SATURDAY 19

 

FESTIVAL ? C.D. DESHMUKH AUDITORIUM FROM 11:00 ONWARDS

 

 

Alifa (Assam)

(109 min; 2016; dvd; English subtitles)

Director: Deep Choudhury

 

Recipient of the Golden Lotus Award for Best Debut Film of a Director, 64th National Film Awards 2017; and Best Film Award, Ottawa Indian Film Festival, Canada

 

Ali, a daily wage earner living in the vicinity of a sprawling city, has to cope with uncertainty, hardship and abuse. He is at the mercy of a forest guard from being evicted from his family’s new-found habitat in a green hilly area overlooking the city. He finds solace in his hardworking, young wife and their two children. Alifa is a saga of human-wildlife conflict competing with basic questions of love, hatred, dreams and desires as well as the frailties of human nature and wider social bonding

 

AT 14:00

The Pangti Story (Nagaland)

(26 min; 2016; dvd; English subtitles)

Director: Sesino Yhoshu

Produced by Public Service Broadcasting Trust

 

Recipient of the Golden Beaver Award for Best Film, National Science Film Festival, Kolkata 2017

 

The film explores the transition of an entire village from one that slaughtered hundreds and thousands of Amur Falcons, the longest travelling raptors in the world, who fly from Siberia every fall to roost in Pangti, a small village in Nagaland, to becoming their most fervent conservationists

 

AT 14:45

Beautiful Lives (Assam)

(123 min; 2017; dvd; English subtitles)

Director: Kangkan Deka

 

Screened at Kolkata International Film Festival

 

Based on the 2008 bombings in Guwahati, the film portrays the undying spirit of one of the victims and his day-to-day struggle to survive

 

AT 17:00

Sabin Alun (The Broken Song; Assam)

(52 min; 2016; dvd; English subtitles)

Script & Direction: Altaf Mazid

Produced by Public Service Broadcasting Trust

 

Recipient of the Cinema Experimenta Award, John Abraham National Film Awards, Signs, Kerala 2016; Indian Panorama 2016

 

Sabin Alun examines the oral singing traditions of the Karbi tribe from Assam. One of the stories that has passed down the generations is a local version of the Ramayana epic, in which Sita is Sinta, the brothers are named Ram and Lokon, and the villain is Ravon. Sabin is the other name for Shurpanakha, whose nose is cut off by Laxman, forcing Ravana into taking revenge for her humiliation by abducting Sita. Rather than a straightforward information-led documentary that introduces us to the Karbi tradition and includes interviews with the community members, Mazid gets performers to sing and enact episodes from the epic. The documentary brilliantly captures with minimal resources the manner in which the Karbis have merged the themes of the Ramayana with their animistic tenets and agricultural lifestyle

 

AT 18:00

Antardrishti (Man with the Binoculars; Assam)

(100 min; 2016; HD; English subtitles)

Director: Rima Das

 

MAMI Mumbai Film Festival; and Black Nights Talinn Film Festival

 

Chaudhury, a geography teacher, living a quiet, retired life of patriarch watches over his family in rural Assam, India. His life starts turning upside down when his musician son, who has come for a visit gifts him a pair of Binoculars!