Pre festival screenings for the press begin

As part of 40^th International Film Festival of India – 2009 pre Festival screenings commenced today for the Press and Media. ‘Ilisa Amagi Mahao’, ‘For Real’, ‘Ekti Kaktaliya Golpo’, ‘Angshumaner’, ‘Dot In For Motion’, ‘Ijjodu’, ‘Swaymabhu Sen Foreseas’ and ‘Kutty Srank’ are being screened in Macquinez I. The synopses of these are as below:

ILISA AMAGI MAHAO (The Taste of A Hilsa)

It is not dawn yet. Only the father and the son in a boat can be seen stirring the river. After casting their net once or twice they move down southwards. Drifting a little further they hit on luck. A big, silvery white hilsa is rolling in the net. Father decides not to sell it off. He hopes to invite his pregnant daughter for a meal. He wishes to share the taste of hilsa with his family. But he comes to know that they have no rice to cook…….

FOR REAL

For Real is all about a child’s determination to keep her family together when the adults are intent on destroying it. Six-year old Shruti knows something no one else does. An alien has come in place of her mother and her real mother has been sent to the Orion Galaxy. While the alien looks just like her mother on the outside, Shruti knows she is completely different from her beloved mother on the inside. Shruti turns to her brother for help but he doesn’t believe her. Her father, like always, remains engrossed in work and unavailable to her. Unable to accept the Alien in her home and desperate to be with her mother, the lonely child runs away. What follows is a child’s passage to finding her real mother, a man’s struggle to save his family and a woman’s journey to finding herself.

EKTI KAKTALIYA GOLPO

The narrative revolves around a 13-year-old boy, Babai. He is given a magic marble (which apparently has the power to summon the king of fish) by an old man who stays in the ground floor flat of his apartment. His teacher (who stays in the same building) takes it way asking him to concentrate on his studies than on fantasies. The boy’s dreams are crushed as he sits by his window with a handmade fishing rod. However, coincidences bring about an unusual turn of events.

ANGSHUMANER CHHOBI

Angshuman had left Kolkata eight years ago to pursue a course in filmmaking in Italy. He stayed back for a career in documentary and advertising. But he has to fulfil a commitment to his college professor to make a film in Bengali. Armed with an interesting script about the curious relationship between a septuagenarian celebrity painter and a young nurse, Angshuman lands in Kolkata. But the project turns out to be a non-starter with a series of hurdles coming one after another, involving three people who are linked to Angshuman’s film-Pradyut, the legend of Bengali cinema living in self-imposed exile, Madhura, who could never live up to the expectations generated by the national award she won for her first film and Neel, a young man passionate about dance and astronomy who finds his life getting changed forever with a stroke of destiny. Things come to a head with a crime on the scene. An alleged suicide brings SP Sourya Roy to investigate the case.

DOT IN FOR MOTION

Dot in for motion traces India’s recent growth after economic liberalization and the information revolution and its effect on the lives of the vast Indian populace. Does globalization really usher in liberty? Does the open market mean a more open society? Does it really foster democracy? Or is it a process of homogenization slowly taking over this nation of enormous diversity? The film neutrally records the voice of people, from lounge of the silicon city to a remote tribal village that never heard of electricity.

IJJODU

In a remote area in Karnataka, photojournalist Ananda meets Chenni, a woman who was made a Basavi-offered at the altar of the village deity to save the superstitions locals from a devastating epidemic. Basavis, like Devdasis, often end up becoming sex workers and bear the brunt of social stigma. Ananda is shocked to learn that Chenni is a Basavi and tries to persuade her, with rational arguments, not to pay the price for superstition. When he insists that she should get married, Chenni asks him if he would marry her but he is not bold enough. The next day when Chenni is found dead on the steps of the temple pond, Ananda feels guilty for her suicide because he was not strong enough to give her a new life.

SWAYMABHU SEN FORESEAS HIS END

It’s 26 July 2005. Three narrators atop a bus entertain the stranded with an urban legend of an extraordinary filmmaker who stole everything he needed to make a film, from film stock to camera. Beyond this the three narrators take the stories in different directions. All stories conclude with the filmmaker not making the film but the how and why differ. The film is a magical, dark journey into the possibilities of fate and the survival or true talent in the business that Indian popular cinema has been reduced to.

KUTTY SRANK

The police find an unidentified body on the beach and three women turn up, each claiming it is ‘her’ Kutty Srank. One is a wealthy woman who wants to become a Buddhist nun. The second is an actress who is later accused of the murder. She was acting in a traditional Christian play with Kutty Srank. The third is a gentle, mute woman who gets pregnant by Kutty Srank. Will this richly short film, with multiple skeins and powerful imagery, reveal the real Kutty Srank?