Island City
Ruchika Oberoi
India. 2015. 108 min.
Cast : Tanishta Chatterjee, Ashwin Mushran, Vinay Pathak

Venue :  Filmoteca Española
Date : 20 may.  20.30h

Island City is a film in three parts. Suyash wins the office ‘Fun Committee Award’, entitling him to a whole day of fun at the mall. However, things go wrong and he ends up doing a horrendous, unthinkable thing. It does turn out to be a fun day for Suyash after all! Anil is on life support. His devastated family decides to bring home that object banned from the house – the TV. The family now, each night, plugs into the popular soap ‘Purshottam – The Ideal Man’, and gradually begins to replace the domineering Anil with this fictional paragon. Suddenly then, comes the news that Anil’s condition is improving and that he will be home soon!

SZERDAI GYEREK  (Lili Horváth)
A VIZSGA  (Péter Bergendy)
UTÓÉLET  (Virág Zomborácz)
LIZA A RÓKATÜNDÉR  (Károly Ujj Mészáros)
ISZKA UTAZÁSA  (Csaba Bollók)

FILMS  SELECTED :

GARMON (Accordion)
Russia. 1934. 66 min. Musical.
BOGDAN KHMELNITSKI
Russia.1941. 114 min. History.

These films will be shown at Russian cultural centre in Madrid

IGOR  SAVCHENKO  (1906 – 1950)

Igor Andreyevich Savchenko was a writer and director of films, often cited as one of the great early Soviet filmmakers, alongside Sergei Eisenstein , Vsevolod Pudovkin and Aleksandr Dovzhenko. He is also known for teaching the genius Sergei Parajanov at the famous Russian film school VGIK, also attended by Parajanov’s best friend Mikhail Vartanov.

He studied at the Leningrad Institute of Performing Arts. In 1932, he played on the stage and doing performances at the Moscow tram. Since 1931, he served as a film director. In 1934, he staged one of the first Soviet musical comedy “Accordion”, about the life of Komsomol village, where he played the role of a kulak son. The theme of the Civil War in the Ukraine, the heroic past of Ukrainian and Russian peoples formed the sones film “Ballad of Cossack Golota” and the film – the legend “Riders”. He created the monumental folk heroic drama “Bogdan Khmelnitsky” (1941). Struggle of the Ukrainian nation, its freedom-loving tradition of poetic, exciting, colorfully recreated in the film. In 1946 the director returned to his comedic theme, putting one of the first Soviet color feature films “Old vaudeville”. In the picture a special emphasis on the patriotism of the Russian people in the Patriotic War of 1812, and also paid tribute to a popular topic in the postwar year ridiculing the German nation.

Events of the Great Patriotic War devoted to films “Guerrillas in the steppes of Ukraine” (1942) and “Ivan Nikulin – Russian Sailor” (1944). The film “third strike” ( 1948) about the impact of the Third Red Army with battle scenes later criticized as yet another monument to Stalin era. Premature death interrupted the Wizard of historical film “Taras Shevchenko” (1951).  Savchenko – bright, kind of artist, master of monumental paintings – made a great contribution to the development of Soviet cinema. But since the 60s, his films rarely shown at all.

In 1946 the director headed the Institute of Cinematography . Among his students: A. Alov A., B. Naumov, G. S. Gabay, L. Faiziev, F. E. Mironer, Y. N. Ozerov, S. I. Parajanov, M. Khutsiev M., A. Korenev A., A. Zakrevskii, Lev Ivanov, LS Danilov.

Retrospective done with the collaboration of MARLEN KHUTSIYEV.

NABALOK  (The Innocent)

Director :  Bauddhayan Mukherji
India. 2014. 51 min.
Cast :  Ananya Sen , Barshan Seal, Suman Mukhopadhyay

Venues :

Spanish Film Institute
17 may Sunday. 20.00

ECAM
07 may Thursday. 16.00

Spread over 34 years of the Bengali life, Nabalok (The Innocent) the first piece of Teenkahon explores a transgressive facet of a relationship that exceeds the norms of social acceptability.

Continue reading BAUDDHAYAN MUKHERJI, a director of the Renaissance →

I AM STILL
Javier Corcuera
2013. Peru / Spain. 118 min.

Venue :  Centro Cultural Pilar Miró
26 may Tuesday.  19.30

A film about characters, characters who are part of a country. Although the film talks about music and musicians, it is not strictly a musical but rather a reflection on personal stories apparently very far apart, stories that look for one another in a country also immersed in the struggle to find it,s identity.

Ek Hazarachi Note
Shrihari Sathe
Cast:    Usha Naik, Sandeep Pathak, Shrikant Yadav, Ganesh Yadav, Pooja Nayak
India. 2014.90 min. Drama

Venue :  Spanish Film Institute
24 may Sunday.  19.50

During a political rally in a small village in Maharastra, India, Budhi a poor old woman recieves a largess of several 1000 rupees note from a politician. She goes shopping to the nearby market with her neighbor but fate has other plans for them.

