The Bong connection at London Film Festival 2011: (From top) Noukadubi, Gandu and Nobel Chor

Three of the five Indian films selected for the 2011 London Film Festival, which opens on October 12 and runs until October 27, are Bengali. Selected by Cary Rajinder Sawhney, the LFF’s South Asian programme adviser who viewed between 70 and 80 submissions, they are: Suman Ghosh’s Nobel Chor (The Nobel Thief), Rituparno Ghosh’s Noukadubi (Boat Wreck), two films with Tagorean themes and Q’s (Qaushiq Mukherjee) Gandu (Asshole).

TOLLY ON A ROLL

“Bengal once again seems to be turning out some of the best, most innovative and highest quality films in India in terms of independent films like it was maybe 10 years ago,” says Sawhney. “It is a good time (for Bengali cinema).”

Nobel Chor, “a black comedy about the state of the Indian nation”, is inspired by the theft of Tagore’s Swedish medal from the museum in Santiniketan, while in the LFF catalogue Sawhney has commended Noukadubi in glowing terms. Noukadubi’s cast includes the Sen sisters, Raima and Riya, Jisshu Sengupta and Prosenjit. “A delightfully twisted plot and nuanced script is supported by a magnificent cast of top Bengali actors, including a superb performance by Raima Sen,” is Sawhney’s enthusiastic catalogue note for the film.

Suman Ghosh will be in London to promote his film but Sawhney does not know of any other “talent” coming over from India.

London has become virtually Bollywood’s backyard but if ever there was an opportunity for Rituparno Ghosh to share the limelight with a member of his cast, this seems as good a chance as any for Raima Sen, dressed in a crisp red cotton sari, to knock the spots off Z-listers teetering on high heels on the red carpet.

“Bengali cinema is famed for its high quality, intellectual depth and literary references,” Sawhney tells t2. “What is unusual about a film like Gandu is it kicks all that out of the window. It’s a very different kind of film in terms of style and subject matter.”

One of the two non-Bengali films chosen is Adaminte Makan Abu (Abu, Son of Adam), directed by Salim Ahamed. Sawhney calls it “a very charming, unusual film from Kerala by a young filmmaker about a couple of pensioners who are trying to get to the Haj and struggle to fulfil this dream”.

The other is Anhey Ghore Da Daan (Alms of the Blind Horse), directed by Gurvinder Singh and set among the landlords and landless farmers in modern rural Punjab.

Sawhney was tempted to add another Bengali film but was restricted to five. “The fact that Bengal can still turn out films as different as Noukadubi and Gandu are a testament to the richness of the cinematic culture of India, but mainly of Bengal,” he observes. “I don’t think it is happening in that way in other places.”

“I could only select five because the London Film Festival has 300 films from all over the world,” reveals Sawhney, who stresses the films he picked are not only for Indians but for a world audience. “I was tasked to find the best films — as simple as that.”

His boss is the London Film Festival’s artistic director, Sandra Hebron, who is in her final year in the post, having done the job since 2003. She has been on the staff of the British Film Institute, which runs the festival, since 1997.

This year, 3,000 entries were whittled down to 300, compared with 2003 in her first year as director, when “we watched 2,396 films to make our final selection of 200 films and 108 shorts”. “Our remit is to show the best of world cinema from the previous 12 months,” Hebron explains to t2. “We try to be international and show a very broad range of works.”

In terms of trends in world cinema, “you see different national cinemas go through a period when they are flourishing and perhaps (when) they are slightly less prominent. The late 1990s, beginning of 2000, saw a massive outpouring of interesting work from Argentina. There is much more interest and prominence certainly in Korean cinema now but from China, too. But it varies from year to year. There are good years and bad years for particular countries.”

She hopes the co-production treaty India signed with the UK in 2008 will lead to increased cinematic collaboration between the two countries. She says that the BFI has traditionally “supported people like Satyajit Ray and we were very much involved in growing the awareness of the work of (Ritwik) Ghatak and restoring prints and touring Ghatak films. The BFI in the longer term will have an interest in Bollywood cinema and try to help to get it taken a bit more seriously than it currently is.”

The UK box office is dominated by American films but Hebron dismisses the notion that British cinema has been stifled by Hollywood. “There have been times when that has possibly been true but one of the things that has been pleasing for me is to look at the British films in the festival, particularly last year and this year, and see what a very original and high quality selection we have.”

Freida Pinto in Michael Winterbottom’s Trishna

Tess as Trishna

As a pointer to the future and of Indo-UK partnership, she proudly holds up Trishna, Michael Winterbottom’s retelling of Thomas Hardy’s Tess of the D’Urbervilles transposed to Rajasthan, with Freida Pinto in the cast.

“I love Trishna, actually,” enthuses Hebron. “One of the things that is so strong about Trishna is that he has kept faithful to the original novel but by setting it in modern-day India he gives it a completely different flavour. And the film feels very modern and I think he has done a really good job.” She says Winterbottom “presents something of India that might not be what people are expecting; as much as he shows us the beautiful countryside and the gorgeous, historic buildings, he also shows us a very modern Mumbai and lots of young people trying to make their way in film or music or dance. So we see Mumbai as a very modern, cosmopolitan city. So I am a great supporter of Trishna. When we selected the film for the festival, it did not have UK distribution at that time. I am very much hoping that by the time we get to the end of the festival someone will have picked it up for distribution. It is one of Michael’s best films.”

Asked for her personal festival pick, she nominates three loosely linked German films, set in the fictional small town of Dreileben where the starting point for the movies are the same — the escape of a convict from police custody — before they take off in different directions. The films, Beats Being Dead, Don’t Follow Me Around and One Minute of Silence, are hailed as being part of “a unique project”.

This year, the crowds will flock to the opening night gala, Fernando Meirelles’s 360, starring Jude Law, Rachel Weisz and Anthony Hopkins; the closing movie, The Deep Blue Sea, directed by Terence Davies and again starring Rachel Weisz; The Ides of March, directed by George Clooney; The Descendants, with Clooney in the cast; and W.E., Madonna’s anti-British and pro-American take on the 1936 royal abdication crisis.

After all these years of running a major festival, has Hebron worked out what constitutes “a good movie” which she would happily watch on a Saturday night as excited as other “civilian” members of the audience? Hebron laughs: “We all have our own ideas about that — it is to some extent a subjective definition. I always look for some element of originality. I like to see a film that is not the same film I have seen a hundred times before. The story has to draw you in. There has to be something interesting in terms of what sits at the heart of the story. And then you want to see a filmmaker who has been able to tell that story in a way that has some freshness. Beyond that it is very hard to be proscriptive. When you watch a film you just know whether it is good or not.”