Film Cycle: “IMAGINEINDIA International Film Festival”
Casa Asia is once again one of the official headquarters of ImagineIndia International Film Festival. At this edition, the three titles will be screened – The Flight (2018), Khandar (1984) and Newton (2017) – that can be classified within what is considered independent cinema and gender cinema, with a vindicative purpose that involves reports and sexist violence and power abuse in general.
It consists of films that are not usually in commercial routes and that is normally only presented at festivals. Criticism of subordinates, gender policies, resistance against is in the core of all these films, which are windows to worlds, that we cannot normally see or learn about, and we can only access them with films. This is why social realism is imposed in narratives from a critical perspective, that turns to different registers of everyday life with the purpose to raise awareness among spectators.
PROGRAMME
Tuesday 21st of May 2019, 7.00pm
The Flight, Dir. Buddhadeb Dasgupta | India | 2018 | 82 min
Bachchu Mondal is a car mechanic and a dreamer. His aspiration consists of managing to fly one day. He shares this dream with his wife and especially with his son, who really enjoys the father’s attitude because Bachchu often behaves like a boy. Bachchu eventually discovers where a Japanese plane of the 2nd World War and decides to rebuild it, despite not knowing how to do it. The place where the plane is is haunted by ghosts. However, Bachchu travels to Calcutta in search of crashed planes, which makes authorities suspect and he starts being investigated. The Flight is separated from the brutality and violence of his best known film, Luchadores (Uttara), which was awarded at the Venice Festival in 2000. Here, violence is in the heart of people who are not able to turn away from their dreams even if they can destroy them.
Wednesday 22nd of May 2019, 7.00 h
Khandhar, Dir. Mrinal Sen | India | 1984 | 106 min
Three friends of the city visit ruins where an elderly mother (Gita Sen) and her daughter Jamini (Shabana Azmi) live. The mother is expecting the arrival of a distant cousin to marry Jamini, but the main is already married and lives in Calcutta. The photographer Subhash (Naseeruddin Shah) feels sorry for the family and pretends to be the expected suitor. So they hold the farce together during the visit, but Subhash and Jamini are fatally attracted to each other in silence, despite the fact that she knows the destination that expects her. When friends leave, Jamini stays behind before a life of loneliness in the ruins.
Thursday 23rd of May 2019, 7.00pm
Newton, Dir. Amit V.Masurkar | India | 2017 | 104 min
Newton is a serious young civil servant who decides to show his devotion to the democratic ideal offering himself as a volunteer for a job nobody wants, supervising a shaky voting boothe in hell, in the middle of nowhere. So a group of locals can take part in elections without knowing anything about candidates who he doesn’t care about. Newton is a man of inflexible principles trapped between tradition and progress. He rejects a marriage organised by his parents when they discover that she is a minor. But the main character will struggle against himself until he makes decisions that will change his life.
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