The film is slated for a wide release of about 800-900 shows a day across India. The release date is 21st June.

Shah has presented popular Bollywood films such as Saathiya, Baghban, Devdas, Company, Khakee and Main Hoon Naa.

B.A. Pass was adjudged the Best Film in Indian Competition at the 12th Osian’s Cinefan Film Festival and won the Audience Award at the 1^st  South Asian Alternative Film Festival (SAAFF) in France.

The film features Shadab Kamal and Shilpa Shukla (Chak De! India) in lead roles.  It revolves around 19 year old Mukesh who after losing his parents in a car accident lands up in Delhi worrying how to support himself and his two younger sisters. He then stumbles in the world of gigolos.

Read If you don’t back your own first film, who the hell will: Ajay Bahl, Director, B.A. Pass

Patang, actually, is more about imagery than intricate storytelling; and Bhargava adopts an almost documentary-like approach while capturing the sights and sounds of the city, his editing and Raman’s camera complementing each other smoothly, except for a few portions where this cinema verite approach looks a bit forced.

As a narrative, Patang’s storyline does not have anything complex. It’s rather a simple story of a man, Jayesh (played by a sometimes wooden Mukund Shukla) visiting his home after a gap of several years – and with a task in mind. Jayesh is a man who has made it in life after having shifted base to New Delhi, leaving his family home in old Ahmedabad which he now wants to sell off. He is accompanied by his daughter-with-a-hint-of-rebelliousness Priya (a perky Sugandha Garg). But his mother refuses to sign the legal papers, and his nephew, the wedding band-singer Chakku (Nawazudding Siddiqui, in one more effortlessly-superb performance) angrily confronts him. Amidst all this, Jayesh’s widowed sister-in-law and Chakku’s mother (Seema Biswas, a fine portrayal as always) is the almost silent spectator, who seems to know that familial bonds are too strong to be broken by such occasional skirmishes.

The inter-personal relationships of the characters in Patang unfold leisurely, weaved near-seamlessly with the city’s gearing up for the kite festival. Sometimes, it seems Bhargava, who grew up in the USA, is more intent on documenting the city’s feverish celebration of the kite festival than creating more layers to the storyline. There are a few side-strands to the story, such as Priya’s flirtatious relationship with neighbourhood youngster Bobby (Aakash Maherya) and Chakku’s friendship with a few street kids, are interestingly developed, but at the same time, there are unexplained introduction to a few strands that never appear again, for example, Chakku’s young friend and kite shop boy Hamid’s one-scene interaction with his grandmother who refuses to let him into the house in the middle of the night because he has failed to bring in some promised money.

The film, which got a full house at the ongoing 12^th Osian’s Cinefan Film Festival on Tuesday, falters when it dives into nostalgia. Bhargava, as someone born and brought up in the West, might have got unintentionally attracted to this pitfall as some of the dialogues mouthed by Jayesh’s character recalling his childhood and times spent in Ahmedabad before he chose to shift out sound almost banal and targeted at the audiences abroad. Luckily for him, he is able to stop just short of exoticizing his subject as the other characters do not fall into that trap.

Bhargava unfolds his storytelling in a leisurely manner, and is able to balance the mix of his narrative and documentation of the kite festival rather well, not stressing too overtly on kites being a metaphor for the wavering human mind as also relationships. Patang succeeds in letting the viewer soak in the atmosphere, but it somewhere falters in making an emotional connect to the extent it could or should have been able to. Perhaps, it would have been a better experience if Bhargava had chosen to tell the story a little more than letting the story unfurl on its own all the way. Patang has its moments, but just so.

The Stagnant is an Indian film that uses as the protagonist, a real statue artist, who earns his living by posing as a statue on the streets of Kolkata, to tell a story that is both humorous and poignant at the same time.

The film almost feels like a documentary tracking the lives of three people living on the edge of an apathetic city: the statue artist Krishna, his uncle whose job is to paste posters of pornographic films on walls, and his friend who sells masks for a living. Frame after frame, the viewer immerses deeper into their lives neither pitying them nor mocking at them; but laughing along with them at the humour inherent in their lives and profession.

