Rekha’s Umrao Jaan is coming back to the big screen. The 1981 film, now restored in 4K, will be screened at the India International Centre. The following evening, it is Jurassic Park, and later in the week audiences can laugh all over again with Gulzar’s Angoor and Kundan Shah’s Jaane Bhi Do Yaaro. These films are part of The IIC Experience: A Festival of the Arts, which is back for its 22nd edition and runs from October 29 to November 3.
This time, the festival has taken Prakriti: Ecology and Existence as its theme, and it comes at the right moment. Climate change, damage to the environment, vanishing wildlife and the pressure on traditional livelihoods are worrying communities across the world, and the IIC wants its festival to be the place where people sit down together and talk about nature, through art as well as ideas. “This year’s festival attempts to create such a space, where ideas, artistic expression and lived experience can come together to deepen our understanding of Prakriti and our place within it,” said KN Shrivastava, Director, India International Centre (IIC).
The 13 films in Stories on Screen, put together with NFDC, NFAI and the Film Heritage Foundation, also include The Red Turtle, an animated film without a word of dialogue, and Girish Kasaravalli’s Ghatashraddha. Director Pradip Krishen will take questions after In Which Annie Gives It Those Ones, the film Arundhati Roy wrote.
On the first day, art historian Naman P Ahuja delivers a keynote on early tree worship in Indian art. IIC President Shyam Saran inaugurates the festival the next evening, after which Alarmel Valli dances Scent of the Earth on the Fountain Lawns. The lawns stay busy all week, with Maa Parvathy Baul, the Thai epic Ramakien, Ustad Mohi Bahauddin Dagar on the rudra veena and Pt Ajoy Chakrabarty on the closing night.
Palms and Parchment brings the reading heritage and cultural treasures of Keralam to Delhi, while Living Lightly follows the lives of pastoral communities through installations, stories and demonstrations. Birds of India, from the DAG collection, shows Company paintings of Indian birds from around 1800 to 1835 and stays open till November 14.
Daytime sessions bring filmmaker Mike Pandey and wildlife biologist Purnima Devi Barman together on conservation, a discussion on how Kerala became fully literate and nature poetry in eight languages. Throughout the festival, the Rose Garden hosts Journeys Across India, with dinners that travel from Kalinga to Jharkhand and Chhattisgarh, and on to Afghanistan, France and the Konkan and Malabar coasts.
So where else in the city can you watch Rekha in Umrao Jaan, hear a rudra veena on the Fountain Lawns and end the night with a meal from the Malabar coast, all in the same week? Better keep those evenings free.