Queues outside film fest venues show Kolkata’s passion for cinema – Times of India

KOLKATA: Chalachitra Satabarsha Bhavan, where Saturday’s first show was of the Azerbaijan film titled ‘In Between Dying’ that had competed at the Venice International Film Festival, is just a stone’s throw from MR Bangur Hospital that was till recently treating only Covid-19 patients.

Viewers stood in queue for 22 of the 72 seats to see the film at the 26th Kolkata International Film Festival (KIFF). The city’s love for cinema was evident from the fact that by the time the theatre screened the day’s last show, ‘Miss Marx’, the number had swelled to 67.
It was a similar emotion that also prompted Prosenjit Chatterjee to drop by at Nandan for the inauguration of the exhibition to pay tribute to Pandit Ravi Shankar, Hemanta Mukhopadhyay, Bhanu Bandopadhyay, Federico Fellini and Eric Rohmer. “People of Kolkata are passionate about sports and cinema. Being a cinema person, I want to support a film festival. Instead of going completely digital, our chief minister has given her go-ahead for a physical edition of KIFF during the pandemic. She has also sanctioned the finances for organizing it. I am grateful to her for that,” Chatterjee said.
Chatterjee was the KIFF chairperson before Raj Chakraborty. “This festival is very important to me. I always love to watch films at Nandan. Raj is much younger than me and I felt I had to support him since he is trying to organize the festival even during the pandemic. When he told me the names of the legends whom KIFF is paying a centenary tribute to, I felt I had to be there to support this initiative. I wanted to do a festival of Bhanu Bandopadhyay’s films at Nandan,” he said.
Chatterjee insisted that the “magic of cinema” will never die. According to him, the visuals and techniques of cinema might change but movies will live forever.
“I just watched Satish Kaushik’s new film called ‘Kagaaz’. This man, who once did ‘Mr India’, has directed a film during the pandemic with Pankaj Tripathi that almost seems like a documentary. Even Anubhav Sinha, who made ‘Ra.One’, is now doing different kinds of movies. I appreciate this change and feel this is a learning exercise for us,” he said.
Sinha was at Sisir Mancha on Saturday to deliver the Satyajit Ray Memorial Lecture on the social responsibility of mainstream cinema. “Not every film-maker has to make issue-based or socially responsible films. There is a thin line between making an issue-based film and being an activist. My attempt now is to bring the discussion to the table. I don’t think I have the answers. But if my attempt ends up starting a discussion, I think I have done my job,” he said.