Krishna is infatuated by a mannequin, becomes still as a statue–even when not on job–out of habit and is always scouring around for characters he can impersonate: the indication of the overbearing ‘stagnation’ in his life.

The feeling one gets while watching this film is similar to those evergreen Charlie Chaplin satires; it is not merely a coincidence that Chaplin is one of the characters that the statue artist impersonates. There is no story here really to follow, but a wonderful realization of the medium of cinema to connect the viewer with the eccentric characters in an equally spirited city.

The film successfully communicates the ethos of the city of Kolkata through the cultural and religious figures that the statue artist impersonates: from Loknath baba and Ramkrishna Paramhansa to Raja Ram Mohan Roy and Siraj ud Daula. Kolkata is shot in a refreshing manner highlighting not the monuments, but the rigmarole of everyday life. It captures the spirit of the city that is decaying yet trying to keep pace with the time to survive.

The Stagnant creates poetry out of the most inanimate and banal objects of everyday life. The composition of each frame is magical and most of the film uses only natural light. The film uses western classical music that enhances the ironical tone of the film.

The Stagnant is a wonderful experiment and certainly one of the best Indian films to screen at the festival this year.

The director of Meherjaan completely breaks free from stereotypes and steers clear of showing blood and gore on screen; not in an attempt to distort reality but to highlight the part of reality she is most interested in: the Bangladeshi women at the time of the war. So with the palpable tension of the war in the backdrop, what one sees unfolding on screen is the story of two female characters, Meher and Neela, who experienced the aftermath of the war in their own ways.

Meher (Jaya Bachchan) has become a sculptor to give shapes to her feelings but is holding back the haunting memories of her past that she had routinely penned in her diary. She would rather live in denial but is forced to confront it when her cousin Neela’s daughter, born out of rape, turns up at her doorstep to piece together her own past. The narrative then seamlessly switches between Meher’s present and her past.

One is transported to Meher’s growing up years when her family had moved to her grandfather’s village to avert the war. Nana-jaan, played gracefully by Victor Banerjee, is the reformist patriarch who wouldn’t allow bloodshed in his village. One begins to experience the war through the female characters in Naana-jaan’s house. His eldest granddaughter Neela (Reetu Sattar) has been repeatedly raped by Pakistani soldiers and is asked by her family to keep this shame as a secret. But she refuses to be ashamed and becomes a freedom fighter to avenge the wrong done to her. Meher (Shayna Amin), on the other hand, falls in love with a Pakistani (read enemy) soldier and saves his life. Then there is nana- jaan’s youngest daughter Salma (played by Rubaiyat Hossain herself) who lives in a world of her own–her make-believe bunker and palanquin—with a desire to get hitched to a Liberation soldier.

There is an amazing conviction and bravado in the female characters and a refreshing change in shifting the spotlight on women to recount a war’s story which makes Meherjaan a unique film to come out of Bangladesh. The journey of its female characters can be summed up in a dialogue that young Meher is seen mouthing to her mother: “Don’t you wish to do whatever your heart desires?” Whether it is picking up arms to take revenge from the enemy or loving the enemy with the same fervor, the women in Meherjaan follow their heart.

Surprisingly, Meherjaan doesn’t care about melodrama and even uses dialogues thoughtfully and sparingly. There is a restraint and tranquility in the narrative which draws one into it gradually and doesn’t let go. The breathtaking countryside of Bangladesh and the gradual development of Meher’s relationship with the Pakistani soldier Wasim Khan (Omar Rahim) create some magical moments in the film which are embellished by a recurring musical theme. Their love that is budding in a difficult time is strangely nurtured by a fondness for each other as well as a stubborn pride in one’s own culture and strong nationalism. They answer to each other in their own respective languages, Bangla and Urdu.

Meherjaan ends on a positive note about coming to terms with the losses of the war. It is a wonderful film with a unique perspective, calm yet powerful images and superlative direction and performances.

