“I feel like I am part of one big family here,” says film director, script consultant and documentary film maker Martina Luneberg who is here in the city to take part in the Cochin International Film Festival.
Luneberg, who came all the way from Germany to take part in the fest, has previously associated herself with several big and small film festivals across the world, including the Berlin Film Festival and Buenos Aires International Independent Film Festival.
She will coordinate the South American and European film sections at the Cochin International Film Festival. “In Germany, Bollywood mainstream films have a huge fan base.
Through film festivals like the Cochin International Film Festival we will be able to introduce smaller but important films to the people there as well,” says Martina Luneberg who claims to be a huge fan of Adoor Gopalakrishnan and South Indian films.
“There are a lot of beautiful films made here. Gopalakrishnan’s work is amazing. The camera work, the symbols, the language, everything is beautiful in Adoor Gopalakishnan’s movies.
The camera work gives you the feeling that your are being sucked into the character. People are really drawn in by the slowness and the profoundness of his work,” says Luneberg, who is also a fan of Indian film directors like Ritwik Ghatak, Satyajit Ray and even more recent directors like C S Padmakumar.
Music is another aspect that draws her towards Indian movies. However , Martina Luneberg confesses that she is not a great fan of mainstream movies.
“But that goes for movies from everywhere. I don’t like mainstream movies anywhere be it European or South-American or Indian.
When it comes to movies, I like those that are politically conscious, which offer social criticism, be it dictatorship in South America or homosexuality in Brazil.
I like movies that talk about actual condition,” says Luneberg. In fact, more and more people are now drawn towards documentary movies as against feature films owing to the former’s capacity to showcase real life, she says.
“Real life often has a lot of stories in itself. This is where documentary comes in. Another reason for the preference for documentary movies could be the cost factor.
Since documentaries are much more economical than feature films, films from a number of poorer countries are documentaries,” she says.
Apart from some selected documentaries and films from various film festivals, Martina Luneberg plans to showcase documentaries on famous film makers like Roman Polanski and Woody Allen at the festival.
There will also be training sessions on documentaries for budding film makers. Luneberg has a word of advise for budding documentary makers.
“Don’t make your documentaries boring. Know what you need to say or the one question that you want to answer in the documentary. Be clear about. Don’t repeat the same things,” says Martina.