The last few days have been all about stories, and landscapes, languages and camera angles, reactions and feelings. IFFI, the International Film Festival held annually in Goa, is something I looked at peripherally until a few years ago. It was just another event that brought huge crowds and traffic jams to Panjim. I didn’t consider myself a ‘film-buff’ and I also thought that my knowledge about cinema was limited – this is perhaps because I grew up in a large family with a black and white tv (therefore less viewing) and in my adulthood simply watched popular Hollywood and Bollywood films with friends for the fun of it.
During the pandemic, an unexpected connection with a budding photographer and film-maker changed my perspective; I was introduced bit by bit to the vastness of world cinema, and the immense possibilities of regional Indian films, particularly southern. During the same time, I had an opportunity a write a column for The Peacock, the daily newspaper that accompanies the film festival – and in the process I was thrown into an enormous pot of knowledge. I learnt a little more about genre and technique, style and history. While filmmaking intersects in some ways with fine-art and art history, it was also a whole new area of discovery. This is so important to do for anyone – to enter into an unknown space brings in multiple fresh perspectives into one’s own field of practice.
So, this year I once again found myself traversing the world – from Tokyo to Shiraz, from the Argentinian and French countryside to the highlands in Armenia and the dense jungles in Kerala… snow and wind, rain and sunshine, clear blue skies and sharp greens of the vegetation, wholly diverse atmospheres
Each landscape, each culture, the people and their language, a new kind of poetry. Sometimes, it is beautiful to listen to an unknown language without subtitles, to have the words and their intended meanings flow through your bones and to let go of the urge to ‘understand’ and interpret.
Whether real stories based on life happenings, fantastic or absurd tales, abstract docu-montages or phantoms from someone’s mind, they all make you feel something.
As with all expressive arts, responses to film are also subjective, but the fact is that you can only find out whether you respond or not by sitting through different types. In all the films I’ve watched at IFFI in the last four years or so, I have only walked out of two – otherwise, even if the story is confounding or boring, I give it its full view, as I do with books as well.
There is so much scope in the craft of the moving-image, and incredible to imagine how vast teams collaborate to string the experience together for an audience. Sounds and silences, the camera movements, graphics and special effects, the altered gazes…
Can AI do the same thing? I don’t know – it can perhaps create shortcuts to the labour, but cannot replace the thought and sensitivity of a feeling human mind. Talk to a film maker, and you can see the visions in their words, the stars in their eyes, the deep desire to share a story come what may.
While I may not put the time and cater to this interest sustainedly the whole year through, I am grateful for these chances to expand my horizons when IFFI comes around, sharing moments with strangers as we step out of our comfort zones into the realm of infinite stories…
Lina Vincent