Complete programme Imagineindia Barcelona 2014
Carrer Girona, 175, 08025 Barcelona
Ph : 931 18 45 31
All the shows at 20.00h
25 October 2014
MEGHE DHAKA TARA (Ritwik Ghatak) India. 1960. 126 min.
One of the most celebrated film of the indian director Ritwik Ghatak.
“Meghe Dhaka Tara” tells the tragic story of the beautiful daughter of a middle-class refugee family from East Pakistan, living in the outskirts of Calcutta under modest circumstances. Neeta sacrifices everything for her family, including her personal happiness, her money, and her health, while her achievements are hardly ever recognized by the people around her.
DHOL GANWAR PASHU ARU NARI (Abhinav Gupta) (Films from Film and Television Institute of India, FTII) India. 2013. 20′
The film talks about the plight of women in the social structure. It is a fight they are constantly fighting against the odd – the male. It is not about the story of Tara and Phool, the characters in the film. They are mere representatives of ‘their’ people.
The film tries to deal with the intense emotional turmoil of a mother, who, having realised the odds, finds herself helpless, but still tries to fight It out leading to an unusual resolve.
1 November 2014
AJANTRIK (Ritwik Ghatak) India. 1958. 102 min.
“They call me a machine, they don’t understand that Jaggadal is also a human”. The complex interaction between nature, mankind and the machine in the backdrop of an harsh and rocky wasteland of Bihar comes the unique story of Jaggadal. Though the name is masculine but the car is definitely feminine as illuminated in the movie. This is the masterstroke of Ritwik and could well be his defining work. No other movie captured this relationship between a man and his machine as have been done here. All later movies based on such theme will be pale including the most recent AI. Only a vagabond and an insane be so ungrateful and unemotional to something which have been making a living for him for so many years. A point proved in Ajantrik.
WHERE RIVER MEETS THE SEA (Sumon Majumdar)(Films from Satyajit Ray Film and Television Institute, SRFTI) India. 2013. 26 min.
There was a father and his two daughters. After retirement and social responsibilities the father decides to leave home and goes to ‘vanprastha’. The daughters comes close to each other and starts searching the father. When they failed they collects the memories of him and creates a dreamland.
8 November 2014
GULABI GANG (Nishta Jain) India. 2012. 96 min.
The district is Banda, and the region, Bundelkhand, in UP. And an organization that has steadily been a media magnet for what it has managed to do: in the rural backwaters of North India, where years of heavy-handed, violent patriarchy has stunted the growth of women and killed the girl child, a woman has taken on all comers. ‘Gulabi Gang’, Nishtha Jain’s award-winning documentary gives us an up-close view of Sampat Pal and her gang, which dons pink ‘saris’, and hefts ‘lathis’, and fights against injustice where it is most needed.
MOKAMA FAST PASSENGER (Subhadro Choudhry) (Films from Satyajit Ray Film and Television Institute, SRFTI) India. 2013. 24 min.
Mohan is a labour contractor, who works for a construction company. He shares a relation with Sabita in the city. On the contrary, Rakhi and her father-in-law waits in the village for Mohan to return. Occasional money order comes but Mohan doesn’t return. Rakhi finds escapade from her daily mundane life, when she goes to feed Jogi, a truck driver. They share a silent relation. One day, Mohan plans to leave the city. He takes a train to his village.
15 November 2014
ANKHON DEKHI (Rajat Kapoor) India. 2014.
Bauji (Sanjay Mishra) lives with his younger brother (Rajat Kapoor) in one of those cramped first floor quarters, more hovel than ‘haveli’, in Old Delhi’s Fatehpuri area. It has a ‘chhatt’ with ‘janglas’, tiny rooms adjacent to each other, a makeshift kitchen, and a common toilet. The family is joint at the hip in more ways than one, which is evident right from the first scene when Bauji’s daughter Rita (Maya Sarao ) is found to be in a relationship with an allegedly disreputable boy (Namit Das), and all hell breaks loose.
22 November 2014
APUR PANCHALI (Kaushik Ganguly) India. 2013.
Subir Banerjee at a tender age went on to deliver an impressionable performance as Apu in Pather Panchali which is listed amongst the 100 greatest films of all time. The boy who grew up never to act again in films has striking similarities with the journey of the ‘reel’ Apu. Many of the incidents shown from Subir’s life reflect Apu’s loss and tragedy in the film. Ardhendu Banerjee plays Subir in his dotage. The actor’s performance is earthy and honest which is much necessary to show the character’s internal conflict.
Flashpoint (A. Lohrii Francis, Gurshimran Khamba, Mridula Chari, Shivani Gupta) (Films from Tata Institute for Social Science, TISS) India. 2013. 18 min.
