3 Years 3 Months Retreat
Dechen Zangmo
Bhutan. 20 min. 2016
How long does it take to make your journey bright and pure? A ritual of more than three-year-long isolation “Lo-sum-Choe-sum” is a practice of Buddhist monks, nuns and devoted followers. It is a journey of transformation, where one reaches the state of higher mind and clairvoyance over the course of three years, three months and three days.
DECHEN ZANGMO
The Third Wife
Ash Mayfair
Vietnam. 96 min. 2018
In 19th century rural Vietnam, 14-year-old May becomes the third wife of wealthy landowner Hung. Soon she learns that she can only gain status by asserting herself as a woman who can give birth to a male child. May’s hope to change her status turns into a real and tantalizing possibility when she gets pregnant. Faced with forbidden love and its devastating consequences, May finally comes to an understanding of the brutal truth: the options available to her are few and far between.
In her statement about her debut feature “The Third Wife”, director Ash Mayfair states two main reasons why she made the film and which topics it deals with. On the one hand, she names her upbringing in Vietnam, most importantly the women in her life who have supported her through the years. Given her career, which has led her to a degree in English Literature and one in Theater Directing from the prestigious Royal Academy of Dramatic Arts in London, large parts of her biography have taken place outside her home country. Yet, as her statement and the nature of “The Third Wife” prove, she has returned there for her directorial debut paying homage to the women who have been most important in her life.
ASH MAYFAIR
Ash Mayfair was born and raised in Vietnam, and received her MFA in filmmaking from NYU. Her short films — including “The Silver Man” and “No Exit” — have been screened at numerous international film festivals. “The Third Wife” is Mayfair’s first feature film, and the screenplay won the Spike Lee Production Fund in 2014.
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Distributor : bartonfilms@bartonfilms.com
Daha
Onur Saylak
Turkey. 115 min. 2017
A film about a 14-year-old boy helping out his father at work in a rural outpost on the sea would probably feature gorgeous landscapes but wouldn’t necessarily make for an interesting story. But Gaza, the protagonist of the hard-hitting Turkish drama More (Daha), isn’t just any teen, and his father, involved in smuggling people from the war-torn Middle East into nearby Greece, doesn’t just have any old job. Turkish actor Onur Saylak makes an auspicious debut as a director here, turning Hakan Gunday’s ink-black novel of despair into a film that’s a hard sit but that suggests an awful lot — awful being the operative word — about the world we live in today.
Ahad is a heavy-set man with an equally heavy brow who exploits opportunities wherever he sees them and who expects unquestioned loyalty from the handful of people he works with, including his most loyal aid, Gaza, his teenage boy. The adolescent, with vivid and alert eyes and a can-do attitude that is probably more rooted in his relative innocence than in his character, is curious about the world and a good student. He’s been secretly testing for a good school in faraway Istanbul, though Dad isn’t very interested in his academic results.
ONUR SAYLAK
Arif Onur Saylak was born in Ankara but raised in Kusadasi (Aydin), Turkey. One day, he saw the poster of the university theatre club and stepped into amatuer acting life.
His desire for acting led him quit the university and win the entry exams of the theatre department of Bilkent University. During his study, he took part in several theatre plays, i.e. Nazim Hikmet’s “Her Seye Ragmen”, and graduated from the university in 2006.
Daha is his first feature film.
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Heretic Outreach : christina@heretic.gr
Orange Days
Arash Lahooti
Iran. 102 min. 2018
Swiftly, Alban is walking through a lush green plantation, inspecting her workers as they bring in the harvest. The assertive forty-something woman has been involved in the male-dominated orange business for years. She employs a group of seasonal female workers to harvest orange trees in northern Iran. This year she has received the largest order in the region – a fact that is not readily accepted by her male competitors. As soon as the harvesting begins, so does the sabotage on Alban’s work and she is forced to deal with the numerous consequences: harvesting is running slow, money is running out and her worker’s motivation is dwindling. To top it all off, her husband Majid packs his bags and leaves her. Director Arash Lahooti stages the battle of a courageous woman in beautiful, richly coloured images and shows a side of Iran that is rarely portrayed in western media.
