10th Chennai International Documentary and Short Film Festival 2022
21-27 Feb, multiple venues, Chennai
Venue : Periyar Thidal, Chennai
Jointly organised by Self Respect Media and MARUPAKKAM
23 Feb 2022, Wednesday
5.30 pm
Moving Upstream : Ganga (Dir : Shridhar Sudhir; 105 min; Documentary; India; Competition)
The 'Moving Upstream: Ganga’ documentary was filmed over 6 months on a 3000km walk along River Ganga in India. This documentary explores the idea of walking, people’s responses to a walking traveler in this fast paced era and an evolving relationship with the natural world. It does this while also amplifying the voices and concerns of the riparian community.
Backstage (Dir: Lipika Singh Darai; 85 min; Documentary; India; Competition)
The film portrays the lives and times of puppeteers of Odisha, India. It documents four forms of puppetry; the glove, the string, the rod and the shadow, which are now being performed by their last generation of artists. After them, the art form will probably die. The folk art form, which is as vulnerable as its performers who mostly belong to the lower strata of the society in terms of caste and economy, is experiencing a silent death. The filmmaker builds a personal narrative to trace the time a dying art form is going through.
Perceptions from a Modern Witch Hunt : The Making of a She-Devil
(Dir : Sourav Roychowdhury; 45.44 min; Documentary; India; Non competition)
Perceptions from a Modern Witch Hunt: The Making of a She-Devil is a social documentary about a Witch Hunt that took place in 2017, in Bardhaman district of West Bengal, India.
25 Feb 2022, Friday
11 am
Ushiku (Dir : Thomas Ash; 87 min; Documentary; Japan; Non competition)
“Ushiku” takes viewers deep into the psychological and physical environment inhabited by foreign detainees in one of the largest immigration detention facilities in Japan. On the eve of Japan's recent--and highly contentious--immigration reform efforts, the filmmaker eludes press embargoes the government has imposed on its immigration facilities, bringing viewers into immediate contact with the detainees, many of whom are refugees seeking asylum
2 pm
Longing (Dir : Bani Singh; 89.42 min; Documentary; India; Competition)
Against the backdrop of Partition, newly independent India’s first hockey team defeats England, their erstwhile coloniser, to win the Gold at the 1948 London Olympics.
Six decades later, when Nandy Singh, a member of this iconic team suffers a stroke at the age of 84, his tenacious will to recover inspires his daughter to go on a journey to discover the champion he was before she was born.
Charaiveti (Dir : Bauddhayan Mukherji, Chandan Biswas; 71.56 min; Documentary; India;; Non competition)
In February 2017, Chandan Biswas, a resident of Barasat, West Bengal set off on his bicycle on an arduous journey of 153 days, traversing 6249 kms, crisscrossing 4 different countries to become the first man to complete the Trans-Himalayan expedition on a bicycle.
Armed with a fixed lens go pro camera, Chandan shot this incredible and spectacular journey of his and came back with a footage of over 52 hours. Charaiveti was born out of this very footage.
5.15 pm
Nasima (Dir : Heather Kissinger; 85.20 min; Documentary; USA / Bangladesh; Non competition)
A little girl’s dream of riding the waves threatens to change the course of history for an entire nation.
Selling trinkets on the beach, 7 year old Nasima’s attention is caught by something out on the water and immediately she is transfixed: surfing has come to Bangladesh. Nasima instantly knows what she wants and that is to surf the waves. She will become the first female surfer in Bangladesh, a place where women don’t even swim in public, let alone ride waves.
Footloose - a story of belonging (Dir : Gulshan Singh; 93.38 min; Documentary; India; Competition)
Minorities from Pakistan & Myanmar came to India to save their lives. They had heard that Indian is a secular country where there is no religious discrimination. But, in the last few years, religious discrimination has increased leading to communal riots which ultimately ended up being the sole agenda for contesting elections.
26 Feb 2022, Saturday
3.30 pm
Land of Women (Dir : Marion Gaborit; 77.19 min; Documentary; France; Non competition)
"Land of women" tell the story of five women farmers around the world, working the land, which plays a key role in the planet’s food production. A tribute to some of these women, invisible but essential links in the chain who ensure subsistence agriculture every day and everywhere on earth.
Once upon a Village (Dir : Srishti Lakhera; 60.14 min; Documentary; India; Competition)
In the Himalayan foothills, an 80- year- old woman and a 19-year-old girl are two of the seven remaining inhabitants of an abandoned village. The two women struggle with the choice to leave for an alienating city life or continue living in a lonely village.
