Nantes (pronounced ‘Naunnt’). Variously described as “the most livable city in all of Europe” (Time magazine, 2004), “the greenest city” in Francy (French weekly L’Express, 2003), “the best place to live” (Le Point, 2003 & 2004), this historic city is the birth place of legendary science-fiction writer Jules Verne, the man who gave us classics like ‘Around the World in 80 Days’ and ‘Journey to the Centre of the Earth’.
Located 50 km off the Atlantic coast in western France, on the banks of La Loire river, Nantes is considered the most important city in the historic city of Brittany. But for film lovers across the world, Nantes is also the place where the Festival of 3 Continents film festival has been taking place since the late1970s, its 30th anniversary edition coming up in 2008.
Brothers Phillipe and Alain Jalladeau, the directors of the festival, are old friends of India, and the testimony to that is in the long list of Indian films the festival has screened over the years, be it a retrospective of films from Southern India in one of the earlier editions to the crowning glory in 2006, when it almost managed the impossible, achieving a feat no other festival in the world has been able to come near to – of screening the entire repertoire of 36 films made by Satyajit Ray. The festival has hosted the luminaries of Indian cinema over the years, from Ray himself to modern masters like Adoor Gopalakrishnan or Manipur’s Aribam Syam Sharma.
From Indian cinema
Unfortunately for Indian cinema, this year Indian representation at the festival, held towards end-November, was minimal – of just two films, both in Malayalam. One, of course, was Gopalakrishnan’s multi-layered ‘Naalu Pennungal’ (Four Women), which is a masterly weaving together of four short stories by Thakazhi Sivasankara Pillai. The other was Murali Nair’s ‘Unni’, also in Malayalam, much different from his earlier work in that it is a simple, linear narrative of a young boy’s growing up story, which the director says is partly based on his own childhood in the hinterland of Kerala.
Gopalakrishnan’s film wowed the audience with its powerful narrative, divided into four separate segments bound together by a progressing idea. The film is up for commercial release in Poland, after doing reasonable business in Kerala. Nair’s film connected famously with a bunch of school kids who bombarded the director with a range of questions after the screening.
But what if Indian representation was very small. It was made up more than adequately by a special focus on Pakistani cinema, again a first for any international film festival. In fact, it is tougher in India to get to watch a motley collection of Pakistani cinema, as it was possible to do in Nantes this year.
Films from Pakistan
The most-prominent of the Pakistani films screened at the festival was, of course, Shoaib Mansoor’s ‘Khuda Ke Liye’ (In the Name of God), which was in the competition at the 38th International Film Festival of India (IFFI) in Goa this year. Despite its inordinate length and propensity to bring in too many aspects, the film is one of the most important cinematic creations to come out of Pakistan in recent years because of the strong stand it takes against religious fundamentalism.
Mansoor keeps the subject within the popular format, and it is no surprise that it has connected very well with the Pakistani audience making it a big Box Office hit. Naseeruddin Shah’s cameo as a reasonable Maulvi in the film keeps up the Indian interest in the film, but even otherwise, this is one project that should be released commercially in India, in reciprocation of recent permission by Pakistan to several Indian films to release commercially there.
The other Pakistani films in the package were a mix of fiction and documentary, old and new, including Anwar Kamal Pasha’s 1954 ‘Gumnam’, Masood Pervez’s 1959 Noor Jehan-starrer ‘Koel’, Sangeeta’s 1978 ‘Handful of Rice’ that is based on the same Rajinder Bedi story from which the Hema Malini-starrer ‘Ek Chadar Maili Si’ was made in India, Jamil Dehlavi’s highly-evocative 1978 ‘Towers of Silence’, A J Kardar’s 1959 ‘The Day Shall Dawn’, Javed Jabbar’s 1965 ‘Beyond the Last Mountain’, Shireen Pasha’s 2005 ‘Hima Remebers’ and a bunch of other documentaries and shorts. No wonder, the reasonably big Pakistani delegation, comprising top film star Reema Khan, directors Dehlavi and Pasha, Pakistani National Council of the Arts executive director (visual art division) Jamal Shah, distributor Satish Anand, and young filmmakers Hasan Ali – the son of Pakistani superstar Muhammad Ali – and Nida Khan, was all praise for the initiative. And yes, all of them were unequivocal about one thing – that such an effort should be replicated in India too, to strengthen India-Pakistan cinematic relations.
For competition
The competition section of the festival, which draws its name from the fact that it screens films only from Asia, Africa and Latin America, presented a fine selection of films, including Gopalakrishnan’s film. Quite interestingly, it is one of the few festivals that allow both features and documentaries compete together. And this year, the top award of the ‘Gold Air Balloon’ went to a gritty documentary called ‘Crime and Punishment’ from China, directed by Zhao Liang, that presented an evocative image of the contradictions facing contemporary China through the tale of young Chinese guards posted at a police station along the China-North Korea border. The second prize of ‘Silver Air Balloon’ went to South African director John Barker’s ‘Bunny Chow Know Thuyself’, a fantastically-uproarious look into the weekend journey of three stand-up comedians. The film’s actors together won the Best Actor award while Oh Jung-Hae won the best actress award for South Korean film ‘Beyond The Years’ of Im Kwon Taek.
Among the highlights of the festival this year were retrospectives of Japanese master Nagisa Oshima and Argentine director Mario Soffici’s works, but the festival was not just about cinema. It was also about soaking in the Nantes experience, the experience of a city where even trams stop to let pedestrians cross the street, which definitely is unnerving for anyone living in a city like Delhi, where officially pedestrians have the first right on roads, but if anyone taking it seriously runs the risk of getting mortally injured at the least.
For a city that is not at all cosmopolitan when compared to Paris, located around 600 km away, Nantes offers an excellent choice of restaurants offering food from all corners of the globe, something that kept the foodie sort of festival delegates busy throughout. Nantes surely holds a lesson for all those upcoming film festivals in how to develop one’s own identity by having a particular focus and building upon it year upon year, almost merging the festival’s identity with that of the city.
