barbarians and mercenaries, and yet Nubia has left us with some of the most spectacular monuments in the world.
Casely-Hayford traces the origins of this fascinating kingdom back to 10,000 BC. He explores how it developed and what happened to it and its people, discovering that its kings once ruled Ancient Egypt and that it was defeated not by its rivals but by its environment.

https://www.dailymotion.com/video/x3ki5xo

Stravinsky (Canada) | Click here to watch
(49 min; 1966; b/w; English)
Directors: Roman Kroitor & Wolf Koenig

This documentary is an informal portrait of the great modern composer Igor Stravinsky. Proudly American, though still very much an Old World figure with a long and alert memory for people and events in music, literature and art, Stravinsky is depicted here conducting the CBC Symphony Orchestra in a recording of his Symphony of Psalms.

https://www.nfb.ca/film/stravinsky/