Food for open thought

The Public Service Broadcasting Trust’s annual ‘Open Frame’ reality film festival is here to stay with its emphasis on an array of independent voices and modes of expression, reports
Saibal Chatterjee

THE first ‘Open Frame’ festival of documentary and reality films, organised four years ago in New Delhi by the Public Service Broadcasting Trust (PSBT) in conjunction with Prasar Bharti Corporation, was a tentative, single-day affair. At the end of the much larger fourth edition of the festival, however, that seems like a distant memory.

This year’s Open Frame, held in Delhi’s India Habitat Centre from September 9 to 15, was a lively weeklong event. It mutated into a major festival that screened 50-odd films from around the world, hosted colloquiums and workshops and provided a forum for discussions for cineastes.

The opening film of Open Frame 2005 was Samina Mishra’s The House on Gulmohar Avenue, a sensitive attempt to comprehend the place of a Muslim in India today.

Lovers of meaningful reality cinema were treated to films from other countries as well.

From Australia there was the intriguing John Safran vs. God, a satirical documentary that probes religious belief systems. From Germany came the poignant but spirited feature-length documentary, Angel Without Wings, about a pretty little six-year-old girl who is a bundle of joy for her parents. Only, she happens to be severely disabled and needs constant care.

DIVO (Digital Interactive Video Online), a Ghana-UK co-production that documents a six-month cultural exchange programme between young Muslim women from the African nation and students from London was also on show. The process of the sharing of their gender identities through digital filmmaking and the Internet reveal unexpected commonalities between the two groups.

In the line-up were films from the US, Sweden, the Netherlands, Denmark, Belgium, Japan, China and Bangladesh as well. Also screened during the festival were several brilliant British documentaries, with award-winning filmmakers Philip Cox and Andy Glynne in attendance.

Among other non-Indian filmmakers attending the festival were the Peruvian Marco Luna and the Brazilian Luiz Eduardo Lerina. The former was in Delhi with a 55-minute documentary, Pamahasto: An Internal Look, which explores the meaning of education in a jungle family.

Lerina contributed a particularly engaging film, the 52-minute-long documentary, Cotidinao da Cidade (City Life), to the festival. It provides a lucid view of the haphazard growth and expansion of Rio de Janeiro through the perceptions of two of the city’s inhabitants – one from an upper middle class neighbourhood, the other from a shantytown.

For the managing trustee of PSBT, the fiercely committed but refreshingly amiable Rajiv Mehrotra, the continuing success of the trust’s efforts "to democratise the independent documentary filmmaking movement" in India is an endorsement of his faith in the reach and power of public broadcasting. PSBT already has over 175 completed documentary films in its kitty, while nearly 50 more are in the process of being made.

"Our aim," says Mehrotra, "is to cast the net as wide as possible and expand the pool of Indian documentary filmmakers." Risk-taking is something that he and his team encourage among all PSBT filmmakers. "We let young filmmakers push the boundaries," he says. "The result is often less than satisfactory, but we do not mind that at all. We always tell filmmakers to go ahead and try out new things without being afraid of failure."

As a result, while Mehrotra can confidently claim that "25 per cent of PSBT’s films are excellent", a like share of the organisation’s output is "an embarrassment". But Mehrotra has no reason to rethink his strategy. PSBT has after all notched up over 150 international film festival screenings and bagged 30-odd Indian and foreign awards. At the National Film Awards for 2003, given away earlier this year by the President of India, PSBT walked away with half a dozen prizes.

The catalogue of PSBT reality and documentary films is an eclectic mix of themes, visions, forms and regional perceptions. While it has established names like the Manipuri veteran Aribam Syam Sharma, the Oriya auteur and film academic Nirad Mohapatra, the New Delhi-based bureaucrat-turned-filmmaker K. Bikram Singh and the multiple Green Oscar-winning conservation and wildlife filmmaker Mike Pandey, the library is dominated by lesser-known filmmakers.

For filmmakers and film lovers alike, the most exciting aspect of Open Frame is the opportunity that it provides for interaction with such Indian cinema stalwarts as Adoor Gopalakrishnan, chairman of PSBT, Mrinal Sen, chairman of the advisory board, and Shyam Benegal.

One of the high points of Open Frame 2005 was an illuminating session "with the masters" moderated by Mehrotra. It is not often that filmmakers of the stature of Adoor, Benegal and Sen exchange ideas among themselves and with an audience from the same platform. Equally lively was a colloquium, "Who Decides What We Watch," which had information and broadcasting minister S. Jaipal Reddy, Shyam Benegal, filmmaker Meghna Gulzar, NASSCOM president Kiran Karnik, TRAI chairman Pradip Baijal, Doordarshan CEO K.S. Sarma, among others, articulating their views on the ways of the broadcasting industry.

But as is quite obvious, PSBT is not so much about the high-profile personalities it has on board as about the difference it is beginning to make in the sphere of Indian documentary filmmaking. It has to a great extent restored the medium to its rightful owner, the people. The way from here can only be ahead.

HOME