But now, the word Drapchi has another meaning too. It is the name of a new movie directed by indie filmmaker Arvind Iyer, and starring famous Tibetan singer Namgyal Lhamo. The 77-minute movie is an interesting experiment in filmmaking. It uses the format of a docu-fiction, with the characters barely speaking to each other and the narrative taken forward by a gruff voice, a voice that the film’s end reveals belong to a former espionage officer from another country. The officer is not identified in this fictional story where the real and the fictional merge seamlessly, but it is believed that he is a real-life Army man from a Western country who spent nearly a decade inside Drapchi after having been caught for alleged spying in Tibet.

It’s a film that has fictional characters who can be real Tibetan refugees fleeing their homeland. In fact, if one had not been told that the lead character of Yiga Gyalnang has been played by the Netherlands-based Lhamo, and had it not for portions where the characters briefly speak with one another, one could have easily termed this film as in intensely personal documentary where the protagonist symbolises the quiet suffering of thousands of Tibetans who trudge across the Himalayas to seek political refuge in another country.

Iyer, a noted designer who has worked with the likes of Santosh Sivan, has eschewed the path of a normal narrative in his first feature film.  He has not even spelt out clearly that Yiga, a noted traditional Tibetan opera singer, is an escapee from Drapchi. These are information that one can either guess about or find indications about in the film. For Iyer the director, these things are not overtly important in the course of the narrative, as it is already quite well-known that the Tibetans who flee their homeland are almost always political refugees, victims of persecution in their homeland.

Rather, the film, with a quiet dignity that is carried on her shoulders by Lhamo, tries to explore the inner turmoil in all those Tibetans who leave their homeland knowing fully well that perhaps they would never see it again in their lifetime. The emotional turmoil in Yiga comes through in the film through Yiga’s melancholic demeanour, and through some superb compositions that form the background score.

The film opens at a point when Yiga and a few other Tibetans are walking across a bridge over the Kosi river in Nepal, the point where the 16-km no-man’s land between Tibet and Nepal ends. It is the same place where Yiga returns to from Kathmandu towards the end of the film, before she flies off to Europe to seek an unknown future as an important political refugee. Or is it her spirit that visits the place in her dream, yearning to return home?  In the interregnum, Yiga has been befriended by a British rocker named Jack Cassady, played by Chris Constantinou, a relationship which does not follow the expected path of the two falling in love, and also by a young monk Tashi with whom she develops sort of a spiritual bonding. We hear the story of Yiga from the narrator mostly, but when it is time for the finale, one does not need words to understand the turmoil in Yiga’s mind as she longingly looks at the mountains across the bridge, where her homeland lies. She knows it is as elusive as the mountain goat whose brief glimpse she gets. She also knows she cannot return to that homeland again, unlike the pack of geese flying across the mountains for whom man-made political boundaries are meaningless. She philosophically accepts her fate and continues with her voice of protest through her powerful songs that make her popular in Europe.

Even though Lhamo herself had got her training in music at the Tibetan Institute of Performing Arts (TIPA) in Dharamsala before migrating to Europe, one gets the feeling while watching Drapchi that Yiga is her alter ego. In fact, at many places during the course of the film, it is hard to separate the real from the reel. Iyer must be given credit for the courage shown in not treading the usual path of narrative storytelling. In the tradition of true indie filmmaking, he seeks to create a world of solitude, silence and sound of music in Drapchi. And he succeeds to a great extent in his effort. Yes, Drapchi is not your usual fare on the big screen. It is experimental, and unapologetically so. It’s not a film for everyone, but those who like moody, philosophical cinema. Drapchi, which was screened at the 12^thOsian’s Cinefan Film Festival in Delhi, offers several layers of thought pointers. To her credit, scriptwriter Pooja Ladha Surti, who wrote Sriram Raghavan’s Ek Hasina Thi, Johnny Gaddar and the recent Agent Vinod, has completely been able to leave her Bollywood baggage behind to create something that is beyond the ordinary.  The film has some amazing cinematography by Trevor Tweeten, and for those who have heard and loved Lhamo’s music, it offers several treats in the background score. It is a film more felt than watched.

