3rd July 2011; PEEPLI LIVE

Peepli Live
A film by Anusha Rizvi
Mehmood Farooqi : Co director
Year:2010
Runtime :
With English subtitles
3rd July 2011 ; 5.45pm
Perks Mini Theater

A television crew intrudes into a village hutment and plonks a camera bang in the middle of its cramped, messy space. It is looking for an exclusive, TRP-boosting ‘conversation’ with a suicidal farmer. The latter, dread and bewilderment writ large on his face, cringes in a corner of the room. The star reporter, doing her best to exude sympathy, seeks to assuage the man's fears. "Don’t be afraid," she says. "This camera cannot do anything."

Well, the TV cameras do an awful lot of things in Peepli Live, and not all of it is of a salutary nature. Writer-director Anusha Rizvi's debut feature, a disarmingly simple but remarkably powerful film, is a major triumph. She taps into the power of the medium to narrate a story rooted firmly in the depressing realities of rural India, but without ever going into paroxysms of self-righteous indignation.

Peepli Live lampoons an entire range of usual suspects – voyeuristic media persons, smarmy bureaucrats, scheming local-level political goons and self-serving rulers, all of whom want a piece of the sleepy village where a farmer is about to kill himself so that his family can survive. Thanks to the film's nifty blend of humour and bathos, it does not slip into diatribe mode. It instead acquires the spiky edge of a pulsating yet biting satire.
Rizvi collates elements from the theatre of the absurd to craft her sly portrait of a grim scenario that urban Indian moviegoers are rarely, if ever, exposed to. The film explores the clinical and incongruous response of the media and the ruling establishment to what is a life and death question for a farmer on the brink of becoming just another statistic in a never-ending tale of woes. This coldness is best captured in the nonchalant refrain of the natty agriculture secretary: "we must wait for the court's order."
The peasant-protagonist Natha (amateur actor Omkar Das) cannot wait. He and his elder brother, Budhia (Raghuvir Yadav), are in danger of losing their plot of land, having failed to repay a bank loan. By way of one last desperate throw of the dice, Natha decides to commit suicide in the hope of securing a government compensation of Rs 100,000 for his dependents. But as word gets around, the media descends on the village for a scoop and opportunistic politicians jump into the fray to draw mileage from Natha's predicament.

As the frenzy peaks, cold drink kiosks and tea stalls come up around Natha's house in next to no time. The whole world wants to know whether Natha will really die. But does anybody really care?
We laugh as everybody in Peepli seems to cut a sorry figure. But do we feel guilty as well? Peepli Live seeks to push us across the line that divides detached glee and genuine concern.
A film that ends by informing the audience that "8 million farmers quit agriculture in India between 1991 and 2001" and does so with the muscular backing of Bollywood superstar Aamir Khan and UTV Motion Pictures, one of the biggest production houses of the Mumbai movie industry, is nothing short of a miracle.
Source: review by Saibal Chatterjee (NDTV)

http://movies.ndtv.com/movie_review.aspx?id=539
(Saibal Chatterjee is a National Award-winning film critic who has covered film festivals around the world, including the ones in Cannes and Toronto. He writes reviews for NDTVMovies.com)

Anusha Rizvi & Mehmood Farooqi

Peepli lIve was conceived and made by Anusha Rizvi and her husband Mehmood Farooqi.Mehmood Farooqui remembers how Anusha Rizvi came out of their bedroom five years ago and announced, “I have an idea.” She had been jotting possible film ideas in a register for a while and this receptivity paid off when she saw a TV programme about farmer suicides. She was intrigued, she says, how the compensation is decided only after the death, “so what becomes important is the dead body, not the living person.” While she knew the entire story and its tone in that one flash, and knew she wanted Raghubir Yadav to play Budhia, it took her a year to write it and begin pitching. Amir Khan confirmed his interest in 2006 and the contract was signed in 2009.Rizvi studied at Sardar Patel Vidyalaya and St Stephen’s, Delhi while Farooqui attended The Doon School, St Stephen’s, Oxford and Cambridge. After NDTV, the duo shifted to Mumbai to crack the film industry. Rizvi returned after a year, and he followed a few years later to escape Bollywood’s boredom. Both freelanced: Rizvi did documentary work while Farooqui toiled on Urdu translations, a MiD DAY column and reviving the storytelling art of dastangoi.

