NEW DELHI: The cinematic medium provides a means to filmmakers to explore multifarious problems facing mankind in the modern day world of tensions and stresses.
Filmmakers who addressed today’s sessions of the Osian’s Learning Experience referred directly or indirectly to the tensions and anxieties facing today’s world.
OLE is the new concept introduced at the ongoing Eleventh Osian’s Cinefan Film Festival which commenced on 24 October and will continue till 30 October at the Sirifort Auditorium.
OLE is aimed at taking the study of filmmaking to an aesthetic level. The Festival has been organised in the previous years by the Osian’s Connoisseurs of Art in association with the Delhi Government.
Director Amit Dutta said he uses stories of men and women - and the way they see each other – to explore his fascination of dealing with the emotion of anxiety.
He summarized his film, Man’s women and other stories as a tryst of “transparent images, a graph of brutality where women takes over at the end,” to which the audience added “movement in spaces with brutal violence”.
He said “it is easier to make pure cinema, the experimental cinema, with less money” without the hindrance of “ethnographic detailing”, and where just an “idea of beauty and grace suffices”.
Anxiety was an eternal emotion, he said, adding that this was the reason he had still not been able to understand the complexities in life.
In the session on ‘The Long Night’ about the political dissidence in Syria, director Hatem Mohamad Ali said “the present turbulent times and obscure present and future of Syria has lent an escapist tendency to TV serial makers, making them take refuge in the past.
The film has not been released yet in Syria though it has travelled to several countries in festivals, he added.
Hatem said the film deals with a range of emotions. Though ‘joy’ is not one among them, it “offers a ray of hope towards the end” because he believes “that even if life is too hard and pessimistic, cinema should have hope even while ensuring it must not lie”.
In another session which was on the film ‘Supermen of Malegaon’, a documentary on the making of the film ‘Malegaon ka Superman’ which has proved to be very popular at the Festival, the director Faiza Ahmad Khan said she had attempted to show “the contrasting background of gory communal violence that the region of Malegaon witnesses and the ease and enthusiasm with which the local people delve in filmmaking” as that inspired her towards making this documentary. Nasir who made the original feature film and a crew member Shafiq were also present.
