Voices from the Waters 2009 – A Preview
The earth is my bed…bed..bed…bed…
The sky is my ceiling..ceiling…ceiling…ceiling
The whole creation is my native place.
- Quick Gun ‘I will teach you how to behave’ Murugan
The Exotic…is within you.
- Prof. Nirgun ‘Tharak Buddhi’ Chaturvedi(speaking at the 7th Convention of Crude Logic, Varanasi)
This one came quite unannounced. I mean generally it comes with a plan and everything, and I prepare for it mentally every year. Well, last 2 years to be precise. And each time there are few faces associated and some films that excite your imagination. It can get tiring, for the film makers, for the watchers, and the readers. Well, the last category is pretty much non-existent actually.
I personally have come to associate with the Water Film Festival rather spiritually. The films, their lineup, the issues all bring out the once-in-an-year documentary-film-activist in me. I can’t explain it. May be it is the nature of events as they unfold in a typical film society environment. You select films all year, put this on, and put that on, to go with this mood, or with that global event, and it all goes so well, according to your plans, as you see people liking the films and coming back to you with questions and suggestions. It becomes a community effort. Well, maybe that’s why someone called it a film ‘society’. Anyways, jokes apart, here is the 4th Voices from the Waters film festival at our doorstep. And we do not happen to have either Eminem or Shekhar Kapoor like last year. They were busy with their next album, next film, next dinner, next press-brawl, next commercial, next personal blog that is supposed to stay a private affair if you are kidding me, next news headline, make your own version. But we got a lineup to feel good about, and we sure are not gonna turn our backs on these important films, more so, when we got no reasons to do that. And some documentary film watching never hurt the average Kaminey-watcher so there you go.
This year we got a 3 day schedule, at some 6 venues. I am gonna stick to the central venue at Alliance Francaise, but feel free to wander around the Garden City and explore the religious and political quotients of the delightfully conversant auto drivers of the city. They come a little rare off late, given the reinforced and digitally enhanced future plans of the long retired city.
As for the films, there are some valuable inclusions and re-runs from the last year. Here is a quick look at few films that look exciting to me, for some reason or the other:
Rajasthan, short length, floods are not a common occurrence in deserts going by the average 4th grader I.Q., multimedia format
Film: Flood of Memory (Baadh Ki Raat)
Country: India
Director: Anitha Balachandran
Duration: 11 min.
Synopsis: In 2006, a devastating flood hits the Rajasthan desert of western India. The film uses a combination of live footage, charcoal and sand animations to evoke the desert landscape, and the memories of people who live within it.
Films that follow the course of a river often turn into interesting documents, last year we had a few(Kaali Bein, Kosi etc.), it connects time, generations, history, culture and all similar things that put you to sleep if not made well. This one looks good on paper, with the adventure and tough mental and physical task to administer and everything.
Film: Source to Sea: The Columbian River Swim
Country: USA/Canada
Director: Andy Morris
Duration: 90 min.
Synopsis: Chris Swan swam 1243miles in 13months, all across the Columbia River, braving not just cold and exhaustion but pollution and encroachments which threaten to turn the once thriving and glorious water body into sewage, displacement and extinction. Andy Morris’s remarkable ‘Source to Sea’ is not just a rousing paean to human endeavor but also spans the ancient story of a river and the life and culture that thrives in and around it. It is through these epic narratives that the film arrives on the essential connect between man and the elements; one we are in the danger of forgetting. Winner of the Best Environmental activism/ Social Justice Award and Most Inspiring Adventure Film Award.
This one is a bumper from last year, it silenced all frowns and noises, brought about a hollow we could not take, made us all sad, but did something to us amidst all that. Then the exotic landscapes, the tribal connections, the ever-intriguing tribal refusal to compromise with the changing times. Moreover, a brilliantly made film, elemental, raw and very very engaging.
Film: Switch-Off (Apaga y Vanamos)
Country: Pehuenche-Mapuche/Chile/Spain
Director: Manel Mayol
Duration: 83 min.
Synopsis: The Biobio is an angry river, one that has resisted every attempt to tame its furious currents- from the Incas to the Spanish Armada. But with an energy giant and an uncaring government trying to construct a hydro-electric dam over its waters, the lands and histories of the indigenous Pehuenche-Mapuche tribes are a stake.
