A film festival by India

Starting tomorrow, cinema buffs can enjoy a festival that will screen features, shorts and documentaries

 The G5A Film Society will present the New York Indian Film Festival (2016) India Chapter, screening five features, four documentaries and four shorts. Post an inaugural function today, the festival will open with the Marathi film Highway Ek Selfie AarPar (Best Film - NYIFF 2016). Directed by Umesh Vinayak Kulkarni, the 175-minute film explores the now converging, now encroaching journeys of an assortment of people from varied backgrounds and how life, as we do not know it, unfolds. Barring the first week where the films will be screened on Tuesday and Wednesday, the rest of the festival will include screenings every Tuesday and Thursday till July 21.

City of Sleep

“There are many Indian film festivals on foreign soil, and this is a great opportunity for our films and filmmakers, where they find a diaspora audience as well as business opportunities and the filmmakers and the cast and crew are able to directly connect with them there. The idea to host the India Chapter of NYIFF 2016 was to create a networking ground for such diaspora festivals and their alumni and upcoming filmmakers — for them to understand the scope such festivals hold for them and their film,” says Anuradha Parikh, founder, G5A.

“We feel it is critical that Indian audiences get an opportunity to see these films, and these are the best of this year’s pick. Most of the films being screened are either National Award winners or have travelled extensively — and all had their NY premieres at the festival. These films often don’t make it to the local distribution network. Through our film society, we want to support and encourage contemporary Indian feature and documentary filmmakers,” she adds. Aroon Shivdasani, Executive & Artistic Director, Indo-American Arts Council (IAAC) echoes her sentiments, “This partnership enables Mumbai film aficionados to view cinema that they may never have experienced without this event. NYIFF has a passionate mission to give independent, art house, alternate filmmakers a platform to tell their stories, and these films received accolades at our recent festival in New York.”

On June 22, the audience can catch Cities of Sleep (Winner – Best Documentary at NYIFF) directed by Shaunak Sen. The 74-minute film will take you into a heady world of insurgent sleeper’s communities as well as the infamous ‘sleep mafia’ in Delhi where securing a safe sleeping spot often becomes a question of life and death for a large number of people. The festival will screen films in English, Hindi, Marathi, Bengali and Malyalam among other languages.

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