In 1997, a group of film industry stalwarts, including Hrishikesh Mukherjee, Shyam Benegal and Ramesh Sippy, founded the Mumbai Academy of Moving Image as a not-for-profit trust to organize an annual international film festival which the film industry and the country could be proud of.
Since then, the festival has had its ups and downs. There were days of glory with guests like Oliver Stone, Asghar Farhadi and Jane Campion, but it nearly shut down in 2014 because the main sponsors pulled out (which is when the current team stepped in). Its survival is a testament to our love for cinema. As MAMI celebrates twenty years, this book looks at its storied history and is a tribute to the passion which has made this festival what it is.
Sucheta Chakraborty has masters degrees in Film Studies and English Literature from the University of Edinburgh, UK and Jadavpur University, Kolkata respectively. She has worked as an editor with Routledge, Oxford University Press and Marg Magazine. Currently based in Mumbai, she writes regularly on cinema. Her articles have appeared in publications like The Hindu, Firstpost, Film Companion, Scroll in and The Telegraph among others.
Rupleena Bose teaches English Literature at Sri Venkateswara College, University of Delhi. After hours, she writes non-fiction and fiction screenplays. Films written by her have won several awards including a National Award. Her directorial documentary Humour Black is about satire and absurdity in India. She writes on cinema for The Hindu, Firstpost, Open, EPW and other magazines.
Her doctoral research is on urban music in Calcutta in the nineties. She is also translating modernist Bengali songs of the same period as a part of her research. She has been a Charles Wallace India Trust Scholarship holder for Creative Writing and is currently working on her first novel. Her other interests include cats, stories and more cats.
In the hall of Liberty Cinema where the ceiling stretched high above and glittered like a sparkling sky, as a stream of people hustled in, it felt as though time stood still. The scene must have been exactly the same decades ago at the opening of a movie when the audience flocked in, ready to be mesmerized when the hero burst onto the screen, promising the victory of good over evil. It was the first time I was attending the Mumbai Film Festival.
I had grown up around film clubs and film festivals. In the cinema city down south, once called Madras, where I lived, schools have film bonanzas where young adults can watch three to four films over a day termed cinema day. In the university where I studied and then taught, there were film screenings and film festivals in an auditorium where film-hungry students watched all of Pedro Almodovar's films from expensive DVD sets acquired from a parent's Bangkok trip. The colourful photoshop poster we put up outside screening rooms said 'film festival', but we did not know at the time that film festivals could actually offer the privilege of listening to Almodovar after a screening of a hot favourite, All About My Mother. Film festivals were events that were rare and hearing a film director was a privilege, certainly not easily accessible for regular college- going, class-attending students.
When I was in Delhi as a student in the late nineties, the international film festival was housed there for only a few years. But by the time I was a masters student slowly venturing into film studies, the city's only film festival, the International Film Festival of India (IFFI), moved to Goa. But then there was the Osian's Cinefan Film Festival of Indian, Asian and Arab Cinema, one that got bigger just as my interest in cinema grew. The Osian Cinefan Film Festival introduced Delhi to cinema from Asia and it also changed our mindset that cinema and the serious discourse around it was essentially around European cinema. And it opened up the world for me and other students like me. Osian also introduced us to Wong Kar Wai and I felt at home in an alien city that seemed to be mine in a way I could not understand.
Book's Contents and Sample Pages
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