Berlin International Film Festival | Of friendship, riots, and food

Berlin: It is an exciting year for India at the 63rd Berlin International Film Festival, with five films in various sections. The festival runs 7-17 February. And it’s great to be back! It’s about my 15th year as India consultant to the Berlin Film Festival. In my first year, Mani Ratnam had just sent his Dil Se, which was translated as von Herzen, or From the Heart. What happens at Berlin is that it is usually cold—currently 4 degrees centigrade and the forecast is minus 6 by Sunday—so you keep rubbing your hands briskly, and the warmth generated kind of rubs off into a gesture of anticipation as well.

add_main_imageFive films in the festival is quite a coup for India, as the event receives an estimated 8,000 film entries from all over the world, and every section of the festival is fiercely contested. This time, there were 171 entries from India.

India has no film in the competition section. However, the Indian films selected include Abhishek Kapoor’s Kai Po Che (Brothers... For Life) in the panorama section. There are three superb documentaries in the International Forum of New Cinema—Sourav Sarangi’s Moddhikhane Char (Char... The No Man’s Island), Fahad Mustafa and Deepti Kakkar’s Powerless, and Deepa Dhanraj’s Kya Hua is Shahar Ko? (What Happened to this City?). And there’s the short film Sonyacha Amba (The Golden Mango) by Govinda Raju, a Film and Television Institute of India (FTII) student in the Generation K Plus section for children and young adults. The competition, panorama and generation sections are part of the official selection; the forum is the highly prized, cutting edge, parallel section of the festival. NextMAds

There are two more British films drawing attention to India this year. The first is Salma, a documentary by well-known British director Kim Longinotto, set in Tamil Nadu, that was also at the Sundance film festival. And Jadoo (Magic) by Amit Gupta, in a most intriguing section called Kulinarisches Kino (KuKi, the insiders call it)—culinary cinema/film and food, which celebrates the delightful idea of pairing films with cuisines, and explores food, relationships and the environment.