Cannes and Indian cinema
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PALMING off our FILM LEGACY
Faizal Khan The Times of India 2013/05/12
It has been two decades since an Indian film made it to the competitive category at Cannes, a comedown overshadowed today by Bollywood paid premieres and sponsored red carpet appearances
One warm afternoon, sometime in April 1984, Mrinal Sen received a phone call from Cannes Film Festival’s Gilles Jacob, who had a request for the master filmmaker. The then General Delegate of the influential festival in the French Riviera was facing a dilemma because he had two Indian entries from two of the world’s greatest directors for that year’s Palme d’Or competition and he could select only one. The films were Khandhar (The Ruins) by Sen and Satyajit Ray’s Ghare Baire (The Home and the World). Ray had suffered a heart attack during the making of Ghare Baire and Sen sensed Jacob’s anxiety on behalf of the Cannes festival to select the film for competition considering the uncertainty of Ray’s career.
Ghare Baire was eventually selected for competition and Khandhar in another big-ticket official selection category, Un Certain Regard. That was the only time a Mrinal Sen film was kept out of the Cannes competition. “They obviously wanted to select Ghare Baire for the competition because of the situation,” Sen said during his last visit to Cannes three years ago when Thierry Fremaux, the new General Delegate, chose Khandhar, restored from the ruins its print had fallen into, again in the Cannes Classics section, in a rare tribute befitting its title.
Exactly a decade later, another telephone call from Jacob, this time to Shaji N Karun, an acclaimed Malayalam filmmaker, came with no strings attached. Cannes, Karun was told, had selected his new film Swaham (My Own) for the competition. “Gilles Jacob hinted at the length (141 minutes) of the film and asked if it was possible to reduce it. I politely declined and he respected my decision,” recalls Karun, whose first three films (Piravi, Swaham and Vanaprastham) were all screened in the Cannes official selection. Karun, along with his Film and Television Institute of India (FTII) classmate Sukhwant Singh Dadha, carried the eight heavy reels of Swaham on their heads to Mumbai airport to send to Cannes. It was the year Quentin Tarantino's Pulp Fiction won the Palme d'Or.
QUANTITY VERSUS QUALITY
No such calls have come from Cannes festival since 1994, making Karun’s Swaham, the tragic tale of a mother’s dream to rescue her family which ends with her son collapsing in a military recruitment camp stampede, the last Indian film to have been selected for the Cannes competition. Not even this year, when India is the special guest country of the 66th Cannes festival beginning May 15. At a time when India is celebrating 100 years of the country’s cinema, that is not good news. The competition section of 20 films in Cannes represents the best of filmmaking in a year, revealing new trends and celebrating new thinking in world cinema. Indian films have regularly competed for the Palme d’Or, the top prize of the Cannes competition from the ’50s to the ’80s when a Satyajit Ray, Bimal Roy, Mrinal Sen, Shyam Benegal, Shaji N Karun or M S Sathyu shared the high table with a Vittorio de Sica, Luis Bunuel, Jean-Luc Godard, Akira Kurosawa or Quentin Tarantino. Today, the honour of being an equal to Lars von Trier, Terrence Malick, Michael Haneke, Pedro Almodovar or Abbas Kiorastami is eluding an Indian filmmaker.
“Good films are not accidental, they are made with proper support like finance, promotion and exhibition,” says Adoor Gopalakrishnan, whose Elipatthayam (The Rat Trap) was an official selection in Cannes (1982). “In India, we had all this support at one time, now it has completely dried out. I am not saying there is no talent today, but certainly there is no support,” rues the director. Now with that money and support available in the form of an industry, India’s B-grade commercial cinema gets the Cannes tag by often travelling to the Marche du Film or the Film Market held during the Cannes festival to screen their movies in hired preview halls by the majestic Mediterranean Sea. With a waning official selection for Indian cinema, these market-bound films on DVD assume the ‘screened-in-Cannes’ status. Aided by a publicity machine that proclaims a ‘world premiere in Cannes’, the quickly-gained spotlight stays for a while, misleading cinema lovers back home.
ART GONE ASTRAY
While the high standards of Indian cinema have been slowly replaced by market driven parameters, like a global release or the number of screens, in the past decade, the Indian-style parallel cinema has been re-emerging in countries like China, Indonesia, the Philippines, South Korea and even Thailand.
Last year, there were two South Korean films in the Cannes competition (by Hong Sangsoo and Im Sang-soo) and two years earlier, the competition jury president Tim Burton handed over the prestigious Palme d’Or to a Thai filmmaker for the first time. Apichatpong Weera - sethakul’s Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives told the simple story of a dying old man visited by the ghosts of his dead relatives in his final days, a straightforward cultural reference to the deep belief in ghosts in Thailand. Brillante Mendoza of the Philippines, who depicts his society’s ills through violent frames of realism, has been chosen for competition in two successive years since 2008. Compared to that, only two Indian films (Udaan by Vikramaditya Motwane in 2010 and Miss Lovely by Ashim Ahluwalia in 2012, both in Un Certain Regard) have featured in the Cannes official selection in the last decade since Murali Nair’s Arimpara in 2003 (Not counting the eminently forgettable documentary on Bollywood).
India’s film lovers are longing for a return to the days when its films competed in Cannes with the best of global cinema. Many Indian filmmakers believe the promotion of mediocrity should stop and committed directors should be given the backing to express their creativity. Asked whether Indian cinema missed its masters like Ritwik Ghatak, Satyajit Ray and Mrinal Sen (who no longer makes films), Cannes festival’s Thierry Fremaux said during his visit to India, “You have to create your own masters”.
Competed at Cannes
1952 V Shantaram | Amar Bhopali-
1953 Raj Kapoor | Awara-
1954 Bimal Roy | Do Bigha Zamin-
1954 Kishore Sahu | Mayur Panch-
1955 Bimal Roy | Biraj Bahu-,
1955 Prakash Arora | Boot Polish-
1956 Satyajit Ray | Pather Panchali-
1956 Shantaram Athwale | Shevgyacha Shenga-
1957 Rajbans Khanna | Gautama the Buddha-
1958, Satyajit Ray | Parash Pathar-
1959 Narendra Suri | Lajwanti-
1960 Bimal Roy | Sujata-,
1962 Satyajit Ray | Devi-,
1964 Moni Bhattacharjee | Mujhe Jeene Do-
1974 M S Sathyu | Garam Hawa-
1976 Shyam Benegal | Nishant-
1980 Mrinal Sen | Ekdin Pratidin-
1983, Mrinal Sen | Kharij-
1984 Satyajit Ray | Ghare Baire-,
1986, Mrinal Sen | Genesis-
1994 Shaji N Karun | Swaham,
