Nazrul Tirtha, the sole venue in New Town for the Kolkata International Film Festival, got a third auditorium on Saturday.
Director Prakash Jha, known for hard-hitting films like GangaaJal, Raajneeti and Aarakshan, did the honours along with Bangladeshi filmmaker Mostofa Farooki and urban development minister Firhad Hakim.
The auditorium seats 52 with reclining chairs in the last row. Up front, closer to the screen, there is a U-shaped table for meetings to be held. “We can hold film appreciation courses here,” said Hidco chairman cum managing director Debashis Sen. The table, he added, could be removed and more chairs put in.
“It is an honour to visit such a beautiful movie hall dedicated to the poet Nazrul Islam,” said Jha. “The more screens you add the better it gets for us filmmakers,” smiled the man now busy making a TV series on the Bhawal Raja case. Bengal, he said, had always been at the forefront of the cinema movement. He recalled that Mrinal Sen had organised a special show of Damul, his first major film, at Nandan in 1985. “The film grew from there.”
A short film, Durattwa, by Amit Bagchi was screened afterwards.
Film fest notes
The film festival, which made its way to New Town with the 2014 edition, has been warmly embraced this year too. According to Nazrul Tirtha sources, earnings from daily ticket sales till Wednesday was in excess of Rs 67,000. Delegates too were making a beeline at the 400-seater Hall 1. The highest footfall was for the Swedish film The Square screened on Tuesday evening.
Friday’s offerings are promising. Not to be missed is Grandeur et decadence d’un petit commerce de cinema (The Rise and Fall of a small film company) by Jean-Luc Godard, the most influential director of the French New Wave. Based on James Hadley Chase’s 1964 novel The Soft Centre, it was created for a French television network for the Serie noire TV anthology in 1985. It is a funny, melancholy video piece about a director and producer who are trying to make a movie out of the Chase novel with a low budget, and with an eye toward classic sublimity. The composer line-up for the music includes Bela Bartok, Leonard Cohen, Bob Dylan and Janis Joplin.
The second film of the last day — Andrzej Wajda’s Afterimage — is also worth a watch. The film is the story of Wladyslaw Strzeminski, the most important Polish painter of the 20th century, whose avant garde paintings and sculptures brought him acclaim though World War I had left him with a missing arm and leg. But at the peak of his career, Stalin comes to power, ordering all art to be objectified, serving as Soviet propaganda.
Wajda’s contribution to cinema has been recognised with an honorary Oscar in 2000 by the Academy Awards, Lifetime Achievement from European Film Awards in 1990 and Golden Bear for Lifetime Achievement by the Berlin Film Festival in 2006.
Tickets are on sale at the venue for Rs 80 and Rs 60.
