50th IFFI pays homage to the New Indian cinema

The schedule for the 50th edition of the International Film Festival of India (IFFI) is out, revealing that the golden jubilee edition of India’s most prominent film festival will have a retrospective of the New Indian Cinema.

The New Indian Cinema, sometimes called the Indian New Wave, was a movement of sorts that started in the late 1960s and went on till the 90s, where filmmakers used experimental narrative techniques to present complex social issues.

Many filmmakers associated with the New Cinema were passouts from the Film and Television Institute of India, where they were exposed to the best of European cinema.

The New Wave movement often stood in stark contrast to the cinema of bollywood as well as the realistic tone of Bengali auteur Satyajit Ray.

In fact, some of the New Wave filmmakers, such as John Abraham (Malayalam and Tamil), Kumar Shahani (Hindi) and Mani Kaul (Hindi) — all of whose films are being screened at the festival — consciously moved away from what they saw as the Hollywood-inspired style of Ray.

Some other New Cinema filmmakers such as Adoor Gopalakrishnan (Malayalam) and Shyam Benegal (Hindi) acknowledged Ray’s influences.

Other filmmakers included in the retrospective are Ritwik Ghatak (Bengali), Mrinal Sen (Bengali), G Aravindan (Malayalam).

IFFI begins on November 20 and concludes on November 28.