London Indian Film Festival: The Satyajit Ray Foundation Short Film Competition ‘We were ten minutes away from cancelling tonight and sending you all home,’ begins the festival spokeswoman as everyone settles into position. We’re at the Nehru Building in Central London, where afternoon is turning into evening. From a first floor window comes the distant hum of a Rolls Royce and the clinking of pints that cost £4.20. But on a street where Michelle Obama has been known to pop into the local, it’s strangely reassuring that the DVD player can break.
Still, the lights go down and the show goes on. First up, via laptop and overhead projector, is ‘Amar’, which documents a day in the life of a young boy who dreams of escaping poverty. Actually, it’s a pretty dull watch, perhaps because of the assumption that its images of famine are hard-hitting enough, without the need of, say, background, conclusion or entertainment. Its maker – last seen by the samosas – accepts his muted applause.
Films two and three are a slight improvement. The former is fittingly haphazard in its study of street graffiti, which it describes as a natural reaction to state repression and the hell of war. The latter is a flawed, but ultimately touching drama about fighting families and a murdered son. The clinking and the humming continue…
Next is ‘The Boxing Ladies’. A documentary about three national-level boxing sisters, it gets the first laughs of the night thanks to their anecdotes, which always seem to end with “… so then I punched him”. Think of Million Dollar Baby but real and breaking even stronger social taboos. There is nevertheless a graveness to their situation, as their parents are relying on them to make it big. The fifth film is a disappointing drama, which still has the festival’s most potent scene, in which a man finds his home demolished by corrupt policemen.
The penultimate effort announces itself with an ominous list of awards already received. After seeing it, however, it probably deserved them. A drama about a boy whose hair is shaved off in mourning for his grandfather, it’s funny, poignant and nicely shot, all with a strong underlying theme of tradition versus change. ‘Vitthal’ is the best film of the night. There’s just time for film seven, a beautifully shot but altogether forgettable seven minutes that pass by without ever saying anything.
And that concludes the Satyajit Ray Short Film Competition, which will announce its winner on July 12th. Most of the films have shown a world where the main objective is still to get through the day; a world where kids still have to work; and where wealth seems unfairly distributed indeed. With that, the lights come on and we make our way down into the Mayfair night.
The films…
1. ‘Amar’ by Andrew Hinton
2. ‘The Talking Walls of Lahore’ by Numra Siddiqui
3. ‘My Lad’ by Sami Khan
4. ‘The Boxing Ladies’ by Anusha Nandakumar
5. ‘Zaroorat’ by George Mangalath Thomas
6. ‘Vitthal’ by Vinoo Choliparambil
7. ‘Home’ by Krish Shrikumar
