Monday, June 10, 2013

I Try to Bring the Audience into the Situation: Nishtha Jain

Feminist and filmmaker Nishtha Jain has said that her method of documentary making focuses on bringing the audience right into the situation that the characters face. Nishtha, the director of the 96-min documentary “Gulabi Gang” was speaking at the third ‘Face 2 Face’ conducted as a part of the 6th IDSFFK. Her recent film was completed over a span of four years. While making films, she realized that the real difficulties and frustrations of people are quite different from what we infer from newspapers.  But if given proper treatment, a documentary can portray the real experience as it is - she said.
In reply to a question about crossing the division by a documentary film towards a fiction film, Nishtha opined that “it’s high time to get rid of the divisions… as long as the film is good, it doesn’t matter that much.” To the same question, Spandan Banerjee, director of To-Let, who also took part in the session, replied that a good documentary should fulfill the audience in all aspects. To make it entertaining, it could use some fictitious elements, but it should also be informative with facts.
When asked why Thomas Mathai’s film “Alfie” is an abstract one having no strong plot, the director replied that “we are so used with plots in movies, that we forget to appreciate the beauty of a visual, just as it is. ‘Alfie’ has a surrealistic approach and there is no fixed plot, making it open to different interpretations.”
Shazia Shrivastava, who directed and co-written the film “Do Peher (One Afternoon)” with her Mother Sharifa Roy, said that her film was inspired from her Grand Mother, who was a very peculiar person. The idea behind their film came from imagining the situations that might occur if a hit man showed up one afternoon at the door of her (Shazia’s) Grand Mother’s house.

Others attended the programme were Archana Menon (director of Virag), Rajesh Jala (23 winters), Kunal Vohra (Plastic Cow), Tushar Digambar (Firdoz), Sunil Sharma and Mini Sharma. Mammad Montage was the host.

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