NYIFF

telegraphindia
Storytelling rules in New York

Swastika Mukherjee in Shaheb Bibi Golaam

- And the award goes to... good ol’ storytelling at the New York Indian Film Festival, writes Pratim D. Gupta

If we don’t tell our stories, who will?” Mira Nair’s signature line echoed through the second week of May in Manhattan as the New York Indian Film Festival celebrated the best of Indian cinema beyond Bollywood. Mira Nair was present, as was Salman Rushdie, at New York University’s Skirball Center for the Performing Arts for the opening ceremony of the 16th edition of the NYIFF.

What took me to the oldest South Asian film festival was my new film Shaheb Bibi Golaam. Starring Anjan Dutt, Swastika Mukherjee, Ritwick Chakraborty, Parno Mittra and Vikram Chatterjee, SBG, as I like to call it, is an original Bengali thriller set in Calcutta today. It was the world premiere of the movie and I had to be there for the first ever public screening. There were non-resident-Bengali, non-resident-non-Bengali and local American audiences and going by the applause and the hour-long Q&A that followed, I couldn’t have asked for a more fitting flag-off for the film.

The opening night movie was Bardroy Baretto’s Konkani film Nachom-ia Kumpasar (Let’s Dance to the Rhythm) which traces a forgotten Goan singer, brilliantly performed by newcomer Palomi Ghosh. A complete natural, Palomi has even sung a couple of songs in the musical. “It was the most natural thing to do and I knew if I could sing myself, I would become the character that much better,” she said. Palomi went on to enthral everyone with a live act at the roundtable gala dinner that followed the opening night screening.

Also having its world premiere at the NYIFF was Pawan Kumar’s much-awaited Kannada movie U-Turn. Pawan’s first film Lucia, largely crowd-funded, was a big success and it wasn’t surprising to see a packed audience checking out his new film at the Village East Cinemas theatre. Moody and mysterious, U-Turn gives a supernatural twist to a very real premise and boasts of terrific performances by newcomer Shraddha Srinath and Roger Narayan.

The other pick of the festival for me was Umesh Kulkarni’s Marathi film Highway. Umesh and his writer-actor-creative partner Girish Kulkarni have been behind some of the best regional films in the entire country with Vaalu, Vihir and Deool. And Highway showed just what they are doing right. Simple human emotions brilliantly brought out by a master ensemble cast including Renuka Shahane and Huma Qureshi, with an ending fittingly cathartic.

Also impressive was the Tamil thriller Kutrame Thandanai (Crime is Punishment) by M. Manikandan who had gifted us the astonishing Kaaka Muttai last year. Scored by the legend Illaiyaraja, the film delves into the desperate mind of an eyewitness who is suffering from tunnel vision.

(L-R) Madhur Jaffrey, Mira Nair, Palomi Ghosh and Salman Rushdie. Picture: Jay Mandal

Besides these fresh new features, NYIFF also had the movies already making the rounds of festivals in Leena Yadav’s Parched, Q’s B. Naman, Ruchika Oberoi’s Island City, Bhaskar Hazarika’s Kothanodi and the closing night film, Hansal Mehta’s Aligarh, attended by Manoj Bajpayee. In the Q&A that followed, when quizzed how he had accepted the role of a gay character when every known name in Mumbai refuses homosexual screen avatars, Bajpayee simply said: “I don’t care. I never have!”

One of the special sections at the festival this year was Three Generations of Filmmakers. To mark the 50th death anniversary of Bimal Roy, NYIFF showed a restored print of his Sujata along with Anubhav, directed by his son-in-law Basu Bhattacharya, and Raakh, directed by his grandson Aditya Bhattacharya. Aditya had flown down from Barcelona to talk about all three films.

The festival also had panel discussions punctuating the movie screenings. Besides a panel on LGBT films and a panel on animation movies, there was a regional cinema panel discussion where I sat with the likes of Umesh Kulkarni, Pawan Kumar and Dr Mohan Agashe chatting about the Bengali, Marathi and Kannada film industries. Both Pawan and Umesh agreed that they have not felt the need to seek Bollywood funding or audiences for the stories they want to tell.

It was indeed a refreshing week at the movies where Indian cinema was celebrated on an international platform without the Bollywood stamp of validation. No big stars, no major studios, no pulverising budgets... just good ol’ storytelling. If we don’t tell our stories, who will?

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