Asansol’s Banwarilal Bhalotia (BB) College will organise a two-day global cinema conference — “Screen to Street: Decoding Cinema in Everyday Life” — starting Tuesday.
Amitava Basu, principal, said this was a major shift in “bringing meaningful conversations on cinema beyond the metros to smaller towns”. “It is possibly for the first time that a conference of such stature and content is being organised by a college here,” Basu said.
With film appreciation courses now a part of the National Education Policy-driven syllabi in UG courses, Basu said this meet “can inspire young minds to look into cinema as a serious academic option”.
The meet will be hosted by Meghe Dhaka Cinema, a cinema collective of BB College, in collaboration with Talking Films Online, a joint forum set up by Nikhila H. of the department of film studies, English and Foreign Languages University, Hyderabad, and Gita Vishwanath of Forum On Contemporary
Theory, Vadodara.
Soumitra Roy of Kazi Nazrul Islam Mahavidyalaya, Churulia, and member of Talking Films Online, who herded this enterprise, welcomed “conversations on cinema beyond Calcutta”.
Filmmaker Jaydip Mukherjee on Tuesday will present his film, Painted Memories: Calcutta Connects Raj Kapoor.
The conference will end with a roundtable, “From Screen to Street: the Mundane and the Artistic in the films of Ritwik Ghatak, Guru Dutt and Raj Kapoor”.
