The 12th International Documentary and Short Film Film Festival Of Kerala (IDSFFK) will begin in Thiruvananthapuram on June 21, Friday, with the screening of Selfie, a documentary film directed by Italian director Agostino Ferrente. Close to 262 films will be screened at the festival, in the city’s Kairali-Sree-Nila theatre complex over 6 days.
This year, the festival will honour documentary filmmaker Madhushree Dutta with a lifetime achievement award at the closing ceremony on June 26. Seven films by Dutta will be screened at the festival. The 60-year-old filmmaker, also a curator, teacher and the founder of women’s welfare organisation, Majlis, forayed into documentary filmmaking in 1993, with I Live in Behrampada, about a Muslim ghetto in the context of communal riots in Mumbai. In 2009-13, she curated Project Cinema City: Research Art and Documentary Practices, a research project with multi-disciplinary interfaces of arts, which was exhibited at Berlinale (Berlin International Film Festival) – Forum Expanded, as part of the 60th anniversary of the festival in 2010, and galleries such as National Gallery of Modern Art in Mumbai.
In the competition section, 63 films – long and short documentaries, short fiction and campus films – will be screened. There will be a special screening of late French filmmaker Agnes Varda’s Faces Places, and late Lebanese journalist Jocelyne Saab’s Beirut films. Also, Adoor Gopalakrishnan’s debut short fiction, Sukhantyam, Sangeetha Dutta’s Bird of Dusk, and Mathieu Roy’s The Dispossessed will have three screening each at the festival. Post the screening of The Dispossessed on June 23, the Sarath Chandran Memorial Lecture and an interaction with journalist P Sainath will be held.
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Shivendra Singh Dungarpur’s 429-minute documentary, Czechmate: In Search of Jiří Menzel, which is known as the longest film ever certified in India, will be screened as two parts on June 22 and 23 at Sree Theatre. The film comprises of 85 interviews on 20 Czech filmmakers who were part of the Czech New Wave.
In Artists’ Cinema section, curated by film critic-filmmaker C S Venkiteswaran, 24 films, including Sudarshan Shetty’s Waiting For Other To Arrive and Vipin Vijay’s Small Scale Societies, will be screened.
The full screening schedule is here.
Feature image credit Tank Magazine