Now back in their Delhi base, Rizvi has no new projects planned while Farooqui prepares to release his first book — on the 1857 uprising in Delhi.
(Source http://www.tehelka.com/ )

19th June 2011; Andre Wajda's ASHES AND DIAMONDS

Ashes and Diamonds
A film by Andre Wazda
Country:Poland
Year: 1958
Runtime: 103 minutes
Polish with English subtitles
19th June 2011; 5.45pm
Perks Mini Theater, Perks School

Exclusive 30 minutes documentary :
Andrzej Wajda: On Ashes and Diamonds

Andrzej Wajda’s third full-length film, Ashes and Diamonds (Popiol y diament) established the director as a leader of the new Polish cinema. Set in a provincial town on May 8, 1945, the day of the German capitulation, Ashes and Diamonds deals ostensibly with the emergence of a Russian-backed Communist regime threatened by armed adversaries.

Previously the Nazis were the common enemy. Now the two groups who led the anti-German struggle—the London-directed Home Army and the pro-Moscow People’s Army—are on opposite sides of the ideological divide. Because the Red Army liberated Poland, the pro-Soviet faction (headed by Poles returning from the USSR) has gained control. A state of civil war exists as splinter groups of Home Army irregulars take to the forests. Members of such a band, Andrzej and Maciek have been conditioned to feel that they owe unquestioning military allegiance to their commanders.

Based on Jerzy Andrzejewski’s 1948 novel of the same name, Ashes and Diamonds was adapted for the screen by Wajda and the author. Time and space have been condensed to less than twenty-four hours in and around a single location—the hotel Monopol—giving the drama great theatrical intensity. Maciek, representative of Poland’s “lost” war generation, is the tragic hero, compelled to commit a crime by the fatality of history. Bound by the soldier’s code of honor to a past steeped in blood, he kills on order without doubts or remorse.
During long years of dismemberment and foreign occupation, literature and drama in Poland had always kept alive belief in the nation’s revival. In Ashes and Diamonds, Wajda continues this tradition, posing the question of Poland’s postwar identity. The thoughtful, tired, middle-aged revolutionary Szczuka adheres to the communist line about building a collectivist future. But he lacks the energy and resources to accomplish his own goals.

The terrorist Maciek has no answer but violence. Yet the handsome young rebel, overflowing with vitality, moves passionately among national mythic images of suffering and heroism: the white horse, the inverted crucified Christ, the poetry in the ruined church.Ashes and Diamonds has rightly been lauded as one of the finest of postwar East-Central European films, and the most vital work of the Polish School.
(Source:Internet)

Andrzej Wajda

Andrzej Wajda (born March 6, 1926 in Suwałki) is a Polish film director He is one of the most prominent members of the Polish Film School. A major figure of world and Eastern European cinema after World War II, Wajda has made his reputation as a sensitive and uncompromising chronicler of his country's political and social evolution. The son of a Polish cavalry officer who was killed by the Soviets in 1940, Wajda fought in the Home Army against the Germans when he was still a teenager. After the war, he studied to be a painter at Kraków's Academy of Fine Arts before entering the Łódź Film School.

On the heels of his apprenticeship to director Aleksander Ford, Wajda was given the opportunity to direct his own film. With A Generation (1955), the first-time director poured out his disillusionment over jingoism, using as his alter ego a young, James Dean-style antihero played by Zbigniew Cybulski.Wajda went on to make two more increasingly accomplished films, which further developed the antiwar theme of A Generation: Kanal (1956) and Ashes and Diamonds (1958), also starring Cybulski.

Wajda was more interested in works of allegory and symbolism, and certain symbols (such as setting fire to a glass of liquor, representing the flame of youthful idealism that was extinguished by the war) recur often in his films Wajda's later devotion to Poland's burgeoning Solidarity movement was manifested in Man of Marble (1976) and Man of Iron (1981), with Solidarity leader Lech Wałęsa appearing as himself in the latter film. The director's involvement in this movement would prompt the Polish government to force Wajda's production company out of business. In 1983 he directed Danton , a film set in 1794 (Year Two) dealing with the Post-Revolutionary Terror. The film carries sharp parallels with the Post-Revolutionary period in Russia as well as with fascist Germany.

