If you love cinema, it’s time to revel in its Asian flavours as the Network for the Promotion of Asian Cinema (Netpac) unravels “Imaging Asia,” a festival conceived as an“ exposition” of cinema, in New Delhi (August 18 to 22). Being held across five venues — Indira Gandhi National Centre for the Arts, Instituto Cervantes, Alliance Française, the India Habitat Centre and the India International Centre — it’s a festival that puts the spotlight on Asian cinema in a much more holistic way; it celebrates the cinema of the region a little more organically. While its conference on the culture and politics of Asian cinema focuses on the “specificity of film cultures and on the need to recognise and respect diversity while defining cinema, the politics governing the cinema’s evolving identity in the context of globalisation and the shifts in technology that play out differently against the dynamic landscapes of Asia,” its exhibitions, organised in association with the Asian Heritage Foundation and the ICCR, bring to the fore the traditional forms of storytelling in Asian countries, lent vividness by the performances of the proto-cinema picture storytellers, shadow plays and puppets by the practitioners of narrative pictorial traditions.
What the festival, which brings “all aspects of Asia’s cinematic history and movements into focus”, really seeks to achieve is inform the viewers about the different dimensions of filmmaking and its evolution in the continent, from its inception to recent times when it’s making waves at various film festivals across the globe, showcase the sheer richness and variety that Asian cinema has to offer — not just with respect to content, but also technique — and trigger a little more calibrated response from them.
For well above two decades, film connoisseur, critic and scholar Aruna Vasudev has been at the forefront of a revolution, no less, that has seen Asian cinema go places. She is the one who brought to us Osian’s Cinefan (which she quit a couple of years ago), a festival of Asian and Arab Cinema, which continues to romance film lovers every year in Delhi. She is the one behind Cinemaya, the Asian film quarterly and the official journal of Netpac, which has been a window to the best of cinema writings in the region for generations of cinephiles. “Imaging Asia” is yet another electrifying and innovative offering from Vasudev, who heads Netpac, as the body celebrates its 20th anniversary.
It has been a long — though sometimes fraught with challenges of its own — and rewarding journey for Netpac, which was established in 1990 and, in due course, facilitated a renaissance in the discourse on and perception of cinema in Asia. In a world dominated by movies from the hallowed portals of Hollywood, Asian cinema, soon, found an audience of its own, enchanting cinema lovers across the globe who finally looked beyond LA, acknowledging the quality of Asian films which were scripting a success story of their own.
A milestone, for Netpac, was the institution of the Netpac Award at international film festivals in 1994. The selection of more and more movies from Asia at world’s major film festivals announced the arrival of Asian cinema and today, the Netpac Award is given at 23 international film festivals in 18 countries and four continents, including Berlin, Brisbane, Bangkok, Barcelona, Rotterdam, Locarno, Hawaii, Pusan, Puchon, Jeonju, Jogjakarta, Singapore, Cinemalaya, New Delhi, Kerala, Mumbai, Kazakhstan, Taipei, Rome, Vesoul, Karlovy Vary, Estonia and Antalya.
Vasudev says that while the nodal point of “Imaging Asia” is the screening of the Netpac award-winning movies, it also highlights the role of Netpac in putting the spotlight on Asian cinema through an amalgam of art, performances and conferences.
Vasudev, who thinks the planet of cinema has grown in Delhi, with more and more embassies screening the best of world cinema for the discerning viewers, says the festival tries to tap the existing audience for a different kind of cinema that goes beyond the contours of popular entertainment.
Vasudev should know. For when a Mohsen Makhmalbaf, Majid Majidi or Abbas Kiarostami was largely the preserve of the well-heeled and the minuscule film cognoscenti, she was the one who, as the moving spirit of the then Cinefan Film Festival, organised screenings of some of the best films from countries, like Korea, Japan, Turkey and Iran, as part of several film weeks, bringing the best of cinema within the reach of the masses.
When Vasudev started it all, she aimed for an audience who connected with a certain kind of cinema and engaged with it in a more substantial, meaningful way. Twenty years down the line, it is an engagement that continues with Asian cinema attracting the attention of the film aficionados from across the world.
Latika Padgaonkar, an authority on Asian cinema, like Vasudev, and a member of the managing committee of “Imaging Asia”, who has curated the festival, had quite a task choosing from the wide array of films for the festival. If there are realist films from West Asian countries like Lebanon, Palestine and Iraq, the festival also puts on the platter some experimental gems from countries like Philippines and Thailand. ““Well, I did it,” smiles Padgaonkar, adding that there was a level-playing field at work in the selection of the films as they all are winners of the Netpac award.
Padgaonkar, however, did have some basic criteria like ensuring as wide a representation as possible. “We saw to it that there was no overdose of films from Japan and Korea and spread the net to the extent possible to give space to other smaller countries,” she says.
The other criteria were the representation of films from different years and different genres. Also, Padgaonkar wanted these films to be stylistically different. So, what you get to see at the festival is a whole gamut of multi-genre, experimental and classical-mould cinema. Political stories are pitted against ghost stories, and love stories against the stories of turbulence and turmoil.
“When you open up a whole range of films from Asia, you notice that some of the concerns raised in these films are completely shared,” says Padgaonkar, alluding to the similarities in narratives of films from Asian countries. Some of the films, she says, have strong political concerns and the viewers will get to see how some of the Asian filmmakers are looking at the common issues of the continent — like poverty, dislocation, violence, etc. — in their own ways.
Padgaonkar also wanted to include All Under the Moon, the 1993 film (on 16 mm) by celebrated Japanese filmmaker Yoichi Sai, which had won the first Netpac award. But that couldn’t be possible because of technical reasons.
Kazakhstan’s Tulpan (2008), by Sergei Dvortsevoy, which was the opening film of the festival, is the story of a group of nomadic shepherds in a poverty-stricken region of southern Kazakhstan. It was Kazakhstan’s 2009 Academy Awards official submission in the Foreign Language Film category.
Oasis (2002), by South Korean director Lee Chang-dong, a love story between a social misfit and a girl suffering from severe disability, will put the curtain down on the festival.
As the pioneering figures who have popularised Asian cinema, Vasudev and Padgaonkar would only like to see the cinema of the region grow and grow further. They would like to see more productions, more producers and better distribution network when it comes to Asian cinema. And, most of all, they would like to see the movement they began with Netpac get accelerated and enlivened across Asia.
The movement, which began 20 years ago, is still on. Let the world be willing to suspend its disbelief for Asian films. Let the spotlight be on Asian cinema, always.
Here’s one for many more years of its growth...