International Association of Women in Radio and Television, India Chapter
11TH IAWRT ASIAN WOMEN’S FILM FESTIVAL 3-5 March, 2015
India International Centre, New Delhi
IIC MAIN AUDITORIUM
3 MARCH 2015 10:00 am – 11:45 am
GOOD STUFF | Short fiction | Israel | 25min | 2013 Dir: Neta Braun
AN UNTITLED LIFE | Documentary | Myanmar | 22min | 2008 Dir: Shin Daewe
A claustrophobic journey filled with extreme encounters, in which a woman searches desperately for hope and redemption.
As a new work takes shape on a canvas in painter Rahula’s studio, we learn how this easy-going artist has managed to survive a sizable chunk of Myanmar’s chequered history.
CLEANING TIME | Short fiction | Israel | 15min | 2013 Dir: Alamork Marsha
AMHYA – SHARE | Documentary | Myanmar | 18min | 2014 Dir: Mya Darli Aung
Assegedu, a 40 year old Ethiopian woman, makes a living cleaning the homes of rich people. One afternoon things go wrong and she finds herself in a moral and economical dilemma.
The film documents an age-old but now dwindling tradition in which monks cook up a meal from leftovers. The meal they make symbolises Buddhist precepts of unity and sharing.
Followed by discussion with Thet Su Hlaing, filmmaker from Yangon Film School
12:15 pm – 01:30 pm SOUNDPHILES A Celebration of Listening Pahadi Pastoralists (05:26) by Aditi Pinto Lonely Lives (03: 12) by Itika Singh Emergency Control Room (07: 04) by Maraa [Ekta Mittal, Angarika Guha, Shruthi Menon] Saving Disgrace (03:25) by Pooja Das Sarkar & Vimal Mylon
Swimming Pool (04:02) by Madiha Aijaz Riverrun 2013 (02:35) by Sindhu Thirumalaisamy Levels (04:33) by Sindhu Thirumalaisamy Number Unreachable (05:00) by Usha Rao
Followed by discussion with the sound artists
02:30 pm – 03:50 pm PLAY ON THE PLAY | Animation | Afghanistan | 5min | 2013 Dir: Lajaward Haqiqi The story of a man who is living inside a locked room. This room turns around in different angles and throws him about… THE REEL | Animation | Afghanistan | 4min | 2012 Dir: Lajaward Haqiqi This film shows how listening to music is a legitimate need of all human beings, and for the people of Afghanistan, the freedom they do not have at present.
Followed by discussion with the filmmaker
USTAD ABDUL RASHID KHAN | Documentary | India | 23min | 2013 Dir: Mithila Hegde At 105, Ustad Abdul Rashid Khan is the oldest living and practising Hindustani vocalist in the country. The film portrays his profound perspective on music, spirituality and life. BASHEERA | Short Fiction | India | 14min | 2014 Dir: Ratika Singh Who has not lost a friend? Set in rural Punjab, the film explores a man’s ever-deepening desire to reunite with his first and most memorable friend from school.
Followed by discussion with the filmmaker
FESTIVAL PARTNERS
IIC MAIN AUDITORIUM
3 MARCH 2015 04:10 pm – 05:30 pm COMPILATION OF EXPERIMENTAL FILMS - I
FARAWAYS | Australia | 10min | 2012 Dir: Audrey Lam
SEWING ROOM | Singapore | 5min | 2005 Dir: Ang Sookoon
An empty urban landscape echoes the isolation of two girls far from home.
The craft of the monotonous daily routine of a sewing room extends beyond its contained realm.
BLACK SUN | Vietnam | 11min | 2010 Dir: Que Chi Truong
MOUNT SONG | India-USA | 8min | 2013 Dir: Shambhavi Kaul
The film captures the image of a young couple, strolling around Saigon, the most exciting city of Vietnam.
A current runs underneath. It creeps under the door, makes its way into the cracks, revealing, obfuscating or breaking as clouds in the sky.
