Robin MacPherson Writes - From the Kolkata Film Festival

Last week, it was China for Robin MacPherson - Screen Academy Scotland director; now it's India........

Last week, it was Beijing, for the CILECT international congress of film and television schools; this week, it’s the Kolkata Film Festival, in India, where we’ve been meeting local film makers and teachers at the Satyajit Ray Film Institute. It’s been a busy time for the four students and two members of staff - myself and Paul Holmes - from Screen Academy Scotland.

One of numerous memories from CILECT was how it coincided with the news of Obama’s election as US president. It was slightly surreal to see half the hall following the US election on their laptops while the congress held its own election for president of the association (for which their was only one candidate).

Obama made the front pages of the Chinese newspapers but popular opinion seemed to be that the US election isn’t such a big deal. That said, the critical dependence of China on the US market for its manufacturing industry is very evident. China’s TV news have been carrying stories about factories closing as a result of the US recession.

On the streets of Beijing I also kept coming across a rather disturbing image – former prime minister, Tony Blair, on the front page of the Chinese Vanity Fair. I also came across another British import, this time on the tube: video monitors carrying ads for Mike Leigh’s film, ‘Happy Go Lucky’, which is getting a Chinese release.

Cultural imports are also evident on Chinese TV e.g. Desperate Housewives, though an attempt to create a Beijing equivalent of Disneyland ran out of foreign investment halfway through so remains half-built, its rusting steel framework a rather eloquent monument to the perils of the economic roller-coaster.

Kolkata, the former capital of India (during the Raj) and now capital of communist-governed West Bengal – is home to reputedly the favourite film festival of former Guardian film critic, Derek Malcolm.

Maybe it's because of the warmth of its welcome and the enthusiasm of its audiences. I can’t comment on the latter - yet - as our programme isn’t screened until tomorrow, but the welcome has been undeniably warm.

The invitation to attend the festival was the result of a word in the ear of its director, planted by veteran arts impresario and Edinburgh Traverse Theatre founder, Jim Haynes, now resident in Paris. Screen Academy Scotland is a partnership between Napier University and the Edinburgh College of Art.

For the last six years, Jim has been programming consultant to the Kolkata Film Festival. Someone, he can’t recall who, invited him to a screening of our films and he, in turn, recommended them to festival director, Nilanjan Chatterjee.

Only a matter of hours after our arrival in ‘The City of Joy’, we bumped into Haynes at our hotel and was able to thank him in person for his good offices.

The festival boasts an impressive line up of world cinema, ranging from a Jacques Tati centenary tribute to Polish master, Andre Wajda’s latest film. Not surprisingly, given it’s his home town, the late, great Satyajit Ray is paid tribute through a selection of his favourite Hollywood films, including Buster Keaton’s The General and Alfred Hitchcock’s Rear Window.

When we arrived at the festival HQ, they were putting the finishing touches to the festival venue, re-painting the courtyard, literally by hand.

At time of writing the festival website (www.kff.in) still features last year’s programmes rather than the 2008 one. But despite this ‘just-in-time’ approach, the festival promises to be a raucous celebration of cinema in one of the world’s most vibrant, most polluted, cities, where the extremes of poverty and wealth jostle for your attention.

Perhaps that goes some way to explaining the locals’ particular interest in the cinema of social realism, a legacy of Ray and other proponents of the so-called ‘parallel cinema’ – a contrast to the familiar escapism of Bollywood that UK audiences associate with India.

Beijing and Kolkata were both cities of Empire. The one, an ordered and symmetrical administrative capital, laid out on Feng Shui lines to ensure celestial harmony was reproduced on earth, the other a vain attempt to impose order on a cauldron of agriculture, commerce, trade and intellectual ambition.

From the Moguls to Maoist trade unionists to multinational software companies, Kolkata has offered a rich seam of human coal – mined for its economic value and creating a world-class ‘spoil heap’ of those for whom ‘trickle down economics’ is a kind of reality; the shoe shine vendors literally scraping at the feet of affluent middle-class Bengalis maintaining the world’s software networks.

Modern Beijing is full of people trying to transform the sterile grey lines of 1960's Maoist uniformity into a cacophony of advertising neon, shopping malls and avant--garde art spaces. It’s a city struggling (unlike Shangai, where the process is virtually complete) to transform itself into the modern commercial capital.

Modern Kolkata, on the other hand, is a city struggling to challenge the anarchic energy and ingenuity of its inhabitants into some kind of order, constantly subverted by the forces of nature - human and otherwise. Its once splendid Victorian buildings - symbols of mercantile and civil power - are now decaying, like the Empire. Sagging, blotchy and decrepit, they are a mouldy shadow of their former selves.

But somehow, life continues to force its way through the grime and the fetid detritus. The energy of the place is overwhelming and also overhead - street dwellers without an official electricity supply solve the problem by attaching (at some personal risk) a wire to the most conveniently located overhead cable, tapping into the city’s grid to power the gaudy-coloured strip lights illuminating their trinket stalls.

The scale of Kolkata’s street life is as if Glasgow’s Barras had mated with Kelvinside, the resulting 'discrete earthquake' distressing the buildings and chucking the residents onto the street to survive the apocalypse, by gamely selling off everything that survived, whether in one piece or otherwise.

Meanwhile, Indian newspapers are dwelling on the perceived snubbing of India in Barrack Obama’s failure to call the Indian Prime Minister despite calls to 16 other world leaders including China’s Premier Hu Jintao and Pakistan’s President Asif Ali Zardari.

“In other world news”, as they say, I’m intrigued to find local paper, ‘The Statesman’, reproducing an article in the Independent newspaper (here) on a row over the new BBC series, A History of Scotland.

Can’t help feeling its rather ironic to be sitting in former Raj capital Kolkata, where numerous Scots lived and died (and did their share of killing) for the Empire, reading claims of excessive anglo-centricity in the presentation of Scotland’s past.

Source: allmediascotland.com