“Jashn” in New York

In a week from now Jashn-e-Azadi will screen in New York at the MIACC 09 – Mahindra Indo-American Arts Council Film Festival – which describes itself as “New York’s Indian Film Festival”. The film will be screened as part of IN FRAME: KASHMIR a Sidebar Program of MIACC 09, organised in collaboration with Alwan for the Arts & 3rd i NY Monthly Collaborative Screening of Arab & South Asian Cinema.

“From fictional narratives to documentary, from feature films for the big screen to multi-media and short films on the web, the complexities of Kashmir as investigated and interpreted by filmmakers in India and in the US. MIAAC09 presents a special focus on Kashmir.

In addition to the screenings below, IN FRAME: KASHMIR will include the screening of Santosh Sivan’s Tahaan, Onir’s short film Omar, and a video installation at Aicon Gallery of MTV Iggy’s short films from their Change: Kashmir media initiative, and Parthiv Shah’s single-channel work, Barbed Wires and Beautiful Skies. A special panel discussion, Kashmir on Film, will take place at NYU Tisch School of the Arts.

Program details of IN FRAME: KASHMIR as well as all other MIAAC09 events are available at http://www.iaac.us/ and http://miaacfilmfest.org/

Sanjay Kak will also be part of a panel discussion Kashmir on Film at NYU Tisch School, in the MIAAC@NYU series ‘Discussions on the Art, Culture and Politics of Indian Cinema’.

November also has other campus screenings of Jashn-e-Azadi in the US: at Bryn Mawr College on Nov 10, and at The Center for Place, Culture and Politics, CUNY Graduate Center on Nov 16.

Considering the film has been around for a while, this has been an unexpectedly busy time for screening events: in New Delhi, we had screening/discussions at Jawaharlal Nehru University (School of Social Sciences) and at the Delhi School of Economics (Dept of Sociology). Last month there was a discussion around the film at the Kamala Nehru College, Delhi University, and a screening at the Film & Television Institute of India, Pune, part of the Persistence Resistence festival organised by Magic Lantern Foundation.

And on Dec 6, there will be a screening at Patna, as part of the cultural festival organised by Jan Sanskriti Manch… plenty.

MTV’s Change: Kashmir

For some weeks now, the website of the US based youth channel MTV Iggy, has been hosting an interesting set of conversations on Kashmir, with the tagline “let’s raise awareness to bring peace to paradise”.

The site hosts some basic information resources on Kashmir, as well as a pretty broad range of people speaking about the conflict. Apart from the well-known—like Arundhati Roy, Fareed Zakaria and William Dalrymple—they have also featured some very articulate young men and women both from Srinagar and Jammu.The diversity of positions represented on the clips is useful, and sometimes also disturbing. (Watch, for example, the Indian journalist Tarun Tejpal for a viewpoint that is uncomfortably close to the status-quo rigidities of the Indian State).

Those who follow the strange meanderings of Jashn-e-Azadi will be happy to see several clips from the film show up on the MTV Iggy space as well: you could click on the clip “What frenzy is this?” and then look around the other videos. I would particularly recommend a peek at the Kashmiri American band “Zerobridge”…

There is an interview with Sanjay Kak there too, predictably speaking in favour of taking “contrary positions” and a few other things besides. Enjoy!

blog update: Screening @ IDFA

On Nov 28, 2007, Jashn-e-Azadi screened at the International Documentary Festival Amsterdam (with its ‘international’ title, “How we celebrate freedom”). This was probably the most splendid venue the film will be screened in for a while: Hall 3 of the magnificient Pathe Tuschinski, which is a huge cinema palace located in the Rembrandtplein, in the heart of Amsterdam. “The cinema opened in 1921 and it remains until today with its Art Deco interior one of the most cherished buildings in Amsterdam”, says one guide book and when you walk in, you know just why. The dark wood, its deep maroon carpeting, the under-stated over-the-top aesthetic that spells Grand Europe, such that the multiplexes of today cannot even visualise, leave alone aspire to…

IDFA, as it itself quite nonchalantly admits, is the largest documentary festival in the world: this year, over 10 days, it screened a few hundred films, and sold more than 140,000 tickets! It’s quite simply the biggest, even the brassiest, documentary event that I have ever attended, and a peep into the new world of international documentary cinema. (The short conclusion is: it’s boom time, folks, and as the closing message from Ally Derks, the IDFA director, said, “Move over Harry Potter! Of course many of the films are huge, ambitiously (and expensively) mounted international co-productions (the credits are a treat, just the list of funders usually running into dozens of names!) These are films one of course admires, but from a distance, and to it’s credit IDFA also makes place for the small, the quirky, and even the difficult and the marginal.