JO HA KYU | Vietnam | 11min | 2012 Dir: Nguyen Trinh Thi
SCIENTIST MEETS THE STORYTELLER | UK | 5min | 2011 Dir: Aindri Chakraborty
Conflict and co-existence of the concrete and abstract worlds, between objective observances and subjective experience.
A moth collector finds an artefact that belongs to a storyteller and realizes in the process that stories cannot be contained.
Followed by discussion with the filmmaker
QIAN MEN NO. 1 HOSTEL | China | 12min | 2008 Dir: Tan Tan It is a film about time, history, and memory. In a very old hotel, a woman in a red cheong-sam appears, and disappears. But this is not a story about her...
06:00 pm – 08:30 pm FELICITATION OF FILMMAKERS AND SOUND ARTISTS THE FRIED FISH | Animation | Iran | 11min | 2014 Dir: Leila Khalilzadeh
PROFESSION: DOCUMENTARIST | Documentary | Iran | 80min | 2013 Dirs: Shirin Barghnavard, Firouzeh Khosrovani, Farahnaz Sharifi, Mina Keshavarz, Sepideh Abtahi, Sahar Salahshoor, Nahid Rezaei
The fish is yearning to see the sea once again… But what is the price he pays to go home, away from those out to consume his flesh?
Seven independent female documentary filmmakers from Iran talk about their personal and professional lives, concerns and challenges in a seven part autobiographical film.
Followed by discussion with Sahar Salahshoor
IIC MAIN AUDITORIUM
4 MARCH 2015 10:00 am – 12:10 pm
FOR THE LOVE OF A CAT | Animation | India | 4min | 2013 Dir: Students of Ecole Mondiale World School
KAPHAL | Feature fiction | India | 91min | 2013 Dir: Batul Mukhtiar
A short cut-out animation film based on a Buddha Story by Rosalind Wilson, created by a team of young Grade VII animators using aboriginal and Bhil art style
Makar and Kamru live in a small village in Garhwal. Life changes when father returns after five years, leading to many adventures. On the way, the boys learn many lessons, including that people are not always what they seem, and magic may work in unpredictable ways.
Followed by discussion with resource person Tehzeeb Khurana
Followed by discussion with the filmmaker
12:30 pm – 01:40 pm DEVIL IN THE BLACK STONE | Short fiction | India | 21min | 2013 Dir: Ananya Kasaravalli The film revolves around three women in a small tenement atop a hill. It shows how all humans become equal in the eyes of greed and the tricks it plays on ours …
Followed by discussion with the cameraperson Udit Khurana
KOI DEKHNE WALA HAI? | Documentary | India | 19min | 2014 Dir: Shilpi Saluja This film explores the sense of touch and music in the lives of children in a residential school. It depicts the relationship that these children share with the world around them.
Followed by discussion with filmmaker
02:30 pm – 04:00 pm DRAGONFLY AND SNAKE | Documentary | India | 17min | 2013 Dir: Lipika Singh Darai
I FOR IRAN | Documentary | Iran | 50min | 2014 Dir: Sanaz Azari
The film is a conversation between a girl and her grand aunt who she calls ‘Aai’. She spent all her summer vacations with Aai in her village. Now she lives far removed in the big city working as a sound recordist.
Brussels, behind the closed doors of a classroom. Using a textbook dating from the Islamic revolution, Sanaz Azari, the director, learns how to read and write in Persian, her mother tongue, the lessons becoming a gateway to the history and culture of Iran.
Followed by discussion with filmmaker
04:30 pm – 06:00 pm KELI | Animation | India | 7min | 2014 Dir: Ranjitha Rajeevan
DANCING ZEMPUKUJI | Documentary | Japan | 50min | 2013 Dir: Yumiko Hayakawa
Little Ponnu is fascinated by Pottan Theyyam, an ancient rebel who stood for equality. She dreams to be like him, dance like him, but she realizes how difficult it is for `her’ to be like `him’.
