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It was the alluring cover that first attracts the attention – of a young monk dressed in ochre robes with his back to the camera and a football balanced on his round, bald head. The mood of the photograph is overwhelmingly orange, with some yellow – it looks like early morning time, and the monk is standing at the edge of a mountain, with three pagodas struggling to appear from behind the fog. The photograph is from the poster of Bhutan’s first full-length feature film, Phorpa (The Cup), made in 1999 by director Khyentse Norbu, himself a Buddhist monk. When I was walking into the theatre in one of the film festivals in in Delhi around 2000-2001, with the info about the director being a monk, the expectation was to get to see something on the screen that would be heavy on philosophy. His next film, Travellers and Magicians, a multi-layered road movie shot in Bhutan, was full of philosophical undertones, but no, not Phorpa. It was, instead a delightful film about a bunch of young monks whose only ambition in life at that moment in time was to somehow smuggle a television set into the monastery to watch the World Cup soccer finals. This film is a little gem, as anyone who has watched it would tell you. And it is gems like this that one occasionally gets to see in film festivals, and through the screenings of numerous film societies that dot the Indian landscape.

Why am I writing about this nine-year-old film now? Because I am right now going through, for the umpteenth time, a book called The Most Memorable Films of the World – From the Diaries of the Film Societies, a compilation of information about 130-odd films from all over the world, painstakingly brought to shape by H N Narahari Rao of Bangalore. If you have attended the Bangalore International Film Festival, you would know Rao as one of the key members of the organizing team. A committed film society activist, Rao has been one of the most active members of Suchitra Film Society of Bangalore. And the years of experience as a film society activist is amply reflected in this book, in which Rao provides a note on each of the 130 films selected to be profiled through its synopsis and cast & crew details, a note by the author, and a brief introduction of the director, making it a really handy reference material.

What makes the book different from the usual ‘100 films you must watch’ kind of lists is that it really brings together films from all regions of India and the world, some that one actually would be lucky to get a copy of. Rao says in the introduction that many more films could have been included in the book but he had to stop somewhere, even if it had to be an odd figure of 130.

The listing is done neatly, in five chapters demarcating five ages of cinema – the silent cinema, the initial ‘talkies’, the New Wave, the new generation and the emerging talents. The films included in the book come from 39 countries. Quite obviously, these are not the only countries in the world to make cinema. And quite obviously a big number of films that usually crop up in such listings are missing here – most notably the Hollywood and Bollywood stuff. But then, the intention of the author seems to take the author through a journey of some great cinema from all genres, and if though I found many films missing from the list, I also found that the book mentions gems like Phorpa that would not usually get listed in the usual market-driven ventures.

I will write about the films mentioned in the book in another post, but can anyone tell me if a DVD of Phorpa is available in the market?