At the 2000 Academy Awards, Wajda was presented with an honorary Oscar for his numerous contributions to cinema; he subsequently donated the award to Kraków's Jagiellonian University. In February 2006, Wajda received an honorary Golden Bear for lifetime achievement at the Berlin International Film Festival. Wajda , well past his 80th year, is still making films .

12th June 2011; Melville's RED CIRCLE

The Red Circle
A film by Jean-Pierre Melville
Year: 1970
Country: France
Run time: 140 minutes
12th June 2011; 5.45pm
Perks Mini Theater, PERKS school.

Gliding almost without speech down the dawn streets of a wet Paris winter, these men in trench coats and fedoras perform a ballet of crime, hoping to win and fearing to die. Some are cops and some are robbers. To smoke for them is as natural as breathing. They use guns, lies, clout, greed and nerve with the skill of a magician who no longer even thinks about the cards. They share a code of honor which is not about what side of the law they are on, but about how a man must behave to win the respect of those few others who understand the code.

Jean-Pierre Melville watches them with the eye of a concerned god, in his 1970 film "Le Cercle Rouge." His movie involves an escaped prisoner, a diamond heist, a police manhunt and mob vengeance, but it treats these elements as the magician treats his cards; the cards are insignificant, except as the medium through which he demonstrates his skills.

"The Red Circle," refers to a saying of the Buddha that men who are destined to meet will eventually meet, no matter what. Melville made up this saying, but no matter; his characters operate according to theories of behavior, so that a government minister believes all men, without exception, are bad. And a crooked nightclub owner refuses to be a police informer because it is simply not in his nature to inform.

The movie stars two of the top French stars of the time, Alain Delon and Yves Montand, as well as Gian Maria Volonte. All of the actors seem directed to be cool and dispassionate, to guard their feelings, to keep their words to themselves, to realize that among men of experience almost everything can go without saying. There is one cool, understated scene after another. The heist itself is performed with the exactness we expect of a movie heist. We are a little startled to realize it is not the point of the film. In most heist movies, the screenplay cannot think beyond the heist, is satisfied merely to deliver it. "Le Cercle Rouge" assumes that the crooks will be skillful at the heist, because they are good workmen. The movie is not about their jobs but about their natures.
Melville's own professionalism -- his understanding of action filmmaking as a kind of lyric poetry -- gives ''Le Cercle Rouge'' its cool, muted impact. It is a long, at times mind-twistingly intricate movie, but there is never a rushed shot, a perfunctory cut or a wasted movement. There are, instead, moments of breathtaking strangeness and blunt emotional force: cold-blooded shootings, creepy-crawly alcoholic hallucinations, spangly dancers and nighttime streets. These things could exist -- could look like this, or seem to mean anything -- only in movies. ''Le Cercle Rouge'' offers the kind of experience that makes you glad movies exist.
(Source: Internet / rogerebert.com )

Jean-Pierre Melville

Poet of the underworld

Film-maker Jean-Pierre Melville's life was a running battle with critics and fans alike. But the 'garlic gangster' won in the end.

Born in Paris, France, Melville, who was an Alsatian Jew, served in World War II and fought in Operation Dragoon. When he returned from the war he applied for a license to become an assistant director, but was refused. Without this support, he decided to direct his films by his own means.

He became an independent film-maker, owning his own studios, and became well known for his tragic, minimalist film noirs, such as Le Samouraï (1967) and Le Cercle rouge (1969), starring major, charismatic actors like Alain Delon (probably the definitive 'Melvillian' actor), Jean-Paul Belmondo and Lino Ventura. His directorial style was influenced by American cinema and fetishized accessories like weapons, clothes and especially hats.

His independence and his 'reporting' style of film-making (he was one of the first French directors to use real locations regularly) were a major influence on the French New Wave film movement, and he appears as a minor character in Jean-Luc Godard's seminal New Wave film Breathless. When Godard was having difficultly editing Breathless, it was Melville that suggested that he just cut directly to the best parts of a shot. Thus, the films famous and innovative use of jump cuts were made.

In 1973, Jean-Pierre Melville died. In a career spanning 25 years, the director had made just 13 full length films, but many of these are regarded as genuine triumphs of French cinema.