NEW DELHI: Persistence Resistance, the annual festival of shorts and documentaries, has commenced with a seminar on Film festivals as public cultures followed by the inaugural screenings.
The seminar had 10 eminent speakers from six international and three Indian festivals. Both the films screened at the inaugural were world premieres. The first was Paromita Vohra‘s brand new documentary Partners in Crime, followed by You Don‘t Belong by Spandan Banerjee.
Shohini Ghosh’s bool ‘Fire’ was released by Sharmila Tagore. There were keynote addresses by Colin Gonsalves, advocate and Peter Wintonik, filmmaker.
Persistence Resistance 2011 also has retrospectives of Arun Khopkar, Rahul Roy and Kim Longinotto. In addition, there are four invited packages: the Doc Alliance films brought by Dok Leipzig, selections from the London Documentary Film Festival, selections from the Asian Network of the Documentary, of the Pusan International Film Festival, and diploma films by students from the Zelig Documentary School, Italy.
There will be a workshop on crowd funding with Charlie Phillip, Sheffield Doc/ Fest and Jamie King of the Vodo on-line distribution platform. The workshop will be moderated by Peter Wintonick. And, UN Women (formerly UNIFEM) presents a seminar on ‘Gender and Governance‘ based on the work of Kim Longinotto and Rahul Roy.
The annual festival has been organised by the Magic Lantern Foundation and spearheaded by Gargi Sen.
On the theme of ‘Edge of Visual Narrative;, the Festival from 7 to 10 February will screen more than 80 films, many of which are distributed by Under Construction, as well as special invited packages, in a multitude of viewing spaces.
Oranges and Mangoes by Priyanka Chhabra and It‘s cricket, no? by Sudhir Aggarwal and Gregory French are also being premiered at the Festival.
The films can also be seen on http://festivalonline.persistenceresistance.in/ by registering on the site by creating a username, check email for an activation link, logging in and checking the menu.