Mohammed Ali Road and Mahim were among the more affected areas during the riots of 1992-1993. Twenty years later, this film takes the lens back to those areas to map the middle classes of those areas. Their lives, though not tangibly afflicted, were nonetheless transformed by that time enough to reflect in their attitudes towards communalism today. Prominent writer and journalist Dilip D’Souza, draws these narratives together as we try to make sense of stereotypes that persist even today.
Flashpoint is part of a series of films from the School of Media and Cultural Studies, Tata Institute of Social Sciences, which seek to revisit the city of Mumbai, twenty years after the communal violence of 1992-93. In a situation where justice has been elusive and the collective amnesia profound, the series attempts to remember and reflect on the events of that tragic period and its aftermath.
29 November 2014
SALMA (Kim Longinotto) Great Britain. 2013. 91 min.
When Salma, a young Muslim girl in a south Indian village, was 13 years old, her family locked her up for 25 years, forbidding her to study and forcing her into marriage. During that time, words were Salma’s salvation. She began covertly composing poems on scraps of paper and, through an intricate system, was able to sneak them out of the house, eventually getting them into the hands of a publisher. Against the odds, Salma became the most famous Tamil poet: the first step to discovering her own freedom and challenging the traditions and code of conduct in her village.
As with her other work (Pink Saris, Rough Aunties), master documentarian Kim Longinotto trains her camera on an iconoclastic woman. Salma’s extraordinary story is one of courage and resilience, and Longinotto follows her on an eye-opening trip back to her village. Salma has hopes for a different life for the next generation of girls, but as she witnesses, familial ties run deep, and change happens very slowly.
23 WINTERS (Rajesh S. Jala) India. 2013. 30 min.
A film set in reality, played by a real protagonist, Bota, who lives a surreal life. A forced refugee from Kashmir, Bota is schizophrenic. This film glimpses through his traumatic past which haunts his exiled present. Nonetheless, his hopes are unvanquished.
6 December 2014
CELLULOID (Kamal) India. 2013. 129 min.
J.C. Daniel, long been reduced to a mere footnote in movie history is finally given the treatment he truly deserves and full credit goes to Kamal for bringing this lesser known icon of Malayalam cinema to life to this generation of audience. It is a tragic tale of a man who dared to chase his dreams and as a result found his whole world falling apart, for the sole reason that he was a man way ahead of his time. We are taken through the journey of a young J.C. Daniel, known as the maker of the first Malayalam movie, “Vigathakumaran” (“The Lost Child”), cheerful and enthusiastic, with stars in his eyes, who was determined to bring the art of movie-making to the Malayali shores, but soon turns into a person disillusioned with the world and his passion, and gradually becomes a shadow of the man he once was.
MUKHABIR (Manoj Kumar) (Films from FTII) India. 2013. 11 min.
A night in the life of an informer who is double crossing the police and the ganglord for money and to get the woman he craves. He slides along various facets of his personality, exposing his cold and ruthless atributes along with his vulnerabilites while having an ongoing internal dialogue.
13 December 2014
PIED PIPER (Vivek Budakoti) India. 2013. 113 min.
Pied Piper is a satirical folklore of a simple laundryman, Chunnilal, who is rumored to have acquired his beloved donkey’s brain in a freak accident. Charming millions with his asinine traits, Chunnilal soon rises to become the most popular and most feared hero of his time. The film traces the dynamics of his unprecedented rise and his inevitable fall along the trajectory of politics, religion, power and ideologies.
FROM BEYOND (Rajbir Kaur) India. 2013. 10 min.
An Indian girl dreams of a voice. Whenever she is about to catch her sleep just disappears. The voice always asks about the meaning of life.
20 December 2014
KHARGOSH (Paresh Kamdar) India. 2009. 94 min.
Sparse in dialogue but rich in visuals, Khargosh centers around a small-town boy in a remote Indian village who accidentally enters into the adult adventure of love. Ten-year-old Bantu loves to be with his older friend Avneesh as they fly kites and explore the local bazaar. One day he sees Avneesh near a particular girl, his “Death” as Avneesh calls her. Young Bantu, thinking that’s really her name, becomes the go-between messenger for the budding relationship, delivering love letters and arranging rendezvous. Yet somehow he’s always missing something. Eventually he stumbles into situations he can’t even begin to understand. Director Paresh Kamdar combines both the real and imaginary world into the unforgettable images and sounds of the mysterious awakenings of love through the eyes of a child. It is a delicate portrait of what it means to grow up.
Bauji (Sanjay Mishra) lives with his younger brother (Rajat Kapoor) in one of those cramped first floor quarters, more hovel than ‘haveli’, in Old Delhi’s Fatehpuri area. It has a ‘chhatt’ with ‘janglas’, tiny rooms adjacent to each other, a makeshift kitchen, and a common toilet. The family is joint at the hip in more ways than one, which is evident right from the first scene when Bauji’s daughter Rita (Maya Sarao ) is found to be in a relationship with an allegedly disreputable boy (Namit Das), and all hell breaks loose.
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