Images of Asia

Cinefan, New Delhi’s own festival of Asian cinema, launched in 1999, has today evolved into a full-on celebration of films made in the world’s most populous continent, reports Saibal Chatterjee

THE seventh edition of the 10-day Osian Cinefan Film Festival (OCFF), underway in the national Capital’s sprawling Siri Fort complex from July 15, promises to be bigger, brighter and better than ever before.

Apart from a special four-film homage to Satyajit Ray in the 50^th year of Pather Panchali and a tribute to the Taiwanese master Hou Hsiao-Hsien with the screening of five of his best cinematic essays, the 7^th OCFF will present the largest showcase of Asian cinema ever assembled in this part of the world. Over 30 nations are represented at the event.

Says Aruna Vasudev, director of OCFF: "We had 90 films last year. The number has shot up to 120 this time around. Most of the major entries that we sought are making it to the festival." That is clear evidence of the growing importance of OCFF, which opened this year with the Asian premiere of Wang Hiaoshuai’s Shanghai Dreams, winner of the Special Jury Prize at the 2005 Cannes Film Festival.

Another major attraction is Kolkata-based filmmaker Buddhadeb Dasgupta’s fresh-off-the-oven Kaalpurush (Memories in the Mist), featuring Mithun Chakraborty, Rahul Bose and Sameera Reddy. Dasgupta’s previous film, Swapner Din (Chased by Dreams), is also part of the festival’s special screenings line-up.

The special screenings sidebar has four other films, including Im Kwon-Taek’s Low Life from Korea, Dariush Mehrjui’s Mama’s Guest from Iran and Yoji Yamada’s The Hidden Blade from Japan.

OCFF’s Asian Competition, a big draw for filmmakers of the region, will see 15 films vying for the festival’s top prize. A five-member jury, including the likes of Belgian filmmaker, actress, producer and scriptwriter Marion Hansel and veteran Indian arthouse filmmaker Mani Kaul, will judge the films in the Asian Competition.

Among the major entries in the Asian Competition are the Cannes Camera d’Or-winning Sri Lankan film The Forsaken Land, directed by the FTII-trained Vimukthi Jayasundara, and Iraqi director Oday Rasheed’s Underexposure, the first feature to be shot on location in Baghdad after the fall of Saddam Hussein.

Starting this year, OCFF will host a competition for Indian films as well. A total of 11 films from all over the country, including Sandip Ray’s Nishijapon (After the Night`85 Dawn), Santosh Sivan’s Navarasa, Kundan Shah’s The Three Sisters and Shoojit Sircar’s Yahaan, are in the running.

A separate five-member jury headed by Cambodian filmmaker Rithy Panh will judge the Indian Competition films. The jury includes actor Mita Vashisht.

A striking features of the 7^th OCFF is the dramatic increase in the number of Indian films. Of the nearly 30 entries, more than 10 have never been screened anywhere in the country before.

Apart from the films in the Indian Competition, the 7^th OCFF will showcase 12 other locally produced entries in a special package. The films listed in this section are Sagar Sarhadi’s Chausar, Saurabh Shukla’s Aye Dil, Jayaraj’s Daivanamathil (In the Name of God), Somnath Sen’s Faisla, T.V. Chandran’s Kathavaseshan (Epilogue to a Life Lived) and Bappaditya Bandopadhyay’s Devaki.

The bonanza of great cinema doesn’t end there. On the OCFF bill of fare is an array of regular as well as special sections designed to provide an overview of the quality and range of Asian cinema today. Among these sections are Asian Frescoes, with 23 films from over 15 countries, including Japan, China, Thailand, Malaysia, the Philippines and Mongolia.

OCFF is one of the few international festivals that curate an annual retrospective of Arab films. Presented under the rubric Arabesque, this section brings together films exclusively from Arab nations. Egypt, Morocco, Tunisia, Algeria and Lebanon are a few of the countries represented this year.

The high points of the Arabesque package are films like Tunisian-French director Abedeilatif Kechiche’s Games of Love and Chance, winner of multiple Cesars (the French Oscars) in 2004, Michel Khelifi and Eyal Sivan’s Route 181: Fragments of a Journey in Palestine-Israel and Yasmine Kassari’s Morocco-Belgium co-production, Sleeping Child.

The 7^th OCFF also has Asian films culled from the repertoire of Fortissimo Films, which specialises in the production and promotion of innovative feature films, and Fonds Sud, France’s best-known film funding organisation.

The Fortissimo Films: Carte Blanche section includes such talked about films as Hong Kong maverick Wong Kar Wai’s masterly 2046, Taiwanese director Tsai Ming-Liang’s quirky What Time is it There? and Zhang Yuan’s East Palace, West Palace from China.

One of the most interesting features of the 7^th OCFF is a selection of Chinese and Japanese martial arts spanning over half a century, including Ang Lee’s global hit, Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon. The section also has the legendary director King Hu’s The Valiant Ones.

While films from Japan, China and Hong Kong understandably dominate this package, it also has two films from Korea, including 2004’s Arahan, one from Indonesia and Lou Ma Ho’s 22-minute A Monk’s Awakening, produced in France.

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