Mohan Agashe: Moving pictures

A conversation between a deaf and blind married couple, the inner voices and visions of a schizophrenic, the dreams of a young boy ? who has no legs ? to become a dancer?

Calcutta will play host to a film festival of a different kind. Since 1995, the German organisation ?Arbeitsgemeinschaft Behinderung und Medien? (Association for Disability and the Media) organises an international short film festival under the name The Way We Live! in Munich. There have been five editions of the festival so far.

On the invitation of the Goethe-Institut/Max Mueller Bhavan Calcutta, festival director Gregor Kern and Pune-based psychiatrist and theatre/film personality Mohan Agashe will present about 25 award-winning films (documentary and short fiction) from 10 countries on disability, selected from the last five editions of the festival.

The films will be screened in four sessions, each session expected to be of about two hours? duration. The first session, on Friday, January 27, will be held at Indian Institute of Cerebral Palsy, Taratala, and the other three at the Max Mueller Bhavan (MMB) auditorium on Saturday (January 28) and Monday (January 30).

Kern and Agashe will introduce the sessions and interact with the audience after the screenings. ?The films and discussions are particularly aimed at teachers/trainers/parents of disabled persons and media professionals with a view to providing a forum to promote dialogue and exchange of views,? according to S.V. Raman, MMB programme officer.

The programme is being organised jointly by the Goethe-Institut/Max Mueller Bhavan Calcutta in association with AHEAD, Indian Institute of Cerebral Palsy and Manovikas Kendra. Admission to the sessions is free and open to all.

Wie wir leben! (The Way We Live!) is the longest-running festival of this type in Germany. It is a festival that shows exclusively films focused on people with disabilities and the chronically ill and on their experience of life. The package, along with ?interesting productions? from India, promises to be ?authentic, moving and entertaining?.

?We are not claiming to present a complete or final picture of disability. For this, the film-makers express far too many different points of view. You will be shown neither an idealised picture of the world, nor a world that is full of tragedy. You will not see problem cases, but people with their own minds, their own wishes and their own ambitions; people who enjoy life, who love and work and fight,? says Kern.