IN SEARCH OF LOST TIMES by Arindam Nandy
Bring Your Own Film Festival
In search of lost times.
Arindam Nandy
It was about seven in the morning when the train chugged to a halt at Puri station. We were revisiting this place after nearly a couple of decades. And one of us, surprisingly, had never been here before.
For me, Puri brought back memories of the time I was about six. Like most Bangalee kids, we most often were destined to visit the area to the right of the station...the crowded Swargadwar area with the Jagannath temple and the public beach. The other side, the left of the station area, that is, hardly ever featured in our itinerary. And I was no disrupter of status quo. Following my parents wherever they ordered, as a little kid, I remember having tried my hand on an Agfa aim-and-shoot camera for the first time on a terrace opposite the Jagannath temple. I shot my parents.
Three of my friends and I embarked upon this journey to discover ourselves in the milieu of a film festival extraordinaire. With the sun, sand and sea and the dreamy-blue sky up above. Bring Your Own Film Festival, BYOFF for short. A festival on an almost virgin beach where short and documentary films are to be screened by the young-at-heart filmmakers and enthusiasts. Films made by them, or brought by them to be shared with others. That's as far as logic and excuse goes. And the magic? No work, all play. For three days in a row with some occasional frolic in the sea. Simply put, an easy, inexpensive way of reversing our age, or so we thought.
As the auto-rickshaw turned left from the station towards Chakrateertha Road, we were discovering a new Puri. No crowd. No temples. No cacophony. The sea-breeze was drawing us close to nature as we busily checked whether our mobile phones caught the necessary signal. In about five minutes, we were at the beach. A hotel and restaurant called the Pink House had two huge tents built in the adjoining area close to the beach.
A gateway with flags and handdrawn posters greeted us with just two simple words that possibly never meant anything to anybody, or, everything to everybody...'Bhadas Dho.' When there was hardly a soul in sight that 'early' morning, a sardar called Gurpal Singh emerged and welcomed us. I am no competent person to talk about the multitalented Gurpal here but one thing's for sure, that the first BYOFF would not possibly have been a success without him. He was there...almost always.
The place had many small hotels around. Leo Castle, Derby, Sea Palace...We checked into a hotel called Beach Hut. Nice, comfortable rooms with a balcony facing the sea. The tarrif was peanuts. While my friend Ranjan and I stuck together most of the time discovering the festival and the place, Ayesha, a colleague, was beckoned by the waves and Kallol, much in love with the surroundings, decided to buy a house around the beach and went hunting for information.
The festival kickstarted with Little Mytheey, daughter of a Belgian tourist, cutting the ribbon to inaugurate the event. The opening film, Where is My Brother? made by 9-year old Kabir Aslam of Bangalore was a commendable effort at such a young age. Thereafter, films of any format and length were being shown in two tents simultaneously with a seating of 200+ in each. People chose chairs or just takiyas on the floor. Some just decided to keep standing as freshly brewed intoxicants poured out from foamy white screens.
And the 35 mm and DVD projections at night on the Pink House wall...under the blue sky...by the endless waves. Fascinating. Young filmmakers were putting up quickly scribbled or photocopied posters on the outer walls of the tents to draw attention to their films. Participants moved about with video and still cameras capturing whatever drew their fancy. Some exchanged notes, some compared the festival with beach festivals around the world while some just did nothing at all but stare at the endless waves while the mesmerising lounge music from Pink House engulfed the atmosphere.
Ranjan and I were like observers from Mars on a special mission to BYOFF. Engaging ourselves in all and sundry... baywatching round-the-clock, tasting fishes of the Scombridae family at Xanadu, leafing through dusty pages at a quaint little bookshop (found my first Haruki Murakami here), checking out a German bakery and reliving the '70s around a restaurant called Amazonia. Ranjan, who was freshly served an order of prohibition by the disciples of Hippocrates, decided to stay dry while I chose between air and water. We were all letting our hair down. And how.
There was order amidst chaos. No one knew who sponsored what but there was free lunch, dinner and drinking water for all. Kapilas was cutting out press clippings, Amlan was managing the tents, Gurpal's father was helping to introduce the films and the filmmakers...The students from Biju Patnaik Film Institute with Susant Lulu Mishra and other filmmakers, critics, technicians and enthusiasts from Orissa, plus Gurpal Singh worked relentlessly to make everything happen.
This is where we made new friends. Discovered other people like us...More people were coming in from all over the country and abroad every day. Kaushik, a friend working for an oil company posted in Andhra Pradesh, drove all the way down. Ranadeep, Urmi and friends played truant to their jobs in advertising and enjoyed the oil massage by the makeshift tent on the beach as the foam caressed their feet. Samit flew down from Bombay. Aspiring to make films in India after a stint at the film school in New York city, Sammit brought along a wonderful short film he had shot in the US called At the Midnight Hour. Nirad showed Arjun's Eye, brilliantly shot and produced by Abhik Mukhopadhyay. Qaushik from Calcutta showed Le Pocha, a film on the music of Bangla bands. Pallavi brought a film on Kalighat. A couple from the St Xavier's College, Department of Mass Communications, showed a handful of commendable shorts as well.
The evenings lit up with performances...Ileana Citaristi came over and performed a Chhou piece. Parnab Mukherjee from New Delhi came up with an installation presentation called Just Look at Me: Keep Looking. And as the evening crept into night, the guitars were drawn. Shilajit, the popular actor and singer from Calcutta performed impromptu and continued till early morning. Qaushik joined in too.
And there were the late night open-air projections. Spreadeagled on the dunes or huddled under blankets as the night grew chilly, the crowd watched films till their eyelids gave away or the sun shone on their faces to wish them a very good morning. About a 100 films were screened and the 3-day festival was extended by a day.
I couldn't stay till the end. My job back in Calcutta stuck like a sore thumb in the face of my age reversal spree. Ranjan stayed on to have more fun. I envied him. We all wished there was no tomorrow. Ayesha did not want to return. She was crestfallen when I reminded her of the impending work at office back in Calcutta. Unwillingly, I let my head rule over my heart. Like a member of the Indian censor board, I snapped every bit of the dream and stepped on to the reality train back to Calcutta.
I was never a disrupter of status quo. A few more BYOFFs and someday, I'm sure I'll surely be one.
The author is the Chief Creative Officer with Response, an advertising and communications company in Calcutta. While creating ads for most well known brands for the last 15+ years, he has remained an avid film watcher and collector. He has spent time in advertising houses and with prominent documentary and adfilmmakers in the US. A connoisseur of the arts, he also has television commercials and a documentary film to his credit.
He can be contacted in arinda...@gmail.com
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Visit http://www.byofilmfestival.com to know more about and register for the BRING YOUR OWN FILM FESTIVAL, PURI 2006
Also visit the Group home page: http://groups.google.com/group/byoffpuri to post your thoughts, suggestions and of course communications with fellow-filmmakers/enthusiasts to make BYOFF 2006 a grand success!