 Shrihari Sathe

Shrihari Sathe is a New York and Mumbai based independent filmmaker and producer. Sathe produced Jaron Henrie-McCrea’s Pervertigo which world premiered at the 2012 Warsaw and Mumbai film festivals and was a part of the 2011 IFP Independent Filmmaker Labs. Sathe’s sophomore production It Felt Like Love world premiered at 2013 Sundance Film Festival and 2013 International Film Festival Rotterdam to great reviews. It is available in over 30 countries. Sathe is a 2013 Sundance Institute Creative Producing Fellow and has received fellowships from the HFPA, PGA, IFP, Film Independent, Sundance Institute to name a few.

Sathe attended the 2011 Film Independent Producer’s Lab with Ed Blythe’s Man With Van. He is a Trans Atlantic Partners fellow (2013) and Cannes Producer’s Network fellow (2015). He is a co-producer on Partho Sen-gupta’s Arunoday (Sunrise) which world premiered at the 2014 Busan International Film Festival and Afia Nathanie’s Dukhtar which world premiered at 2014 Toronto International Film Festival. Sathe’s feature directorial debut – Ek Hazarachi Note (1000 Rupee Note) won the Special Jury Award and Centenary Award for Best Film at the 2014 International Film Festival of India and has received several other nominations and awards.

Sathe received his BA in Film and Video Studies (High Honors) and Global Media & Culture from University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. He has a MFA-Film degree from Columbia University.

Lajwanti The honour keeper
Pushpendra Singh
Cast: Sanghmitra Hitaishi, Pushpendra Singh, Sugna Devi
India. 2014. 63 min. Love

Venue :  Intermediae el Matadero
22 may Friday.  17.00

A folk tale set in the Thar Desert explores the inner struggles of a married woman to honour a dream and in that search find the higher meaning of love and freedom.

Chatkorichya Athwani
Shweta Ghosh
India. 2014. 47 min

Venue :  Intermediae el Matadero
22 may Friday.  19.00

Bhalchandra (Appa Ajoba) and Kalindi Morje (Kaku Ajji), 90 and 83, are the oldest surviving members of the Morje family that settled in Vengurla in the 19th century. In an attempt to chronicle their lived histories in the Konkan coast, the filmmaker, also their grand niece, stumbles upon an ancestral history of her multicultural self.

Within blurry childhood memories of her maternal family and Vengurla, simmer questions of origin, belonging and home. As she begins to weave Appa’s handwritten account of his early life and times and Ajji’s recollections, she negotiates with her own experience of placelessness, only to find home in the sizzle of fried bangra (mackerel), warmth of triphala spices and luscious, golden Alphonsos.

Shweta Ghosh

Shweta Ghosh is a documentary filmmaker and researcher. A silver medalist from the School of Media and Cultural Studies, Tata Institute of Social Sciences (SMCS, TISS), Mumbai, she has explored her interest in disability, cuisine, travel and music through research and film projects.

Shweta’s debut documentary ‘Accsex’, a film exploring notions of beauty, body, sexuality and disability was awarded Special Mention at the 61st Indian National Film Awards and has won accolades across India and abroad. Shweta has recently premiered her new film ‘A Slice of Memory’ which explores history and culture in the coastal town of Vengurla, Maharashtra, through food memories. Her third feature documentary explores diversity in India through tea drinking cultures and is currently in post-production.

She has two peer-reviewed publications – a paper on food television, gender and cooking in urban, middle class India (Food Studies: An Interdisciplinary Journal) and a paper on the representation of cuisine and culture by food television channels in India (‘SubVersions’ Media and Cultural Studies journal).

APUR PANCHALI
Kaushik Ganguly
India. 2014. 97 min

Venue :  Centro Cultural Pilar Miró
19 may Tuesday.  19.30

This is a real life story inspired by Subir Banerjee,the little child actor who played the iconic role of Apu in Pather Panchali.

FILMS SELECTED :

SZEGÉNYLEGÉNYEK (The Round up)
CSILLAGOSOK, KATONÁK (The red and the white)
CSEND ÉS KIÁLTÁS (Silence and Cry)
FÉNYES SZELEK (The Confrontation)

One of the masters of widescreen composition and elaborately
choreographed long-take sequence shots, Miklos Jancso has been
described as the most important Hungarian director of all time (Mira and A. J. Liehm) and the key Hungarian filmmaker of the sound era (Jonathan Rosenbaum). His fervid, transfixing, highly stylized and intensely formalist films are noted for their balletic, brutal study of repression, rebellion and revolution.

Hungarian film-maker Miklos Jancso, who graduated in law and took courses in art history and ethnography, also served the Second World War and was for a brief period of time, a prisoner of war. After the war, Jancso enrolled in the Academy of Theatre and Film Arts in Budapest. He received his Diploma in Film Directing in 1950. Jancso’s debut feature, The Bells Have Gone to Rome was released after the 1956 anti-Soviet uprising which left hundreds of Hungarians dead or imprisoned and thousands of refugees.

Continue reading THOSE WHO LEFT US : Hungarian Director MIKLÓS JANCSÓ →