Today’s world cinema is a declaration of human freedom. These are the extraordinary stories of ordinary people,” said a renowned film critic Ajit Rai.
Ajit was addressing an event ‘Samvad’ organised by Bharat Bhavan here on Tuesday. He spoke on ‘World Cinema, India and today’s time’ at Antarang Hall.
While addressing the audience, he said that today’s world cinema is giving is showing new hope with ideas and philosophy ahead of sex and violence. Elaborating further, he said that today India's participation in world cinema is very poor. “We have not been working enough to get a space in world cinema,” he added.
He cited the example of the world's largest Cannes Film Festival, saying that after 1994 none of the Indian films have been selected in this official selection. “Our films do not even have a percentage of the total film market in the world. Indian artists cannot reach the main red carpet. Many Indian filmmakers show movies to their friends in a ten-seat rental tuition claiming that their films were shown at the Cannes Film Festival,” he added.
Adding to it, Rai said that this film festival has become the Olympics of cinema. Giving example of Iranian filmmaker Asghar Farhadi who has boycotted Oscar awards Rai said that such courage is not seen in any Indian filmmaker. Talking about Matthew Brown's British film ‘The Man Who Die Infinity’ based on the famous Indian scholar S. Ramanujan, Ajit Rai said that we cannot make world-class films on any Indian talent. The main reason is that now India's best geniuses are not been involved in film production. He discussed about various films of world cinema of last year and spoke about the genius International filmmakers.
Various youngsters aspiring to enter the industry participated in the lecture. They asked about their queries to Ajit Rai. Notably, Ajit Roy is the only Hindi reviewer of Hindi who has been participating in almost all important film festivals in the world for the last ten years.