Getting Ready to Rock On!! at Indian Visions
iView Author: Amanda Sodhi (Washington DC, USA)
Email: amandasodhi [at] gmail [dot] com
Getting Ready to Rock On!! at Indian Visions
A few weeks back, I had done a brief posting about Indian Visions: The Indian Film Festival of Washington, DC. The film festival is taking place from November 13 through November 16 at the Phoenix Adlabs Theaters at Union Station (I hope all you PFCians in the DC area attend).
Over the past few months, I have been working as Program Coordinator of the Indian Visions, which happens to be my first experience with organizing film festivals. I must say it has been quite an insightful, exciting and memorable experience.
After sending out what seemed like infinite requests for screeners and actually hearing back from a fraction of the people contacted, we have finally narrowed down the films to be screened to 24 extremely well-made shorts, documentaries and feature length films in 7 languages (Hindi, Urdu, Bengali, Tamil, Malayalam, Marathi and English).
And, after going back and forth with various directors and production homes trying to finalize the opening night film, I am really happy to let you all know that our opening night film is Rock On!! and the festival is bound to be magik-filled as director Abhishek Kapoor will be attending the festival to present his film to the DC audiences.
Other celebrity guests who will be attending include Brahmanand Singh, Ashish Avikunthak, Spandan Banerjee, Harjant Gill, Mona Kumar, Leena Jayaswal and Indria Somani. All of these guests will be interacting with the audiences after the screening of their films.
While all of the information about the festival is on our Web site, I’m still throwing in a list of the films we’ll be screening:
Rock On!! (Abhishek Kapoor)
Welcome to Sajjanpur (Shyam Benegal)
Naalu Pennungal/Four Women (Adoor Gopalakrishnan)
Prapancha Pash/A Throw of Dice (Franz Osten)
A Wednesday (Neeraj Pandey)
Valu: The Wild Bull (Umesh Kulkarni)
Mumbai Meri Jaan (Nishikant Kamat)
Nirakar Chhaya/Shadows Formless (Ashish Avikunthak)
Pancham Unmixed (Brahmanand Singh)
Shot in Bombay (Liz Mermin)
The Fiction (Spandan Banerjee)
AIDS JaaGo (Mira Nair, Vishal Bharadwaj, Farhan Akhtar and Santosh Sivan)
Midnight Lost and Found (Atul Sabharwal)
Rewind (Atul Taishete)
Haravele Indradhanush/The Lost Rainbow (Dhiraj Meshram)
Antaral/End Note (Ashish Avikunthak)
Beware Dogs (Spandan Banerjee)
The Private Life of Albert Pinto (Sidharth Singh)
Between Two Worlds (Mona Kumar)
Crossing Lines (Leena Jayaswal and Indira Somani)
Milind Soman Made Me Gay (Harjant Gill)
Quamar/Working to Live (Preeya Nair)
Super 30 (Christopher Mitchell)
Wings of Evolution (Ramesh Mourthy and Raghu Jeganathan)
With our film festival just a few days away, requests to media outlets to cover the event still in the process, our stress levels (and excitement levels) skyrocketing, I really hope that in the end the second year of Indian Visions will be a successful one.
P.S. I’ll be covering the film festival for PFC when it takes place and will be sharing photos of the event, as well 
Anurag Kashyap
Abhay Deol
Dibakar Banerjee
Hansal Mehta
Khalid Mohamed
Kundan Shah
Anish Kuruvilla
Jaideep Verma
Manish Gupta
Navdeep Singh
Bhavani Iyer
D. Santosh
Onir
Ashvin Kumar
Ramu Ramanathan
Sudhir Mishra
Pankaj Advani
Revathy
Saurabh Shukla
Shilpa Shukla
Sujoy Ghosh
Suparn Verma
Santosh Sivan
Shashank Ghosh
Shivajee
Pavan Kaul
Partho Sen-Gupta
Prroshant Naryannan
Sam Langoria
Satish Kasetty
WoW,.
‘Valu: The Wild Bull’; is in the list;
Aeeiii Durkyaaaaa!!!!
Thanks for Sharing! Hope you have a great festival!
@Shekhar
Awesome artwork on your blog!
Thanks, Sarang!
btw, anyone looking for more info. about the festival (those of you in the DC/MD/VA area), the Indian Visions Web site is www.indianvisions.org
Awesome! Good luck for Indian Visions. Lots of acclaimed film titles there. Waiting to hear more on the responses the films get. Have you seen all these films?
Will try to be there..
@Tushar: Thanks! Yep, will definitely keep you all posted about the responses the films get!
@Tejas: Great!
@Amanda,
I am working with the local Academy of Art here at Honolulu to help them arrange their 2009 Bollywood film festival. I wanted to know if you would be willing to share your experiences in obtaining the movies. I am interested in some and any assistance would be greatly appreciated.
Thanks.
@Sarang: Sounds interesting!
There are a few ways to obtain screeners for Indian films (feature films, shorts, documentaries):
1. You can visit Web sites of other film festivals for lists of well-made films like IFFLA, MIAAC, PIFF, TIFF, IFFI, Osian-Cinefan, etc. Some Web sites like the IFFLA Web site are really awesome as they post contact information for the screeners. You can also contact the people listed on the Web sites and request a festival program book which sometimes has the contact information for screeners if it is not posted online. Or, you can ask the program coordinators of various festivals and see if they can share contacts.
2. You can also go to Bombay and try to obtain films (and secure guests for films)…This is a good tactic to get really new films not previously showcased elsewhere for your festival.
3. You can also call production homes and directors, expressing your interest in screening their film(s).
To tell you the truth, one ends up sending out LOTS of email requests and getting screeners for a fraction of the films requested because directors have priorities regarding which festivals they wish to participate in. There are over 400 film festivals in the world and people don’t want to send screeners and prints to all of them ;)
Furthermore, for some of the big-budget feature films there are issues with release dates and sometimes there are requirements that you need to invite someone from the film team in order to get permission to showcase the film which leads to budgeting issues. Other times one has to play phone tag and email tag before one gets a yes or a no on whether they can screen a film or not.
In the end, though, this is all very doable. It just requires advance planning, a lot of patience and research, and solid communication skills. Of course, having contacts within the industry also helps.
Hope these thoughts help, Sarang
Good luck with your film festival!
@Amanda
Thanks. A lot of communication is what is going on right now and hopefully, we shall have a small but nice festival. I shall share those as things develop.
“Milind Soman Made Me Gay (Harjant Gill)”
:D
@Sarang: No problem. Yep, do keep us posted about how things go.
amanda, best of luck with the festival.. sorry won’t be able to attend, but looking forward to your coverage.
@Striker: Thanks! What?! You aren’t coming? Oh well, Sukumar and I will be sure to keep you posted on how it goes