ARASH LAHOOTI
Born in Tehran in 1982, Arash Lahooti is a filmmaking and editing graduate. He is a director, producer, and editor of documentary films and a member of the Iranian Union of the Documentary Filmmakers. His first feature documentary is Trucker and the Fox which has been screened in over 45 festivals and received 9 awards.
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Distributor : info@iranianindependents.com
Appendix
Hosein Namazi
Iran. 84 min. 2017
Due to severe abdominal pain, Zari and her husband, Reza, go to the hospital. However, Zaris insurance ID has expired and they are forced to borrow her friend Leila Attarod’s ID. Eventually, she undergoes appendectomy using Leila’s ID and the staff at the hospital suspect about this matter. Due to this, they are forced to switch roles to convenience hospital staff that the ID belongs to Zari. However, many unfortunate events take place in the process…
HOSEIN NAMAZI
Born in 1981, Hossein Namazi is a scriptwriter and director. He has studied Cinema and has written and directed a number of short films. APPENDIX is his debut feature film.
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FCF : fcf1@dpi.net.ir
Kedara (Armchair)
Indraadip Dasgupta
India. 110 min. 2018
Kedara tells the story of a middle-aged man with the innocence of a child for whom life is about mischief, building a world of fantasies, and finding joy in certain discoveries about one’s own.
Dasgupta has chosen an exceptional subject and tells his story with surreal execution. Ventriloquist Narasingha (Kaushik Ganguly) lives alone in a weary house full of old mementoes, masks and antiques. That he is a ventriloquist is revealed in most unexpected fashion. Narasingha does not only mimic sounds or voices; voices have their own entities for him and they live with him — they are his family.
The loafers of the locality make fun of Narasingha’s profession and his apparently abnormal nature. His maid doesn’t lose an opportunity to taunt him. One of his neighbours pays him visits only to remind him that he is a failure.
Narasingha bears everything in silence. He sometimes blames his joblessness. There is a locked room in his house that no one else is allowed to open. The locked room almost proves to be the protector of his lifeline — the core of all his fantasies.
INDRAADIP DASGUPTA
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Producer : indraadipdasguptaproductions@gmail.com
Kaamyaab
Hardik Mehta
India. 105 min. 2018
The drama is based on a seasoned character actor who decides to come out of retirement and begins a quest for a record of some sorts, that elusive 500th role, the one for which he shall be remembered forever.
HARDIK MEHTA
Hardik Mehta is an Indian screenwriter and director, who has worked on Hindi feature films like Queen (2014) and Lootera (2013). His Gujarati-language documentary, Amdavad Ma Famous (2015), won the Swarna Kamal (Golden Lotus) at the 63rd National Film Awards for Best Non-Feature Film.
He has also co-written the screenplay for Vikramaditya Motwane’s most recent survival-thriller, Trapped (2017), alongside Amit Joshi.
He has written and directed his debut feature film Kaamyaab (2018) which premiered at the Busan Film Festival.
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CONTACT
Ritika Bhatia : ritika@drishyamfilms.com
Kia and Cosmos
Sudipto Roy
India. 123 min. 2018
Kia is a 15-years old girl diagnosed with autism and who lives with her mother Diya, in South Kolkata, since her father passed away a couple of years back succumbing to a massive heart attack. One day, Cosmos, a neighbourhood cat, suddenly dies awakening Kia’s curiosity of investigating the cause. Diya coaxes unsuccessfully her daughter to forget the death of Cosmos. In one of the investigative ventures in her own house, she chances upon a few letters with her name written on them. They were from her father and Diya had concealed the truth from her daughter for all these years. Her father was alive and Kia was decided to look for him. Kia tackles every hurdle to find her way to her father. A postal address was all that she had. Why did her father leave them? Will she reach her father?