But what really makes IDFA are it’s audiences: I don’t think I went to a single screening (and over 5 days I went to 15) that was not nearly full, and most often it was actually over-full. Everyone, including the delegates, were queueing up for the events well before opening time. On one cold, wet, wintery, Amsterdam morning, I was in a queue at just past 9 am, but was rewarded with a ticket to attend a long conversation between the legendary Werner Herzog and the irrepressible Peter Wintonick. It was worth it, if for no other reason, than to hear Herzog rasp out “Accountants!”, his favourite term of derision, his shorthand for all the kinds of people who are inimical to the creative processes of film-making!

In the midst of all this high-voltage excitement, “How we celebrate freedom” was screened at 12.45 in the afternoon, on a working day. But this being IDFA, we had a full house! I was expecting the usual high-ratio of the “South-Asian” audience, but that was another surprise: one brown face, in a auditorium of what I guess were mostly Dutch people! Some were introduced– lawyers, human-rights activists, journaists, but the rest were just walk-ins… impressive. The stunning picture and sound (played from Digi-beta, the first time for us) was a treat, but so was the Q&A that followed, and the conversation with the audience carried on for almost 45 minutes.

As always, the next day Sanjay Kak also did a session with students, this time at the University of Amsterdam, a class on ‘conflict’ in the Political Science department, showing excerpts from the film, and then an animated discussion with a group that by and large knew very little about Kashmir. But it lasted 90 minutes, and the students seemed quite taken aback by the issues that the conflict in Kashmir raises…

[ blog flash 12&half-mumbai continued ]

a nice blog entry on the episode. anyone who can produce the copy of the email complaint referred in the blog, gets a free poster from blogmistri

and a discussion at passionforcinema 

sarai reader list conversation (1 & 2) on the interruption

mumbai police’s crack critic team

mumbai police’s crack critic team 2

[blog flash 12 - mumbai interruption]

Yesterday evening, blogmistri had been lazily formulating a post about the great response Jashn-e-Azadi had in its first festival/public screening at Osian’s Cinefan Festival of Asian & Arab Cinema (New Delhi, July 22) – and waiting for the news of the first Mumbai preview from Sanjay. But around 8.30pm, he heard that the preview of the film organised by Vikalp, the film-makers group, at Bhupesh Gupta Bhawan had been interrupted and the screening DVD of the film seized by Mumbai Police.

We will keep you posted on this interruption in the life of the film, but till then you could check out this news report in Mumbai Mirror. There is a first person account on a blog called paddlesweep. And the films for freedom/vikalp site for an incisive remark by Ranjit Hoskote of The PEN All-India Centre. (And for a very different view see this first comment on our post!)

[ blog trivia 1- search terms]

Just curious what those searching for the highlighted terms make of the site ?
What happens to you if you are looking for ‘hot anus’ and you arrive at our keyword ‘interrogation‘. Or a search for ‘hindi poems on azadi’ offers you ‘slogans of kashmiri freedom‘? Do you curse the web or allow yourself to be surprised?
A recent sample:

2007-07-02: film & flashes institute pune / e dainik bhaskar
2007-06-30: inder salim / collage on kashmir / vidhi upadhyay / amit bhan sound of silence / lightstalker flash slideshow / kashmir songs about freedom
2007-06-29: patricia mukhim / hindi filmi poet / Indian Independence Day 60th Anniversary / kashmir uzma / hot anus
2007-06-28: hindi poems on azadi / indian army do u have it in you / habba kadal / kashmir what does it mean / the untold tragedy
2007-06-27: jashn / lepeska / kashmir uzma

The Hyperworlds of Hypertexts are curious places to dwell in…