Non E Giusto (Italy) and (below) The Apple Game (Czech)

It may may or may not have been out of emotional empathy for our Bangladeshi brothers, but Shyamal Chhaya (Humayun Ahmed), screened on the last day of the Cine Central organised International Forum of New Cinema, as a parallel festival to the 11th Kolkatta Film Festival, was a big draw, one of the few films to be not just appreciated, but generously applauded at the end. The other being I am Taraneh, 15 (Iran; Rassul Sadr Ameli). Ahmed’s film stands out in its starkly simple treatment as he shows a group of Hindu and Muslim men, women and children marooned together on a boat while on the run during the Pak-Bangla war. What’s remarkable is the subtle, quiet humour Ahmed fuses into the situation and the characters as they realise they must stick together if they have to survive that night of terror. No style or technology, just simple narrative and good characterisation. And it works.

Like in Ameli’s film about Taraneh, a 15-year-old girl, pregnant and deserted. Almost documentarish, very straight treatment, but the strong theme and convincing acting by the characters, including some very moving scenes between the girl and her father, who’s in jail while she goes through the ordeal alone, keeps us glued, waiting for her moment of feminist triumph.

A similar triumph was also seen in The Apple Game by Czech director Vera Chytilova, to whom was dedicated the retrospective section of the festival. Chytilova, who is known to have paved the way to Czech New Wave cinema, relies neither on simplicity nor hard anti-anything statements. Surrealist, almost bewildering, camera shots blurring into a style of her own, as she shows her characters grapple with old age, eroticism and the loneliness of life. But no pathos anywhere. Scenes drift into each other, polished by humour, experimental, though dealing with everyday characters like the Don Juanish boss Faun in Faun’s Very Late Afternoon, or young Anna who allows herself to be seduced in The Apple Game. The treatment very erotic, very ripe, like the big red apples from which we cut to the head of a baby emerging from the womb. What was special about the retrospective section was that it opened with Another Way of Life, the same Vera film that Cine Central had screened for the first time in this city 40 years ago.

Cine Central dedicated its Homage section to Yasujiro Ozu, considered “the most Japanese of all directors” and the maker of such classics like I was Born But, Late Spring, Floating Weeds, Tokyo Story, about families, relationships and changes that time brings.

But apart from such classics, there were perhaps only a handful of other films in CC’s screening of nearly 48 films during the eight-day festival (November 10-17), which will stand the test of time and memory, at least till next year’s festival.

Awed silence there was this year, too, broken only by rare shuffles in films like Contra Todos (Brazil; Roberto Moreira), set in the poor suburbs of Sao Paul, about the sex and violence in their lives. In the very next film, a no-skin Vares (Finland; Alekshi Makel), everyone was suddenly restless and deciding to quit soon enough!

In films like Marie Jo And Her Two Love Affairs (France; Robert Guediguian), with skin there was also some sense and sensibility. As with the other French film by Patrice Leconte, Man on the Train. Two lonely men meet and see in each other the lives they wanted for themselves but never had. Italy was not bad, including the digitally shot Non E Giusto, about children from two troubled families who come together to be friends.

It’s understandable that for the beleaguered Cine Central, not always having the most favourable means to get the best, hijacked as their festival has been by the state government, not to mention babudom ruling the roost even at Nandan’s media centre. But wish they could have managed a better hall than Crown, with a lack of food facilities around, or excluded a released Bollywood entry like Shoojit Sircar’s ...Yahaan or not inaugurated with a Tollywood film like Bappaditya Bandopadhyay’s Kantataar, a film of dubious quality, anyway.