Third Eye 14th Asian Film Festival, 2015, III: Bad features, good shorts
Two national awards, one for the best film in its language (Haryanvi, spoken in the north Indian state of Haryana, which shares its capital Chandigarh with Punjab) and another for best supporting actress do not contribute to a completely predictable story that drags for far too long. Pagadi (meaning turban), also titled Pagadi—The Honour, is about the heartless custom of killing young men and women who fall in love with members of another community, and is termed ‘honour killing’, for marrying into another community would bring dishonor to the families. Director Rajeev Bhatia assisted Ketan Mehta and Mukul S. Anand, but it doesn’t show. What is seen is a TV style narrative (Bhatia has directed some 25 TV serials), with few elements to praise, except for the laudable cause. It’s his debut film, so we hope he will mature.
The moment you have a mentally or physically challenged character as your lead, audiences tend to overlook film-making lapses. Not when those lapses are as loud and blatant as in Bhidu (‘partner’, in Marathi and Mumbai slang). Actor-writer-director Milind Shinde, in his second directorial foray, is all over the place. He is not a bad actor and tries hard to infuse his differently-abled character with some life. But you cannot help feeling that he does not fit the role. Again, there was no need to cast a 35 looking actress as his 60 looking mother. As Shinde admitted himself, the editor has salvaged by inserting NG (not good) takes, not entirely a commendable idea.
If you want to know what an over-the-top Kannada film looks like, Marana Dandane (Death Sentence) is the film for you. Stock characters, stagey performances, deafening dialogue, contortionists galore… it has them all. Most cineastes will find it impossible to sit through the 115 minutes that this sentence lasts. In terms of cinematic treatment, it is a hark-back to the days of the 40s/50s. Writer-director Barguru Ramchandrappa is 68, and probably very nostalgic.
Iranian films dominated this section of the festival, both in terms of quantity and quality. Mirror and Water was a good example. It won the Best Short Film Award at the 3rd Wimbledon Shorts, a London short film festival that took place in England on July 10 and 11 last year. The film, directed by Kurdish filmmaker Bijan Zamanpira, is about an itinerant, rural showman, who makes a good living from people who want to look at themselves in his mirror. Everything goes well until a rival, with better technology, forces him to “reflect” on his future. Novel idea, as is the norm with Iranian script-writers, and high level of competence.
Brilliant is the word to describe Babak Habibifar’s The Fish and I (Iran). Habibifar has acted and donned many other hats as well. A simple, short tale about a blind man who accidentally breaks his fish-bowl and then gets down to saving the fish’s life rising way above his visual impairment. The catalogue says 6 min, but it felt like 2 min. Excellent camerawork and editing too.
The Season of Return (Abbas Amini) is a 13-minute short about a boy who accidentally kills a man, on the very day his father is due to be released from prison. Fearing obvious consequences, he and his friends devise a plan, to save him from the obvious consequences. Not brilliant, though watchable.
A brief idea gets 3 minutes of screen time in Help (Mahdieh Ahmadi Soleymani), about a boy suffering from cerebral palsy who liberates a fish from what he sees as the suffocating confinement in water, since he feels suffocated under the shower. The Seventh Day (Bita Elamin) spreads its seven days years apart. A couple is on the verge of separation, when they discover that the woman is pregnant, with twins, a boy and girl, and one of them must die to save her. Bita Elamin imparts good treatment, but the con-incidence is a bit far-fetched.
Babak Safshekan’s Borj (also written as Burj)/The Tower is about a real estate broker. He shows a flat to a lady, but she shows preference for another flat, in a tower. He is the broker for that flat too, and is it is empty, but suddenly he sees a woman flitting around there. It is a suspense story, with a climactic twist that will have you chuckling. Short-story writer, director and editor Safshekan is an M.A. in Cinema from the Tehran Art University.
To select the top two films, TEAFF had three judges. All three doubled up, since Mohan Agashe was attending as co-producer and lead actor of Astu/So Be It (Marathi), Manju Borah had her film Dau Huduni Methai/ Song of the Horned Owl (Assamese; Bodo language) and Cacoly Shahneoyaj came with Nodijon/The River of Colour (BanglaDesh). I saw Astu and wrote about it in my earlier piece, I have seen Dau Huduni Methai at another festival, earlier. Coming to The River of Colour, it was not possible to stay on for this 135 minute film, scheduled for an 8 pm show. She insisted that I should not only see it, but write a review full of unbridled praise. I offered to interview her instead, but she claimed her diary was full.
Their verdict put Broken Image in the second place. A photographer finds himself in the not so uncommon dilemma of getting good pictures or saving the victim of a heinous crime. An Indian entry, directed by V.K. Arvind and set in South India, it a well-made film. Did it deserve the second position? Debatable.
On the other hand, there was little doubt about the Iranian film Ice Water, by Jalal Seyyedpanahi, winning the Best Short Film award. The film recounts the story of an old man, an ice vendor, who knows better than anyone else how to save water from the droplets melting from ice. He gets water from ice and ice from water in a cycle which has become a part of his life. In October 2015, it competed in the Izmir Short Film Festival. Iran's Cultural Attaché in Mumbai, Mehdi Zare, received the award on behalf of Seyyedpanahi. Obviously, modest film festivals cannot fly winners down just to give them awards.