Jul 29, 2015

2nd Aug 2015; Shivendra Singh Dungarpur's CELLULOID MAN





CELLULOID MAN

Documentary by Shivendra Singh Dungarpur
2012 / India/ 164 min
5.45pm / 2nd Aug 2015/ Perks Mini Theater

Celluloid Man screening is part of Thamizh Studio’s  2015 Lenin award function. Sri. P.K Nair will be receiving the 2015 Lenin Award at Chennai on Aug 15th 2015.


Celluloid Man is a tribute to film archivist and  cinephile extraordinaire  P.K. Nair, a man whose childhood fascination with cinema finally led to the creation of the National Film Archive of India. In a country where film preservation was once regarded as irrelevant, Nair's has been a long, hard fight to preserve precious fragments of India's film heritage that would otherwise be lost forever.

Comparable to France's late, great 'man of cinema', the noted film archivist Henri Langlois, Nair has also influenced generations of Indian filmmakers by introducing them to new worlds through the prism of cinema. Featuring wonderful clips and interviews with many Indian and international filmmakers, this award-winning documentary is both a portrait of a man's passion with film and a love letter to cinema itself.

The film is a deeply personal and nostalgic take on the life of P. K. Nair, the man almost wholly responsible for what is now known as the National Film Archives of India (NFAI), in Pune. And through the journey of the film, we also understand what true passion for cinema is; how someone can be so devoted to collecting and archiving films for posterity, because he understands what very few people do – that perhaps films offer the most comprehensive and indicative representation of the times, even if most of the films he collected and archived were ‘fiction’.

Shot by some of the foremost cinematographers in India - names like Santosh Thundiyil, K. U. Mohanan, Mahesh Aney, Vikas Sivaraman, Kiran Deohans and the likes – the film also looks at Mr. Nair’s life through the eyes of the some of the most respected names in Indian cinema; a number of them being former students of Mr. Nair from the Film & Television Institute of India. Through rich anecdotes and little stories that highlight the man’s tireless work and the result of it – prints of tens of thousands of film from across the world stored, the work of great masters worth many times their weight in gold - the film is a heartfelt ride that is inspiring and humbling at the same time.Celluloid Man will move you, and will reinforce the fact that cinema is life.                                                  
 (Source: Internet)






Shivendra Singh Dungarpur

Shivendra Singh Dungarpur (born 25 August 1969) is an award-winning filmmaker, producer, film archivist and restorer. Following a successful career as a maker of ad-films and documentaries, he has established the Film Heritage Foundation in 2014.Shivendra Singh Dungarpur belongs to the royal family of Dungarpur State in Rajasthan. After graduating from St. Stephen's Delhi, he joined Film and Television Institute of India (FTII) at Pune. After that he started Dungarpur Films in 2001.
Shivendra Singh is a patron of the British Film Institute and was a donor for the restoration of Alfred Hitchcock's silent film, The Lodger: A Story of the London FogHe facilitated the restoration of the Indian film, Uday Shankar's Kalpana (1948), by Martin Scorsese's World Cinema Foundation, that was premiered in the Cannes Film Festival Classic section in 2012. In 2013, Shivendra collaborated with the World Cinema Foundation again for the restoration of the 1972 Sinhalese film "Nidhanaya"


Shivendra's first feature length film was the 2012 documentary Celluloid Man, a film about P. K. Nair, India's pioneering film archivist who was the founder-director of the National Film Archive of India. Shivendra began filming the documentary in 2010 and it was completed in May 2012. The film premiered at the Il Cinema Ritrovato Festival in Bologna, Italy on June 26, 2012.

Jul 13, 2015

19th July 2015; Pawel Pawlikowski's IDA


IDA
A film by Pawel Pawlikowski
Year ; 2013 / Country : Poland
Black & White / Run time : 83 minutes
19th July 2015 / 5.45pm
Perks Mini Theater


Set in the Poland of 1962 and composed of austerely gorgeous black and white images, Pawel Pawlikowski’s "Ida" could fit right into the "Masterpieces" series. Main protagonist  Anna (Agata Trzebokowska) is an 18-year-old orphan who was raised in that convent. 


When she is preparing to take her vows, her Mother Superior insists that first she meet her one known relative. That is an aunt, Wanda (Agneta Kulesza), a former prosecutor with a high Communist Party rank whose dissolute life of smoking, drinking and bedding men stands in stark contrast to the ascetic existence of her sheltered niece.


Aunt Wanda tells her that her real name is Ida (pronounced Eeda), that she is Jewish and that her parents were killed during World War II. Aunt and niece drive back to the village of Anna’s parents in an effort to discover how they died and where they were buried. Although this quest is central to the narrative, "Ida" is anything but plot-driven. It’s a film of moments, observations and moods.


Few recent films can claim a visual approach as striking as that which cinematographers Lukasz Zal and Ryszard Lenczewski give "Ida." Filmed in the unusual, boxy aspect ratio of 1.37:1, and most often deployed in static long shots, the film’s images sometimes suggest Vermeer lighting with the color taken away, and the compositions manage to seem at once classical and off-handed, with the subjects often located in the screen’s two bottom quadrants. The effect is to draw the viewer’s eye into the beauty of the image while simultaneously maintaining a contemplative distance from the drama.


Ida, starting as a woman of unquestioned faith is forced by circumstances to embrace the complexity of who she is, and the question of the film is not whether this knowledge will change her but how and how much. There are no easy answers to the riddles life poses, none at all.

(Source: Internet)





Pawel Pawlikowski

A literature and philosophy graduate, with extensive post-graduate work at Oxford on German literature, Polish-born Pawel Pawlikowski started as a documentary filmmaker in British television. His second feature, Last Resort (2000), earned him international critical acclaim at numerous festivals, including Toronto and Sundance, and won the 2001 British Academy of Film and Television Arts (BAFTA) award for "Most Promising Newcomer in British Film." His next film, My Summer Of Love (2004), won the Alexander Korda Award for Best British Film at the BAFTA Awards in 2005.

In 2011, he wrote and directed a film loosely adapted from Douglas Kennedy's novel The Woman in the Fifth. On 19 October 2013, his film Ida (starring Agata Kulesza) won the Best Film Award at the London Film Festival. "Ida" won the 2015 Academy Award for Foreign Language Film on February 23, 2015.