BENGALURU: To celebrate cinema and the culture around it, another festival unveils its stage after two years of existing in the virtual space. The ninth edition of the Urban Lens Film Festival (ULFF) is back in its physical form taking place from February 16 at the Max Mueller Bhavan and the Indian Institute for Human Settlements on February 17, 18 and 19.
Festival director Subasri Krishnan is elated that the event is back without the online hassles. “Earlier, organising the festival online was a bigger challenge because filmmakers and producers are far more reluctant. Secondly, in the online format, people join in from all over the world and you don’t have a grasp of who they are. This leads to the conversations being disparate and segregated. But we were excited to be back with having a physical edition. Collectively viewing these films in a dark room is what cinema is meant to be,” shares Krishnan.
The festival doesn’t have a theme because the organisers feel it doesn’t bode well with the multi-dimensional nature of cinema. “We don’t believe in themes because there is no one theme that can unify all cinema. For instance, there’s a film that we’re showing on the partition. But it’s also about memory and cities. It’s also about documents and people’s relationship with them. Art is never about one thing; there are many layers to it,” quips Krishnan.
As the films being screened at the event are going to be diverse, she feels this would also welcome varied types of conversations. “The discourses would depend on each filmmaker. We have various kinds of cinema coming in from different places. We have two films from Meghalaya, but also films set in the national capital and outside the country. So naturally, the conversations after the screening would veer around the kind of questions these films are asking,” says Krishnan about the film festival that started in 2014.
The opening film of the festival is Ariyippu, a Malayalam film about an immigrant couple from South India working in a medical glove-manufacturing factory near Delhi. The festival boasts of having many international motion pictures but the closing film of the festival is going to be Shaunak Sen’s All That Breathes, which has been getting a lot of laurels including the nomination in the Best Documentary Feature category for this year’s Oscars.
With the ninth edition of the Urban Lens Film Festival starting today, festival director Subasri Krishnan speaks to CE about the movies being screened, the conversations around cinema and how the city has always had a cinephile crowd