All That Breathes by Shaunak Sen winning Cannes’ highest honour, The Elephant Whisperers winning an Oscar, Marching in the Dark by Kinshuk Surjan nominated for Human Rights Award... in the last few years, Indian documentary filmmakers have pushed boundaries of filmmaking to reflect the realities they see and gotten international acclaim for it, but why doesn’t Bengaluru have a festival dedicated to the form? It was this question that led Vinayak Bhat, the founder of Bangalore Film Forum to start the Bengaluru Documentary Film Festival which is set to open from November 5. He says, “There are lots of film festivals in India but not many take documentaries or when they do, because of the volume of fiction being made, the focus is on those films. At the same time, whenever we screen documentaries or other venues in the city do so, we can see there is an audience for them in Bengaluru. We realised we really needed a festival rather than a one-off screening, with filmmakers and audiences coming together for a few days.”
With ‘The World and the Self’ as the theme, the lineup is divided into this and four other categories: Intersectional, 16mm screening, features and shorts. Speaking about curating the 28 films on the programme, Bhat says, “With World and the Self as the focus, we chose filmmakers who are looking at their own life, their immediate surroundings and in the process, making sense of culture, politics and different things outside themselves. There is also a huge diversity in terms of duration – from 10 to 15 min shorts to hour-long features.”
Among the lineup, Bhat points to the opening film, The Gas Station Attendant by Karla Murthy as a must-watch, saying, “It is a very personal film made by an American filmmaker whose father happened to be from Bengaluru. It looks at memory, family history and the course of her father’s life.” A meditation on immigrant experience, the filmmaker blends voice calls and home movies together to tell the story of her father’s life.
Another highlight of the festival is a rare screening in 16mm film of Children of Mini-Japan by Chalam Bennurkar. “This kind of projection doesn’t happen often and we had to look a lot for a projector that still works, thankfully Goethe Institut had one which hadn’t been used in a long time, which we got up and running,” smiles Bhat. The Tamil film, released in 1990 is set in Shivakashi and looks at the child labour there. He adds, “We’ll also be having a conversation about the film and other things with cinematographer RV Ramani, Ashish Rajadhyaksha and Babu Eshwar Prasad.”
Other must-see films include Herland and Auto Queens, both exploring women’s stories, the former through the story of Bhagyashree and her growing sisterhood rising against the patriarchal control of their deeply conservative villages, and the latter taking a look at Tamil Nadu’s first women’s auto union.
(The festival will take place until November 8 at Goethe Institut/Max Muller Bhavan. More info on bangalorefilmforum.com)