The film documents the song and dance of those who live in Zempukuji, tucked in a corner of Tokyo’s Western district. It aims to reawaken something sleeping within us all, to open our eyes, catch our spirit and send us into a dance.
Followed by discussion with filmmaker
Followed by discussion with filmmaker
06:30 pm – 08:10 pm OH! STARGAZER | Animation | Hong Kong - USA | 6min | 2013 Dir: Jessica Poon The story takes place in a sleepless night, a restless city. The stargazer, sleeping offshore, is woken up by the fish zodiacs from across the ocean and navigates back home.
MY NAME IS SALT | Documentary | Switzerland-India | 92min | 2013 Dir: Farida Pacha Year after year, for an endless eight months, thousands of families move to a desert in Kutch to extract salt from the burning earth. Every monsoon their salt fields are washed away, as the desert turns into sea. And still they return, striving to make the whitest salt in the world.
KAMALADEVI COMPLEX
4 MARCH 2015 11:00 am – 12:00 noon
DRIVING TEST | Documentary | Afghanistan-France | 25min | 2011 Dir: Mahbouba Ibrahimi A young woman struggles to get her driver’s license and to join a company of taxi drivers where there are only men.
DOPPELGANGER | Short fiction | Taiwan | 26min | 2013 Dir: Hsieh Ting-hang Dai-De is a young mortician who has been stealing gold teeth from his dead “customers.” But as temptation turns to greed, he will discover that some corpses are best left untouched.
APRIL 21 | Animation | Hong Kong-USA | 4min | 2014 Dir: Jessica Poon An extended geographical metaphor that compares geometries and cubical shapes to anxiety.
12:00 noon – 01:30 pm BEYOND THE WAVE | Documentary | Germany | 83min | 2013 Dir: Kyoko Miyake A gentle and powerful exploration of how a community was swayed by corporations to demand a nuclear plant in their town. Kyoko Miyake takes us to the once picturesque town of Namie where her loving aunt used to live. After the tsunami and the ever expanding radiation from the nuclear plant at Fukushima county, “atomic” aunt Kuniko is among the many left homeless and confused.
02:30 pm – 04:10 pm JOURNEY | Short fiction | Hong Kong | 28min | 2013 Dir: Wong Chin-Yan Doris
THE BAG | Documentary | Myanmar | 9min | 2011 Dir: Thet Su Hlaing
Hong Kong is an international financial centre and its skyrocketing property prices are the most expensive in the world. People toil all their lives to pay mortgages. Dreaming is a luxury in this city, and Rachel and Ronald struggle between pursuing their dreams and facing reality.
While construction workers build an extension next door, Daw Nar Ku quietly creates a strikingly patterned traditional Lahu bag.
POTTER’S SONG | Documentary | Myanmar | 23min | 2013 Dir: Hnin Ei Hlaing This portrait of a community of potters in the town of Twante west of Yangon is suffused with the music, warmth and humour of a hard-working, resilient people, plying a craft that is already dwindling in Myanmar’s fast-changing environment.
LAST KISS | Documentary | Myanmar | 22min | 2014 Dir: Seng Mai Kinraw One-time film director Jaing Chying runs a women’s shelter near Kachin Independence Army HQ in Laiza. Every day since civil war resumed between the Myanmar military and the Kachin Independence Organisation, she has written and recited a poem.
Followed by discussion with Thet Su Hlaing, filmmaker from Yangon Film School.
04:30 pm – 06:00 pm COMPILATION OF EXPERIMENTAL FILMS - II NOON DAY DISPENSARY | India | 26min | 2014 Dir: Priya Sen
NIGHT NOON | India-USA | 11min | 2014 Dir: Shambhavi Kaul
Noon Day Dispensary produces the ʻunsettling gazeʼ, as a possible cinematic gesture with which to respond to the systematic neglect of institutions within an anxious and burdened state.