SUDIPTO ROY
Sudipto Roy is an Indian writer and director. Having worked as an International Travel Journalist, with a career that spans across a decade and the world’s most celebrated and quaint cities turning muse his heart lies in story-telling and films. With the keen ear of a guitarist, two very well received short films under his belt and an enviable experience in working with veterans of Indian Cinema, “Kia & Cosmos” is his first feature film.
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Sudipto Roy : sudiptoroy.dgp@gmail.com
3 Storeys
Arjun Mukherjee
India. 100 min. 2018
In Arjun Mukherjee’s “3 Storeys”, a portmanteau film set in a Mumbai chawl, the lives of residents intersect and clash in several unexpected ways.
Mayanagar is three Storey Chawl in Mumbai. Flory Mendonca, a Catholic widow, wants to give away a part of her house but doesn’t have buyers due to its high price. Finally Vilas, who is eager to take a house near station, buys it. Whereas in the same building, Varsha is facing daily abuse from her unemployed and alcoholic husband. On the other hand she still has feelings for her past lover, Shankar, and bonds well with her neighbor and tends her little son. Suahil and Malini falls in love being from different faiths much chagrin to their parents.On the ground floor lives glamours Leela, who sends seductive vibes towards man around.The lives of people living in Mayanagar don’t seem to be what it is as there are hidden secrets.
In all three stories, director Mukherjee makes sure there is some twist at the end, some curveball that he throws at the audience that, more often than not, fails to stick. The acting is uneven, which is perhaps to be expected in a film with an ensemble cast. Most of the actors, including Makhija and newcomers Ankit Rathi and Aisha Ahmed, look like they’ve walked in from the posh bylanes of Bandra into the chawl and its squalid surroundings.
ARJUN MUKHERJEE
While pursuing a degree in Philosophy and Economics, Arjun Mukerjee was inspired by a few films he chanced upon, and decided to dive off the deep-end to become a film-maker. His film school was an advertising film production house in Bombay which he joined in 1994.
He started directing commercials in 1999, and has since directed almost a hundred commercials for brands like Pepsico, ING, Suzuki, Reliance telecom, Colgate Palmolive and Procter and Gamble. One of his films, a CSR for water conservation, won a World Silver Medal at the New York A.M.E film festival.
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Priya : priya@openairfilms.com
In The Shadows
Dipesh Jain
India. 117 min. 2017
A reclusive shopkeeper spends his life isolated from the outside world, interacting with his home of Old Delhi solely through hidden closed-circuit cameras. Meanwhile, a boy struggles to protect his mother and younger brother from the harsh sting of his father’s hands. When the shopkeeper overhears this abuse he must break free from his self-imposed prison in order to help the boy, discovering a shocking truth along the way.
DIPESH JAIN
Dipesh Jain – Director, Screenwriter, Producer Director’s Guild Of America (DGA) Student Award recipient, Dipesh Jain is a graduate of University of Southern California Film School. He has written, directed and produced award-winning films, documentaries and stage plays in India, Prague and US. Before USC he studied at Prague Film School and also has Chartered Accountancy and CPA. 11 WEEKS, his thesis film at USC, was shot in terrorist areas of Kashmir with local people and real army. The film has screened at numerous film festivals such as Chicago, Mexico, Melbourne, Heartland and USA FF and won awards including Alfred P. Sloan, Carole Fielding, Best Short at 35th Cleveland Intl FF, Finalist at USA FF. His other films, including 5 QUESTIONS 5 CHANCES, have played festivals in Asia and Europe. A recipient of Panavision Young Filmmaker Award, Dipesh has been selected for the Talents Lab at the 64th Berlin International Film Festival and the Producer’s Lab at the International Film Festival of India (IFFI). Dipesh wants to make strong character driven films for the international audience and has several feature screenplays set in US, UK and India at various stages of development. His screenplay A STONE’S THROW AWAY, a political drama set in Kashmir, was placed semi-finalist in the Sundance Screenwriting Lab, and quarter- finalist in the American Zoetrope Screenplay Competition.
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MPM Films : festival@mpmfilm.com
imagineindiafestival.com 