BackNew Year Ideas | Attend a film festival
Festival-going may sound like an anachronism in the age of downloads, but there really is no better place to watch a movie
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My year is determined by the festival calendar. Not the religious one, but the movie one.
My own private almanac is divided into the busy period (October-December) and fallow phases (nearly every other month of the year). There’s the Mumbai Film Festival in my hometown, which always necessitates a paid leave application (reason: personal). There is the International Film Festival of India held in Goa, which I have abandoned in recent years but which I plan to return to. And there is the annual pilgrimage to the wonderfully idiosyncratic International Film Festival of Kerala, held in Thiruvananthapuram. There are many other festivals in other parts of the country that I am unable to go to, but I keep tabs on them remotely, scrolling up and down the schedules to see what I am missing, swallowing my disappointment at not being able to make it, and wondering if I should break my no-piracy rule.
Festivals, those seemingly endless days of wallowing in cinema where one movie flows into the next to the point where you will be hard-pressed to remember what you last saw or what you plan to watch next, are an essential part of any movie-goer’s experience. This is where the old and new expressions in cinematic language come together in one place. However, movie-watching is only one part of the experience. There are few better places than film festivals to lose and regain faith in humanity. A festival is where you meet the sophisticates and the upstarts, the experts and the charlatans, the faddists and the fanatics. The true-blue festival regular isn’t usually the most opinionated one, nor is he the delegate who is glassy-eyed and somewhat breathless after having watched four films and rushing into the fifth. The genuine article is the one who would like nothing better than to watch films all alone, who quietly slips out of one screening and disappears into another, who doesn’t like to pull up to the shore but keep floating along from one wave to the next.
Festival-going sounds like an anachronism in the age of downloads and private viewing, where a large-canvas movie gets squeezed into a 12-inch screen. However sophisticated the home theatre system (such as the mini-theatres in the homes of affluent suburban Americans and some very wealthy Indians), there really is no better place to watch a movie than in a cinema hall, where its true destiny lies.
All my good, bad and tiresome movie experiences have been in theatres. And the best experiences, however tedious or overrated the movie, have been at film festivals. I am quite pathetically addicted to making fervid inquiries first about festival dates and then about the line-up of films. Once this line-up has been revealed, a familiar sensation starts unfolding in the body, usually similar to the early warning signs of a heart attack, which results from the difficulties of navigating the festival schedule. How does one deal with clashes between two masters? Badly, usually. How does one fit lunch, caffeinated beverages and toilet visits between screenings? Will one get a good seat, which is in the rear and right in the centre? Like so many others I know, I have spent several precious hours and minutes worrying over what appear to be trifles, all in the name of feeding the sweetest addiction of them all.
Festivals can actually be fun, once you have stopped worrying about them. A festival is where you meet forgotten buddies and find new ones, and it’s also where you decide to end a relationship purely based on another person’s taste. I have festival friends whom I see but once or twice a year, usually in some queue or the other, clutching a festival catalogue, soliciting or handing out recommendations and opinions, and shaking their heads about how this edition was simply the worst of them all. I usually meet them again at the same place the following year. I doubt we would have anything to say to each other if we met in the harsh light of day, without a film screening or a whining session for a context. I doubt that we even want to. Like pilgrims who surge forward towards the light, festival regulars congregate and make their way as one towards darkness. At that moment, it is the only truth that matters, and the only way to repeat the experience is to scan the calendar, list out the dates, apply for leave and start the process all over again, and again, and again.
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