Unmoving rock collapsed to ocean, geology’s ‘thrust and fold’ becomes the unlikely habitat for two actors’ shadowy encounters with sand, waves, night, desert, dread, calm, trepidation and escape.
Followed by discussion with filmmaker LOST IN HOME | China | 29min | 2013 Dir: Tan Tan The film consists of thousands of pictures, poetic plots and a live performance—all that happened in a 100 year old community under demolition.
LET GO AVIARY | Singapore | 3min | 2004 Dir: Ang Sookoon Solitary without solitude … FISH LOVE | India | 12min | 2014 Dir: Gayatri Kodikal
I am the kind of fish who lives in sludge, the slimy undergrowth below this pond. I am madly in love with a fisherwoman, who visits the pond. Followed by discussion with filmmaker
IIC MAIN AUDITORIUM
5 MARCH 2015 10:00 am – 11:20 am
DEATH AND THE MAIDEN | Documentary | Israel-Germany | 30min | 2014 Dir: Yael Lotem
I HAVE ONLY ONE LANGUAGE; IT IS NOT MINE | Experimental | India | 30min | 2014 Dir: Mithu Sen
Shortly after WWII, over 1000 paintings were found in a Cellar in southern France. They were created by a Young-Jewish artist called Charlotte Salomon depicting her turbulent life story in a unique creation named: “Life? Or Theater?”
The work, originally an installation, engages with the idea of radical hospitality, exploring in the process the limitations of language and the possibility of dialogue outside it.
Followed by discussion with the editor Anupama Chandra
11:45 am – 01:30 pm THE LAST ADIEU | Documentary | India | 90min | 2013 Dir: Shabnam Sukhdev A personal quest of a filmmaker’s daughter to unravel the past and make a connection with her father, S. Sukhdev, who died suddenly at the age of 46, leaving behind a huge body of work in documentary films and an unresolved relationship with her.
Followed by discussion with filmmaker
02:30 pm – 04:00 pm RAAH | Documentary | India | 19min | 2014 Dir: Radhika Fatania
FRAGMENTS OF PEACE | Experimental | UK | 16min | 2014 Dir: Lin Li
Radhika, the director explores her own indecisiveness about her life and career. She learns how challenging is it for an aspiring young lady to fight the filters carved out by society and follow her desires to become an independent filmmaker.
Using a mixture of interviews (with local residents in an idyllic location in the Scottish Borders) and a fictional narrative (inspired by an old Chinese tale), the film considers the questions of what constitutes peace and whether peace is attainable.
Followed by discussion with filmmaker
Followed by discussion with filmmaker
PAVA | Short fiction | India | 10min | 2014 Dir: Vaishnavi Sundararajan A contemporary Indian suburb. A young, budding sportsperson, her barber, and their casual chit-chat which blossoms into a close friendship. However as she and her career grow, things take a different turn.
Followed by discussion with filmmaker
04:30 pm – 06:15 pm CHHATRABHANG | Imageography CineArt Film Poem | India | 84min | 1975 Dir: NinaSugati SR Shivdasani Rovshen A stark, true life incident awakens and reveals the innermost desire for social change and transformation in the people of rural India. An unusual poetic docu-drama with a socio-eco-political analysis of hierarchy and caste relations.
Followed by discussion with filmmaker
06:30 pm – 08:30 pm MAINE DILLI NAHIN DEKHA | Animation | Bangladesh-India | 19min | 2014 Dir: Humaira Bilkis
SELF PORTRAIT: BUILDING THE BRIDGE AT 47 KM | Documentary | China | 76min | 2014 Dir: Zhang Mengqi
The film is a journey of exploring a new city. The filmmaker discovers the soul of the city not in its museums, mausoleums and architecture but in her relationship with its people.
Through the act of making the film, she tries to build a bridge between the older generation and the children. It is an evocative and self reflexive work that observes the gentle rhythm of rural life even as it speaks about a dark phase.
Followed by discussion with filmmaker
