5th Aug 2012; Thamizh Studio screens Amshan Kumar's Subramania Bharathi & Oruthi

THAMIZH STUDIO
Presents
Lenin Award winner
Amshan Kumar’s two films
SUBRAMANIA BHARATHI
&
ORUTHI 
5th August 2012; 5 pm
Perks Mini Theater

Thamizh Studio is a frontline film movement in Chennai. Their 2012 Lenin award for best filmmaker goes to Amshan Kumar. Prior to the awards function which will be held at Chennai on 15th August 2012 , Amshan Kumar’s two films are being shown in major cities of Tamilnadu.

Subramania Bharati:

Documentary.1999. Script .Indira Parthasarathy. Camera.P.S.Dharan. Music.L.Vaidyanathan.Editing.Gautam.Produced by N.Muruganandam.
Direction.Amshan Kumar.

Subramania Bharati (1882-1921), the renaissance figure of modern Tamil Litreature was born in Ettayapuram, South India.As asingle major force he revolutionized Tamil poetry with great lyrical beauty and brought it closer to people as never before.He was drawn early in his life towards mainstream nationalism and his journalistic writings incensed the British government. Bharati was a true modern championing the cause of nationalism, casteless society and equality for women. He was a unique spiritualist and expressed profound compassion for all living beings.

This is the first full length documentary on Bharati that gives an account of his life and the turbulent times he lived in. Filming is done in Chennai, Madurai, Ettayapuram, Tirunelveli, Pondicherry and Benares, the places associated with his life. Two elderly persons who had acquaintance with him have recounted their memories in this.The documentary has won several awards.

Oruthi2003/91minutes

Story.Ki.Rajanarayanan. Camera.P.S.Dharan. Editing.Satish-Harsha. Music.L.Vaidyanathan.
Produced by. Thara and Gopal Rajaram. Screenplay, dialogues and direction. Amshan Kumar
Cast:Poorvaja, Bharati Mani, Thomas Ober and Ganesh Babu.

The story is set in the late nineteenth century. Sevani, a dalit girl is in love with an upper caste boy Ellappan.Both are shepherds. Plans are afoot to get Ellappan married within his own caste.
John Williams, an English Revenue Divisional Officer arrives in the village to probe into the claim of the Zamindar that people do not pay tax. He comes to know through Sevani that the season was good , people pay tax regularly which the Zamindar has misappropriated for his pleasurable ends.
John Williams effectively intervens and brings permanent relief to villagers through tax reforms.The villagers know that this has become possible due to Sevani but they are helpless to fulfill her single wish of uniting her with her lover.Sevani is finally left with the quill pen that changed the destiny of her people.The film was shown in Indian Panorma and thereafter in several International film festivals. It won the Best film award from Government of Puduchery and Tamil Association of New Jersey, USA.
(Screenings supported and arranged in Coimbatore by Konangal Film Society )

Amshan Kumar

Amshan Kumar is a film maker and writer. His first book EHUTHUM PREGNIYUM published in 1980 deals with topics on writing and philosophy. His book ‘Cinema Rasanai’ written in 1990 in Tamil on film appreciation is the first book of its kind. It is prescribed as a text in many universities in Tamilnadu, Puducherry and Batticaloa in Sri Lanka.

He has conducted film appreciation courses to various age groups and gives lectures to visual communication and Mass Media students in Tamilnadu. Also he co-edited Salanam, a film magazine that was devoted to the study of serious efforts in world cinema. As one who is fond of developing film culture since his college days, he has been associating with and founding film societies like Trichy Cine Forum which was one of the earliest in Tamilnadu and Darshana in Coimbatore. In 2005 he participated in a seminar on ‘Parallel Film Movement in India’ in Kuala Lumpur.
He has directed more than 25 documentaries. His documentary Subramania Bharati the great Tamil poet that won various awards including the Best Documentary Award from Cinesangam, London, Nobel Laureate C.V.Raman, Third Theatre of Bengali Playwright and director Badal Sircar, Ashokamitran, Modern Art in Tamilnadu and Reaching the Unreached are some of his documentaries that have been widely appreciated. His most recent documentary is `Manakkal S.Rangarajan: Carnatic Musician of the Era`
‘Oruthi’ his feature film based on a story written by Sahitya Akademi award winner Ki.Rajanarayanan, was shown in Indian Panorama of International Film Festival of India in 2003 and won the Puducherry State Award for the Best Film and award from Tamil Association of New Jersey, USA.
‘Pesum Porchithram’ his anthology of articles on films was published in October 2007. It was released by Phalke Award winner Adoor Gopalakrishnan at the Chennai International Film Festival in December 2007.
He headed the panel of juries for the Vimbam International Short Film Festival held in London in November 2010.
Amshan Kumar is a post graduate in English Literature and regularly writes on film and other subjects in various Tamil and English magazines. He lives in Chennai.

22nd July 2012; Dardenne brothers' The Kid With a Bike

The Kid with a Bike
A film by Dardenne brothers
Year : 2011
French with English subtitles
Runtime: 83 minutes
22nd July 2012; 5.45pm
Perks Mini Theater

