JOIN USAfter being organised in Karachi (Pakistan) and Chittagong (Bangladesh), the 10th edition of the ‘Travelling Film Southasia 2016 – A festival of South Asian Documentaries’ marked its presence in the city recently.
The festival, an offshoot of Kathmandu’s biennial Film Southasia (FSA) festival, screened a vibrant mix of non-fiction films on politics, culture and society of the South Asian region at the India International Centre. “After each FSA festival, about a dozen films are selected to travel across the subcontinent, and the world, as the Travelling Film Southasia (TFSA) package,” said Mitu Varma, director, Film Southasia, Kathmandu.
“It is required that non-fiction films take centre stage because they give you an avenue to voice your concerns and question status quo in times when the media itself is practising censorship and not bringing out certain issues like the other side of poverty and terror,” she added.
From trailing the lives of two individuals and understanding the politics of sleep within the infamous sleep mafia in Delhi in Shaunak Sen’s Cities of Sleep; tracing the displacement of an old man and his family from Waziristan and how they live in a refugee camp in Ammar Aziz’s, A Walnut Tree (which won Ram Bahadur Trophy for best film), to tracing the genesis of the Coke Studio and search of identity by Pakistanis in Journey Within, the travelling festival screened 10 documentaries.
The final 10 films that made it to the city were selected from 42 documentaries that were screened in the competitive section of FSA 2015. These films were encapsulative of the flavours of the subcontinent with films from Nepal, Myanmar, India, Pakistan and Sri Lanka, and were a mix of award winners (at the main festival) and those selected by the jury to showcase the “variety, treatment and intensity of non-fiction”. “For us, the binding theme is South Asia. We started the travelling festival so that we can take it to cities and smaller towns. These are familiar subjects, and people, both at the regional and global level enjoy it,” mentioned Varma.
While News from Jaffna traced a young reporter’s tryst in covering press freedom in Sri Lanka, Khoon Diy Baarav (Blood Leaves It’s Trail) explored memory and resistance in Kashmir. “These filmmakers find courage and fortitude to make films on such subjects and get them screened. It is remarkable that some of them have now started marketing their films. The scenario is changing as compared to how difficult it was when we started off in 1997,” said Varma.
In addition to the main festival in Kathmandu, FSA organises screenings, discussions and workshops across South Asia to promote South Asian non-fiction. “Non-fiction films are an important part of media and they not only reflect the societal challenges and political climate of the times but also enable filmmakers to discover their potential,” Varma told Metrolife.
As the festival marked Myanmar’s entry with an observational documentary Tyres — a black and white portrayal of how a community of tyre cutters and recyclers make things out of defunct tyres — Varma said, “We are now looking at entries from Afghanistan as well where a lot of film schools have mushroomed lately.”