The 9th Pune International Film Festival (PIFF): Snatches, briefs

7/1/2011
Esquare, Ganeshkhind Road

The Pune International Film Festival  is back, the 9th edition been held in a season we can assuredly call winter this year. The movies are been screened across five multiplexes across the city, and today I am at Esquare. There are no queues outside the screens this time, no checking of the passes hung around our necks, anyone can just walk in during the screening time of the movie, or much before the screening. As a result, it is to some mild irritation - to having the best seats taken, that I enter a theatre for the afternoon show.

For the 6 pm screening, take corrective steps, arrive half-an-hour earlier, some 20-odd people are already there, the air-conditioning has certainly not been switched on, and there is a lot of chatter. There are no lone women, but many lone men. Many college students sit with half-turned bodies, cell phone to the ear, waving arms in the dark, beckoning their friends - the friends groping in the dark, stepping on a foot or two, as they gingerly make for the seats. The loners are a restless lot. Most pluck out their cell phones as glowing distractions, some stomp their feet from time to time, shake their legs.
An old man seated beside me, places a restless hand inside a black plastic packet. There is a constant rustle as he picks out an orange and devours the contents stealthily, self-consciously, wary of some crime. He then places a sealed water bottle on the bottle-holder and from the top of the bottle, allows the plastic packet to dangle in an awkward inventive arrangement. Finally satisfied, he folds his left leg over the right, the foot bare and hirsute. I switch to a chair beside me. In the semi-darkness a guy with a mike stumbles through the reading of the synopsis of the movie from the catalogue, but finishes impressively. Nerves. He holds up a hand and the ray of the projector hits the screen, all in one instant motion.

Subsequent posts shall have reviews of the movies watched at the festival and other tit bits on the location, films, arrangements, how is it to watch four movies a day, etc, etc, etc.               

PIFF 2010: ID cards, schedule and samosas....

The Pune International Film Festival is back again. Hurrah.
So if you love cinema, or believed until now that there were only Hindi and Hollywood movies movies been made, you were wrong. There are films from Hungary, France, Britain, Poland, Slovenia and from other countries all over the world. Countries, whose names you probably couldn't spell but their directors and actors still come together to make movies that they want to make and not what the market demands. Hail freedom. Art is individual and impartial, hence proved...

This time they have a web cam for the photographs, so the 'Delegate ID Card' is made with much less fuss. Rs 500 is cheap if you can camp at the theatres screening the movies over the coming week (The festival ends on January 14), its Rs 300 for those who can prove they are students.
The same bulk of literature is provided along with the ID card - one with the synopsis of every movie to be shown at the festival, a daily newsletter - this one carrying the inauguration pictures, and the schedule, that is sure to change by the first evening of the festival and it does - almost by tradition.

No complaints about the movies though or the experience - soft comfortable seats you can fall asleep in if you want, nice but expensive food (samosas at INOX are grand, even without sauce or chutney; and the volunteers who bluntly recite the movie synopsis (word-to-word from the same literature we carry) before each screening are forgiven that they do so. Another year, same festival.
As long as the movies are engrossing, and they allow cine buffs like us to view it from opening credits to end credits in peace (including uncensored sex scenes and a new vocabulary of swear words), and let us fulfil the inclination of reading the subtitles aloud sometimes, who's saying anything?
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More about the movies watched in subsequent posts....