Rustom is a small-time telephone lineman in an unnamed small town in India. The film is apparently shot in Coorg in Karnataka but there is nothing in the film to suggest the identity of the characters. Unfortunately in a country with such mind boggling diversity, universality (read homogeneity) of this kind doesn’t work. The characters in this town speak in chaste Hindi which must be out of use except in some parts of northern India. The film fails to strike a chord the moment one fails to place the cultural identity of the protagonist. However, the director seems to have a different take on this. In an interview she mentions, “While the film is rooted in the countryside, it is not region specific. Rustom could have an identity anywhere.”

Lineman Rustom is an honest government official who claims the moral high ground in the local telephone office with a staff of two including him. His boss—the telephone officer—who takes bribes for telephone connections and gets cozy with women chides him for giving him an inferiority complex regarding integrity. He also tries to curb the innovative spirit in Rustom who likes to indulge in small scientific experiments with his bicycle in his free time. Rustom is the unsung hero of our time when there seems to be no idealism or morality. But the cruel world which has no place for honesty or innovation must take its toll on Rustom someday. Besides, there is not much one learns about Rustom’s life throughout the 117 minutes of the film called Ballad of Rustom.

The film is full of exaggerated and romanticized scenes of ‘life in the countryside’: Rustom’s isolated and picture-postcard hut in a scenic location, boys wandering through the woods and sleeping by the stream, a girl pouring water on her bare arms and shoulders from a pail and a rundown printing press. The film unfolds as a string of scenes which pay tribute to the director’s fantastical vision of life in the countryside instead of a coherent narrative. It’s a place where people are fighting to get a landline telephone connection in their houses (no one has heard of a mobile phone yet!) and the State is systematically working to thwart creativity and imagination. The rich who use the countryside as their holiday home, despaired by the cultural and moral degeneration, are preparing to move to Europe while the naxalites are looting the corrupt telephone officer. Had this film been made twenty years ago, it would have seemed much more relevant than today.

Ballad of Rustom makes use of some loud and boisterous music that just doesn’t blend with the look and feel of the film. The film is leisurely paced and one sees a lot of panoramic shots. The cinematography draws attention towards itself by playing with light and darkness.

There is lot of verbosity in the film about everything ranging from God and religion, to science, philosophy and post-modernism. This is one film that is exaggerated and pretentious; and happy to be so.

We have had other examples of ultra-low-budget films in India before, a most notable recent example being The Untitled Kartik Krishnan Project, but as one could see at the world premiere of LKF at the 12^th Osian’s Cinefan Film Festival on Saturday, July 29, Basumatary’s film needs to be celebrated not only for this fact. Instead, this is a film that needs to be lauded for its true-blooded – VFX or cable-unassisted – martial arts action combined with locally-rooted comedy.

Basumatary is quite definitely a multi-talented person – he is a published author, an actor (seen in a small role in Dibakar Banerjee’s Shanghai recently), a martial arts exponent and now a director. And he not only uses his own talents but has also pooled his relatives’ and friends’ help and talent to make LKF. Like almost all low-budget – or “zero budget” as some of them claim to be – films, LKF is low in technical finish, but its spirit is what makes it a worthy watch.

Unlike the technology-assisted visually-stunning stunts we see in big-budget Hollywood and Indian mainstream films, LKF has real stunts executed by real Kung Fu experts and students. And it won’t be incorrect to say that it has some of the best realistic stunts we have seen in an Indian film in a long, long time. In fact, some of the action can easily be compared to the best of the best – except for the fact that they visually look a tad rough, simply because there is no artificial aid that usually helps stunts to be executed with finesse.

Basumatary has written in his blog how he managed to shoot the film in such a low budget – he bought the camera, and his cast & crew comprised his martial arts instructor uncle’s students and a host of relatives. But the amateur crew manages to do its job rather well in their first brush with movie making, and most of the actors etch out their characters quite admirably, especially when one takes into account the fact that the film’s tone and tenor is comedic with a big dose of martial arts.

