FESTIVAL
SNIPPETS
The five-member
festival jury was watching two to three films a day at the FD Auditorium,
finding themselves free for only two daytime events: the gala lunches hosted
by Minister Jaipal Reddy and Festival Director Malti Sahai.
 Jury Chairman Istvan Gaal, a festival celebrity several
times over, values his annual two-month teaching stints at FTII, carrying
group photographs of each year’s students and recalling their names
with ease.
Halfway through the festival, a contrite and worried
jury member, the director of the film Burkino Faso, Idrissa Ouedraogo, was
forced to rush back to Paris. On the day he left, he sat bleary-eyed late
into the night with only an hour to go before he had to rush to catch his
flight, seeing all the remaining competitive films and filing in his nominations.
His lovely wife, Sannata, remained till the end of the
festival.
 South Korean
jury member Kim Dong-Ho, director of the year-old Pusan Film Festival which
paid tributes to Adoor Gopalakrishnan last year, travelled light, half his
luggage reserved for his tennis regalia. On his last day he played golf
(“and won!”, he told us). Being a respected cultural government
official for most of his career, he was interested in learning all about
India’s film scene and policies. I&B Secretary, S Kamalnathan met
him specifically for this purpose for over an hour.
Jury member Sharmila
Tagore delighted her colleagues by gifting them with carefully selected CD
tapes of Indian classical music.
 Iranian
jury member Rakshan Banietemad’s retrospective was extremely well-received,
leaving her surrounded by people wanting to talk to her or interview her.
Her vivacious Farsi-language interpreter, Sara Hassan, was so overworked
that on the last day of the festival, she lost her voice!
A popular figure at
the festival was the ever-jubilant Baba Varma. A firebrand who left his
home-town, Agra, when he was in his teens, Varma wandered all over Europe
(Germany in particular), honing his professional skills while earning at
McDonalds or playing professional chess. He then wound up in Los Angeles,
to create his one-man entertainment bandwagon, one of his goals being to
link India to the American musical scene. His company, Baba Records is doing
great business and is responsible for introducing the qawwali and Nusrat
Fateh Ali Khan to the US. Baba is now starting his film company, Baba Films,
through which he plans to bring Hollywood films to India and vice-versa.
He is also all set to build a multiplex in Agra. “Should be ready by
next year,” he informs. Baba is the man who has brought over 70 films
to the Indian film festivals over the past five years. His close links with
major companies such as Miramax and Warner has made him the man who brings
prize festival entries to India. One year he brought the invaluable Kieslowski
trilogy. This year he was instrumental in bringing 10 films, which indlude
The Wings Of The Dove, Dinner, She’s So Lovely and the closing night
film that played to a packed, rapt audience, The English
Patient.
 Both Mira
Nair and Deepa Mehta were in Delhi during the festival but were too preoccupied
to pay much attention to it. Nair was visiting family and friends. Mehta
was hard at work on the Delhi shoot of her next film, Earth. The two made
one grand exception. Both attended specially arranged private screenings
of Rajan Khosa’s impressive debut feature, Swara Mandal (Dance Of The
Wind). They were very impressed, and congratulated Khosa extensively and
were wowed by Kitu Gidwani’s performance and that of the remarkable
basti child actress Roshan Bano.
The clear winner in
the Panorama package was Jayaraj’s exquisite and insightful Kaliyattam,
an intrinsically rural Kerala version of Othello. Noted Japanese critic and
director Tadao Sato and his wife rushed to Jayaraj immediately after the
screening and invited the film to the ‘Focus On Asia’ section of
the Fukuoka International Film Festival to be held in
September. |
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