All things cinema!

Director Nashen Moodley gives the Sydney Film Festival a shiny new look

BY RAJNI ANAND LUTHRA

It will be all things cinema in Sydney as the 59th Sydney Film Festival gets underway this week. In a new look festival devised by firsttime director Nashen Moodley, cinema is going to come out of the theatres and invade other areas of life in our city, with exhibitions, talks, discussion forums, even cuisine, taking on the hues of silver screen.

“There’s been a wonderfully positive reaction so far to the program we’ve devised,” Nashen Moodley said while speaking with Indian Link a few days before the start of the festival, adding that he was confident of delivering a vibrant new festival.

More than 150 films from 50 different countries will screen at the festival which is on from June 6 – 17.

And while in recent years, Indian fare at the festival has dwindled somewhat, prompting comment in this very newspaper about the sorry inability of organisers to find even a handful of interesting films from the world’s most prolific filmproducing nation, this year’s special focus on India hopes to bring in welcome relief for and contemporary India that struggles to make sense of itself as it grapples with centuriesold tradition and a modernity that is sweeping through it like a tsunami. This year’s Sydney Film Festival will take us from the rugged violence of the Hindi heartland to environmental degradation in war-torn Kashmir, from congested urban Kolkata to drought-ridden rural Maharashtra, from the glamour of the Miss India contest to the austerity of a Hindu women’s fundamentalist movement, from the sets of a Mallika Sherawat film to a Panipat rag trader’s workshop. edge cinematic creations … rare but thrilling films that truly move the art form forward. These are the films that provoke, court controversy, broaden our understanding of the world and say important things in innovative ways”.

“Of course the Indian films are not only for Indian audiences,” Moodley noted. “The aim as always is to expose all our audiences to different types of cinema”.

And which of these films is Moodley himself looking forward to seeing again?

“I am loath to take sides really, but I’d say Gangs of Wasseypur and Jai Bhim Comrade Wasseypur will be interesting – full 5 ½ hours of it!

I’m just disappointed its director Anurag Kashyap won’t be here.

Still I’m happy we have the film in our official competition section – the first Indian film to be listed for competition at the festival”.

The competition section in general is one of the highlights for Nashen.

“Competition is important in a festival, I think,” he observed.

Equally important for Moodley are the film-maker guests who will be on hand to introduce their films, such as Anand Patwardhan, Sandeep Ray and Musa Sayeed from India.

“Guests also make the festival. To interact, network and engage with people involved with cinema at various levels, will be a definite highlight”.

And there will be many opportunities for film buffs to do this as the festival begins. This year, in a new platform created by Moodley, the Sydney Town Hall will be the ‘Sydney Film Festival Hub’. In just a short stroll away from the Festival’s major venues, the ‘hub’ will be a hive of activity where you can catch up with filmmakers as well as other festival goers, and enjoy free exhibitions, talks, parties, live music and performances. Discount tickets will be available for next-day screenings, and much like in New York’s Times Square, you will have experts on hand to guide you through what’s on offer.

Special events are also on at the Grasshopper Bar (one of them with Indian film-maker Musa Sayeed, where you can get create special cinema-inspired meals! Plus, you can catch all the action at non-stop screenings of SFFTV at Martin Place.

With all these new activities, the Sydney Film Festival will look a lot more vibrant this year.

“Film festivals these days create a wonderful space for interaction,” Moodley stated. “The atmosphere is changed now, to include more consultation with the audience”.

But ultimately film festivals are all about films, and Moodley has created an interesting program, including new as well as established film-makers – a tribute to Bertolucci, classics from Japan, arthouse offerings from India, Indigenous films from Australia, films on music, “freak me out” films, international documentaries, short films, even a special section from Sydney’s film-school alumni.

At his first Sydney Film Festival, Moodley brings years of experience from the Durban and Dubai Film Festivals that he has been involved with for long. A film buff since his boyhood days, he stumbled on to organising film festivals during university in his native South Africa, where he was studying law. His family migrated from India in the 1860s, and although he continues to have close ties with India, Nashen claims he likes to see himself as a “global citizen”.

“I go to India fairly often, and have close contacts with the film industry there, having worked and Dubai festivals”.

“I know an Indian focus has been largely absent in Sydney in recent years, and that’s what I’ve tried to shepherd in this year”, he added.

Some of the unforgettable Indian films screened at the Sydney Film Festival over the years have included Mr and Mrs Iyer (Aparna Sen), Peck on the Cheek (Mani Ratnam), Bend It Like Beckham (Gurinder Chadha), the documentaries Hunterwali (Riyad Vinci Wadia) and War and Peace (Anand Patwardhan), and a rare classic from 1928, Shiraz (Franz Osten and Himanshu Rai), restored and played to live orchestra music. Chadha and Patwardhan, whose films won SFF awards, were memorable guests of the festival, besides of course India’s undisputable star of ‘thinking’ cinema Shabana Azmi, way back in 1996. That year, Indian Link newspaper had helped organise a special night of Indian cinema with then festival director Paul Byrnes. Not long after that, Byrnes had included a list of Bollywood’s commercial blockbusters in the festival line-up. But the first samples of Indian cinema came to the festival nearly 45 years ago in 1968, when David Stratton brought Satyajit Ray and his Apu Trilogy to Sydney. With his special package from India this year, the message Nashen Moodley wants to send out to Sydney’s Indian

“Wasseypur will be interesting – full 5 ½ hours of it! I’m just disappointed its director Anurag Kashyap won’t be here. Still I’m happy we have the film in our official competition section – the first Indian film to be listed for competition at the festival”.

Nashen Moodley