What, however, might be missed by non-Assamese viewers of this Assamese movie, where the hero Charlie is played by Kenny himself, is the very local-flavoured – sometimes even Guwahati-specific – humour. At the Osian’s premiere, the good sprinkling of Assamese people in the early morning screening ensured that there was adequate response to the comic scenes, and this is a good indication that if this film is released in Assam with adequate publicity, it has a great potential to do well commercially. But then, that is also a plus point of the film – in that it captures the idiom of a fast-changing city rather well.

The director also deserves credit for subtly bringing out the fast-degrading moral quotient of a haphazardly-modernising city like Guwahati. Here, the villains are not really all-black villains. They are merely a reflection of the times when aimless youth are taking to the easy money culture. They try to get liquor shot licences by hook or by crook, extort money from small-time shopkeepers, and while away their time in street corners trying to learn the art of bullying. You don’t hate these villains but sometimes even start to like them. In fact, a very thin line divides the good and the bad in the film, and that’s what makes it look more realistic.

LKF is a roller coaster ride till its lasts, and despite its rough edges, should be applauded for its economy of making and vision of execution. It, along with films like The Untitled Kartik Krishnan Project, serves as a model of how a good film need not have big budgets only, though it goes without saying that with adequate funding, it would have looked much sleeker.

Asura

The story is set in 15th century Kyoto ravaged by drought and famine. The film begins with visuals of death and destruction, setting the mood for what is to follow. A famished mother gives birth to a boy and imagines eating his flesh in a desperate moment of hunger. The boy is abandoned and learns to eat human flesh in a bid to survive. He resembles a deadly beast: he crawls on his four limbs, snarls and preys at small kids for food. He is named Asura by a monk who makes an attempt to tame the boy. It is hard to imagine in the beginning of the film as to how will one develop sympathy for the scary protagonist who is a far cry from the cute heroes of animation films, both in appearance and character.

But gradually Asura reveals his human side. He seems to mellow down under the love and care of a young woman called Wakasa; whose relationship with him gives rise to some of the most evocative and emotional moments of the film. But as the bestial child makes an attempt to develop human characteristics (all of us have a beast within, but what makes us human is the heart: the monk tells him); humans made desperate by hunger trade off their feelings for a bag of rice. There unfolds the central message of the film: that death is necessary for life. For somebody to live, someone else has to die.

It is said that the director Keiichi Sato decided to make this film to pass on a message to those who had lost the will to live after the natural disasters that hit Japan in 2011. The film is dark and gruesome at times; and particularly disturbing at the moments when one realizes how far humans can be pushed by desperation and hunger. But the film also shows one the brighter side through the goodness inherent in each one of us; and the vitality of death.

Asura is a hybrid animation film that makes use of watercolor technique which gives it a subdued effect in sync with the mood of the film. The technically superior film is also rich in emotions which leave one with one with much to meditate on.

For a complete coverage of 12th Osian’s Cinefan Festival, click here

The festival opened with animation film Asura directed by Keiichi Sato of Japan.

The Aruna Vasudev Lifetime Achievement Award for Writing on Cinema was conferred on Egypt-based film critic and author Samir Farid. Farid has authored several books on cinema and is the consultant for Cinema affairs in the Bibliotheca Alexandrina, library and cultural center in the Egyptian city of Alexandria. He will deliver a lecture on Film Criticism on July 28.

Indu Shrikent, director of the festival, said: ”When we decided to revive the festival after two years hiatus, we knew we had a daunting task ahead, but what were clear about is that it would be a bigger better and a more exciting event.”

The festival runs from 27 July to 5 August 2012 and will screen over 175 films from 38 countries.

Asura is based on a controversial manga by George Akiyama published in the 1970s. It tells the story of a boy who is born as a beast and learns to kill humans. His lost soul is saved by a young girl, Wakasa.

The Chief Minister of Delhi Sheila Dikshit will be the Chief Guest for the opening ceremony of the festival at Siri Fort Complex.

The festival will pay tribute to Japanese filmmakers Koji Wakamatsu and Masao Adachi known for ‘pink films’.

Marco Mueller, the Director of Rome Film Festival will deliver the inaugural Mani Kaul Memorial Lecture at the festival.

For festival lineup, click here.