However evasive and sly the officials try to be, the voice of protest booms across the land. Director Mayol captures these angry voices and images to channel them into the explosive and acclaimed ‘Switch-Off’. Winner of Best Film at both, the prestigious Planet in Focus and Ecocinema 2005.
Exotic. Inuit. Something about films with seals in them. They bring out that love for Iceland. A recent example is Frozen River(Mellissa Leo took the OFF THE MAP sensibility and based it in a frozenland, the cold-everything was a metaphor for everything lacking in their cornered world)
Film: Umiaq Skin Boat
Country: Canada
Director: Jobie Weetaluktuk
Duration: 31 min.
Synopsis: Umiaq Skin Boat is a beautiful and poetic film about a group of Inuit elders in Inukjuak, Quebec who decide one summer to build the first traditional seal skin boat their community has seen in over 50 years. Umiaq Skin Boat bears witness to the resilience of the Inuit spirit in rapidly changing times.
Invocation films hardly go wrong.
Film: Secret Life
Country: Poland
Director: Joanna Hoffmann
Duration: 12 min
Synopsis: The video refers to the contemporary quest for life and its definition. In a poetic way, it combines micro and macro scales, scientific images with everyday surrounding and experiences. It touches the subject of water as a source of life.
Superb film from last time. Ancient history. Caves, that Egypt feeling. Houses that would collapse if you said wow one more time…
Film: Blue Gold in the Garden of Eden
Country: Turkey/Syria/Iraq/Germany
Director: Leslie Franks
Duration: 59 min.
Synopsis: It was called the Garden of Eden. The cradle of western and Islamic civilization nourished by two ancient and legendary rivers- the Tigris and the Euphrates. These were the lands that gave the world the first principles of water management, showed how mighty rivers could be harnessed for greater good. But times have changed. Director Franke’s striking documentary delves into the social and economic consequences of the South-East-Anatolia Project and prophecies that reason for the next war in these strife-torn regions will be nothing but ‘water’.
Conflict between the ancient(faith) and the modern(experiment)
Film: Salt of the Earth
Country: France/Thailand
Director: Bernard Sugue
Duration: 51 min.
Synopsis: Food supply of millions people of the Isaan region in Thailand is endangered because of the salinity of the earth. The scientists installed a veritable field laboratory in the middle of the rice field but to no avail. With no breakthrough in sight, they turn to the farmers and their intimate knowledge of the land and together, the search for a solution is begun.
Mexico films also seldom go wrong, tribal, the threats to a culture that cannot survive anyways
Film: Cucapas & Kiliwas 9000 Years Later
Country: Mexico
Director: Nicolas Defosse
Duration: 58 min.
Synopsis: The haunting tragedy of two tribes, the Cucapas and Kiliwas, in Northwestern Mexico, both prohibited from plying their traditional livelihoods in their own ancient territories and are now being pushed to the brink of extinction. As the members of the tribe are forced to emigrate in search of work, their culture and language gradually dissolve into oblivion.
The scientist in self-doubt mode. Who needs any more reasons?
Film: The Earth Beneath His Feet
Country: India
Director: Saji P. Mathew
(The Director and Cast of the film will be present for the screening)
Duration: 16 min.
Synopsis: Late in life, a scientist is tormented by the fact that all his life’s work has been one great folly and instead of progress, he has instead pushing civilization closer to extinction. Will it be too late to redeem himself?
Spiritual/mystical connect between a rural populace and water. Reminds me of Kaali Bein.
Film: Duet with the River God
Country: India
Director: Altaf Mazid
(The Director of the film will be present for the screening)
Duration: 90 min.
Synopsis: For Suren Boro and 6, 50, 000 people, living in 126 villages in the southern side of the River Pagladia, the river is a living god called ‘Pagla Baba’. Round the year they remain engaged in pushing the river down south, for every use of water – drinking, household, irrigation. Since the 1920s, they have constructed 13 bunds with whatever materials at the disposal – boulder, stone, sand, tree etc. ‘Duet with the River God’ chronicles a brief period in Suren’s life and through it, finds an almost mystical connection between man and river.
Animation or experimental shorts are always welcome in a documentary fest. And this one has an interesting premise for added appeal.