Incomplete Sentence (Dir : Adar Bozbay; 58.05 min; Documentary; Turkey; Non competition)
Aslı Erdoğan, world-renowned author and activist, has fallen into silence after she fled to Germany. Incomplete Sentences is a feature documentary on her literature and life, leading to exile in Frankfurt, after the Turkish regime’s oppression results in her unlawful imprisonment.
Emergence : Out of the Shadows (Dir : Vinay Giridhar; 79.58 min; Documentary; Canada; Non competition)
For Kayden, Jag, and Amar, awakening to and expressing their sexuality within conservative South Asian families was a lonely and terrifying experience. Denial, shame and despair haunted their youths, even threatening their lives. Yet, they’ve emerged. In the feature documentary Emergence: Out of the Shadows, the disparate journeys of Kayden, Jag and Amar converge around a shared sense of compassion and healing as they bravely convey their often heart-wrenching stories.
27 Feb : 10.30 am to 8.30 pm; Periyar Thidal
10.30 am
Moon on the Man (Dir : Prince Shah; 75 min; Documentary; India; Competition)
Moon on the Man is an observational and exploratory feature length documentary, that questions the most basic questions of reality, perception and choices. As such, it is synonymous with every individual’s struggle to find direction, some that bear an identity through the afflux of time in the ever-evolving landscape of human perspectives and also focuses on mental illness, old age and broken dreams
Bid for Bengal (Dir : Dwaipayan Banerjee & Kasturi Basu; 70.30 min; Documentary; India; Competition)
How did Hindu-nationalist politics find a foothold in West Bengal after all these decades? Using fresh and archival footage with personal family history, 'A Bid for Bengal' lays bare historical fault lines and visits the workings of frontal organisations in the Hindu-nationalist network responsible for the recent political shift in West Bengal, in between witnessing two consecutive elections trails, from 2019 to 2021. As resistance takes shape, one arrives at the immediate present marred with anxiety, yet not bereft of hope.
Keemat Chutaki Zeendagi (Dir : Shriprakash; 86 min; Documentary; India; Competition)
Driven by his quest for truth, a poet and people's leader rises against the power structure that is complex and layered, and with it ignites the spark of dignity and dissent among the people facing atrocities of the power.
The poet and people's leader- Mahendra Singh- is eventually murdered in 2005.
This film unearths the life of Com. Mahendra Singh and the subversive life ethos through two set of filmmakers, shot over 13 years, both investigating the truth of the man and the mass, who fought a brave but unequal war against the power structure.
2 pm
Ramachandra PN Retrospective
Voices of Mini Tipet (10 min)
Nirvana a spiritual liberation is the core of any form of Buddhism, but to the refugees in the many Tibet are settlement colonies in India such spiritual liberation is closely associated with their political liberation. This film zeroes in at one such colony in Mungod, Karnataka.
Makkala Panchayat (30 min)
In Coastal Karnataka, in South India, 56 Gram Panchayat’s (Village Self Governing Bodies) hold elections to the Makkala Panchavat (Children’s Self Governing Bodies), so that the children can from a pressure group to help solve developmental issues that they think are important to them and to their villages.
Gudigeri Company (24 min)
A popular professional theater troupe arrives at a busy fair in North Karnataka, South India only to find that its audience base is dwindling.
Miyar House (76 min)
The filmmaker’s 200-year-old ancestral house in a remote village of Miyar in Karnataka is being dismantled, giving him an opportunity to undertake a journey into a past that he shares not only with his extended family but also with successive generations of rural Indians. A realisation of the inevitability of a transition marks this journey, which could well be the journey of a country that has propelled itself into modernity. As plans are on for the house to be reconstructed in an open-air museum, divorced from its original context, the fossilization seems to be complete.
The Unbearable Being of Lightness (45 min)
The filmmaker goes to the University of Hyderabad to conduct a film related workshop where the students have to observe and write a structured report using the sight and sounds of a crowded place. The place selected is a shopping area at the University called the Shopcom, which was the epicenter of the struggle for social justice launched immediately after the death of a research scholar Rohit Vemula.
An Autobiography of a Project Report (44 min)
A retired Government technocrat passionately remembers his environment destroying pet projects that he had painstakingly worked out and proposed to the Government of Karnataka that aims to divert a portion of the water of the west flowing rivers of the state into the deep east, where it will be used for drinking purposes and to recharge ground water levels.
5.30 pm
Closing ceremony & prize distribution
7 pm
Screening of award winning films
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