The Dharamsala International Film Festival is all set to kickstart from November 5. SHAlINI SAKSENA caught up with festival director Ritu Sarin to talk about the pulsating content this year
The Dharamsala International Film Festival, in its fourth year, is all set to wow the audience with some of the best works from directors and filmmakers from across the globe. A brainchild of Ritu Sarin and Tenzing Sonam, the festival began its journey in 2012 and has grown vertically.
“We started off with just four volunteers and a manager. Today, besides Tenzing and me, we’ve 40 volunteers and four managers to oversee the festival. It feels good that people are appreciating the effort we’re making to get some good cinema into the country which they would otherwise never get to see,” Sarin says.
Though the couple had been talking about a festival in the shadow of the majestic Dhauladhar mountains, it took time to make it a reality. They would travel to other film festivals to showcase their work and assess the organisation and the kind of work being shown. For example, at the locarno International Film Festival, the organisers had used a mountain as a backdrop to show a film. A film festival in the Amazonian basin was so lush and grand that couple wanted to do something similar.
“Ours is an independent film festival. We don’t get funding from the Government so it’s nothing as grand as what we see abroad. We learnt from festivals we have attended over the years. All our talk of a festival in Dharamsala would end just there. In 2012, we decided to just go with whatever we had,” Sarin tells you.
This year, the festival, set to unfold from November 5 to November 8, will showcase a wide range of films from India and abroad that have a common theme — to explore freedom in different forms and the obstacles in the way. In collaboration with the Asian Cultural Council, the festival will also be bringing three international filmmakers to present their films.
“The first is a film by French filmmaker Boris lojkine, Hope which talks about the realities of undocumented immigrants. The story of a Nigerian woman Hope who is rescued in the Sahara desert by a young man. The two then endure a treacherous journey in order to get to Europe.
“The second is by Brian Knappenberger — The Internet’s Own Boy: The Story of Aaron Swartz. The film shows what we lose when we disregard technology and its effect on our civil liberties.
“The third movie is by Polish filmmaker Malgorzata Szumowska. Set in present-day Poland, Body centres around the intertwined stories of a criminal prosecutor, his anorexic daughter and her quirky therapist.
“Another movie to look out for is by Joshua Oppenheimer’s documentary The Act of Killing (2012), and his latest film, The look of Silence (2014), which has won awards at the Venice Film Festival and Busan International Film Festival. The films are in tandem with each other and explore the effects of the Indonesian genocide on the survivors and perpetrators.
“Veteran Japanese documentary maker Kaoru Ikeya will attend the festival for the international premiere of his new film lung Ta,” Sarin says. She says she doesn’t have a favourite as it’s very difficult to pick one from 35 brilliant movies.
To choose the 35 films on show this year, the couple watched over a 100 films. And it all starts by sending invites to directors and filmmakers to send in their enteries. “It’s a long drawn process. Sonam and I usually sit in the evenings to watch these films. The ones we can’t see, our team or the people we’ve on our panel watch. Each year, we set a criterion and choose the film on that basis. It takes months to go through the documentaries and films we get. But in the process, we get to see some of the best works by best filmmakers from around the globe,” says Sarin, who is working on a feature film titled The Sweet Requiem.
The story is about a woman who escaped from Tibet 15 years back with her father suppressing the memories of that traumatic journey till an incident brings it all back.
“Our’s is a small festival. We don’t want compete with any other film festival. Our aim is to show great films from different countries. The location is a big plus. There are many foreign tourists in Dharamsala, plus many people even from States like Kerala travel to see the movies here. This is good enough for us,” Sarin says.