Winner of the Grand Jury Prize at Cannes 2011, "The Kid With a Bike" is another empathetic film by Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne, the brothers from Belgium who have strong sympathy for alienated children and young people, and who avoid melodrama and sensation in telling their stories so movingly. There are two things that could go seriously wrong in young Cyril's life, but they don't quite happen. The Dardennes don't wring us out like that. They prefer the drama of ordinary life, in which for a boy like Cyril, things don't easily go right. In straightforward, realistic scenes, they show a boy who fears he has been thrown away, but persists in feeling that his father only lost him and will be happy to find him again.Tightly edited and exciting, not a second is wasted, and every scene has a purpose. Their characters are constantly in motion, both physically and emotionally: In “The Kid With a Bike,” 11-year-old Cyril (Thomas Doret) is somewhere between a human turbine and a wild animal, with so much energy and desire in his preadolescent frame he can’t possibly contain it. Cinematographer Alain Marcoen’s camera flows alongside the characters, but never in a way that focuses your attention on technique.Dardennes are more focused on the redemptive possibilities of their Dostoevskian universe than on its bleak pits of despair. Cyril makes bad decisions and falls in love with the wrong substitute parent, but he’s the toughest kid you’d ever want to meet, better than most grownups at admitting his mistakes and adjusting to reality. The film is only 87 minutes long, lean and efficient, intent on Cyril. It doesn't "explain" him, because he is all there to be seen: his need, his abandonment, his reckless determination, his unprotected youth.
(Source:Internet)

Dardenne Brothers

Brothers Jean-Pierre Dardenne (21 April 1951) and Luc Dardenne (10 March 1954) born in Liège Belgium, are a filmmaking duo. They write, produce and direct their films together.

The Dardennes began making narrative and documentary films in the late 1970s, but they first came to international attention in the mid-1990s with La Promesse (The Promise). They won their first major international film prize when Rosetta won the Palme d'Or at the 1999 Cannes Film Festival. All their films since have played at the Cannes main competition and won one of the major prizes. Over the course of their 12-year careers, they have won more awards than any other filmmakers in the history of the Cannes Film Festival.

In 2002, Olivier Gourmet won Best Actor at Cannes for the Dardennes' Le Fils (The Son) In 2005, they won the Palme d'Or a second time for their film L’Enfant (The Child), putting them in an elite club of only 7 with the likes of Francis Ford Coppola. Their film, Le silence de Lorna (Lorna's Silence), won Best Screenplay at the 2008 Cannes Film Festival and was released in Europe in the fall. Their latest film The Kid with a Bike won the Grand Prix at the 2011 Cannes Film Festival.[2] Jean-Pierre has been announced as the jury president for the Cinéfoundation and Short Films sections of the 2012 Cannes Film Festival.

15th July 2012; Mani Kaul's DUVIDHA

DUVIDHA
A film by Mani Kaul
Year: 1973
Run time : 82 minutes
Hindi with English subtitles
15th July 2012; 5.45pm
Perks Mini Theater

Kaul’s most acclaimed film Duvidha (1973) opens with a rather flat, Godardian image of a woman in a red saree standing in front of a white wall, staring determinedly into the camera, as high-pitched Rajasthani ethnic vocals grace the audio. Like the frozen image of Truffaut’s juvenile delinquent, it suggests a predicament addressed to the audience. Based a folk tale, Duvidha speaks of a love that is beyond time and space.The presence of the ghost, which falls in love with the new bride, is not an exotic delicacy served to us but a given. And so is the ‘story’, which is read out verbatim to us by the narrator, freeing the film from the burden of storytelling, so to speak, instead allowing it to experiment with the imagery.
Employing a number of photographs, freeze frames, jump cuts and replays, which illustrate the film’s central notion of temporal and geographical dislocation (and save on the budget) and manipulating time like an accordion player,Kaul weaves a narrative where the past, the present and the future are always in conversation. (The ghost is simply referred to as ‘Bhoot’ (ghost), which is, of course, the word for ‘past’ as well). The predicament of the title, then, involves a choice between the spiritual and the material, the bride’s past and future, her childhood and adulthood, her freedom and honour and her love and security.Bewitchingly shot like a Dovzhenko film (and composed like Cézanne‘s still lifes), and impressively designed, with a simple yet striking interplay of red and white, Duvidha builds on both Kaul’s feminist leanings and highly personalized aesthetic.
(From: seventhart.com)

MANI KAUL
(25 December 1944 – 6 July 2011)

Those who think of Indian cinema as the glitz of Bollywood on the one hand and the eloquent classicism of Satyajit Ray on the other miss a third important strand, manifested best by the radical director Mani Kaul. Kaul was a totally uncompromising film-maker who never sought popularity but pursued his own concerns, influenced by Ritwik Ghatak, his Bengali teacher and a great director in his own right, and by Robert Bresson and Andrei Tarkovsky among the foreign giants of the cinema.
Mani Kaul is undoubtedly the Indian filmmaker who, along with Kumar Shahani, has succeeded in radically overhauling the relationship of image to form, of speech to narrative, with the objective of creating a ‘purely cinematic object’ that is above all visual and formal. He was born Rabindranath Kaul in Jodhpur in Rajasthan in 1942 into a family hailing from Kashmir. His uncle was the well-known actor-director Mahesh Kaul. Mani joined the Film and Television Institute of India (FTII), Pune initially as an acting student but then switched over to the direction course at the institute. He graduated from the FTII in 1966.
Mani’s first film Uski Roti (1969) was one of the key films of the ‘New Indian Cinema’ or the Indian New Wave. The film created shock waves when it was released as viewers did not know what quite to make of it due to its complete departure from all Indian Cinema earlier in terms of technique, form and narrative. The film is ‘adapted’ from a short story by renowned Hindi author Mohan Rakesh and is widely regarded as the first formal experiment in Indian Cinema. While the original story used conventional stereotypes for its characters and situations, the film creates an internal yet distanced kind of feel reminiscent of the the great French Filmmaker, Robert Bresson. The film was financed by the Film Finance Corporation (FFC) responsible for initiating the New Indian Cinema with Bhuvan Shome (1969) and Uski Roti. It was violently attacked in the popular press for dispensing with standard cinematic norms and equally defended by India’s aesthetically sensitive intelligentsia.
(Source: Internet)