Film: Trade Winds
Country: USA
Director: Elyssa Di Giovanni
Duration: 05 min.
Synopsis: A leisure-minded lighthouse keeper puts his kite building hobby to good use when a violent storm at sea threatens his life.
Alaska, frozenland, exotica, rare document of a world you would normally not catch on NGC or Discovery(do check your listings for that crazy look on your face).
Film: Ice Bears of the Beaufort
Country: USA
Director: Arthur Smith
Duration: 55 min.
Synopsis: Arthur Smith’s dreamlike ‘Ice Bears of the Beaufort’ plays witness to fragility and the otherworldly beauty of Alaska’s Beaufort sea coast, home to the polar bear. As the offshore oil and gas development threatens to wreck havoc in paradise and the government debates as to whether or not to declare and protect the area as a ‘critical habitat’, a lone resident of an Inupiat Eskimo Village captures the sounds and images that offers the sole documented proof of a mesmerizing world dangerously poised on the brink of extinction. Winner of the Special Jury Prize at the Blue Ocean Film festival, Georgia.
LA river? Of course. If it is anything similar to Texas Gold or The Return of Cuyahoga, I am in.
Film: Heather and Goliath
Country: USA
Director: Thea Mercouffer
Duration: 10 min.
Synopsis: A rousing account of a biologist with the Army Corps of Engineers, a satirist and a bunch of boaters stand up to the authorities, and change the course of history for the embattled LA river.
A film from Australia(they are normally lazy and everything, no I am not talking about that Baz Luhrman film that no one saw)
Film: Ten Canoes
Country: Australia
Director: Rolf de Heer and Peter Djirr
Duration: 90 min.
Synopsis: It is a land where that which comes before and all that has yet to be exists in the present, in beautiful unity. The first full-length feature ever to be made in the indigenous Australian language, the acclaimed and truly one-of-a-kind ‘Ten Canoes’ unspools story within story, time within time and spins a strange, whimsical and beautiful narrative about the land and its legends, spirits and strangers, husbands, wives, friends and neighbors. Winner of the Special Jury Prize at Cannes’ 2006.
Invocation film. Graphic tale. Meditative.
Film: Cairo: the breaking up of ice
Country: USA/UK
Director: Jacob Cartwright & Nick Jordan
Duration: 16 min.
Synopsis: 19th century adventurer John James Audubon’s graphic tale of being stranded among breaking ice is juxtaposed with images of changing landscapes and ghost towns, thus combining the past and the present into an intense meditation on the changing times.
OK, this one comes with a snore warning, but like it is a classic and stuff, so…
Titas Ekti Naadir Naam
Some facts:
Voices from the Waters – 2009
Voices From the Waters is the largest International Film Festival on Water, with more than 300 handpicked films that deal with the many dimensions of the water crisis- ecological destruction, livelihood and migration, discrimination distribution, sanitation, harvesting and so on. The festival has been much acclaimed and films from the festival have played at prestigious international film festival such as the Margaret Mead Film Festival, New York, Mountain film in Telluride and Finger Lakes Environmental Film Festival, Ithaca College, USA.
It was a festival in design, but has become a movement in reality. The true success of ‘Voices From The Waters’ lies in its ability to reach out to the students, film makers, artists, water activists, architects, engineers, scholars and policy makers.
The 4th International Film Festival on Water – “Voices from the Waters 2009 ” will be conducted from the 4th to the 7th of September, 2009. It will take place in many auditoriums in Bangalore so as to reach a more diverse target audience – Bal Bhavan, Cubbon Park for School Children, MES College for College Students, Alliance Francaise de Bangalore, Badami House, YWCA and Suchitra Film Society (General Audience). About 4000 people are expected to attend the festival every day.
Highlights:
Water Awareness Cycle Rally by Youth Conference
on 29th August, 2009 on climate change and water.
Paintings and photos exhibition on water.
Water Songs.
Conference on Critical link between Climate changes Food, water, livelihood and ecosystem security.
Interaction with various Film Directors.
For Polar Bears
For Sid
BlogBFS
Festival Schedule
Last year reviews
Art – D. Narahari
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
‘preciate it! All aboard and set sail.
Cheers. Ready to rock the boat.