Bengali film makes it to Berlin festival

KOLKATA: After news of Haoban Paban Kumar’s ‘Lady of the Lake’ being selected for

Berlin

Film Festival’s Forum segment this year, comes the news of the selection of a Bengali feature film in the Forum Expanded segment. Directed by Ashish Avikunthak, ‘

Aapothkalin Trikalika

’ (‘The Kali of Emergency’) is the first Indian feature-length fiction narrative film to be shown in this segment since its inception in 2006.

The 79-minute film asks an allegorical question — during social and political turmoil, what is the manifestation of divine intervention?

“This film is a metaphysical contemplation in times of perpetual emergencies,” said the director, who is now an associate professor in film/media at Harrington School of Communication at the University of Rhode Island. Set in and around Kolkata, the film was made in seven years and is a deliberation on the social, political and psychological disruption caused by ‘emergency’.

“Not only is this the only

Bengali film

at Berlin this year, mine is the only Bengali feature film to be at Berlin after Q’s ‘Gandu’,” said the director who has a PhD in cultural and social anthropology from Stanford University and has earlier taught at

Yale University

.

Despite Tollywood churning out so many films every year, why do the official sections of coveted international film festivals not select Bengali films? “Tollywood is a commercial filmmaking industry. At best, it does lip service to art cinema, and at worst, it actively prevents non-commercial cinema to be produced. It is not that it does not have the enterprise or the talent; it is that the industry does not have the initiative or the artistic will to make such films. Tollywood is about making money and not producing art.”

“This selection is an important acknowledgement by the curators of the festival of not just my work, but the state of intense despair we live in.”