100-day Countdown to 2019

Day 62 (31 st October) Three fine films at MAMI today. Champions, the Spanish film turned the convention of sporting movies on its head. The underdog team doesn’t win and finishes second. Yet they celebrate unabashedly and teach the coach a valuable lesson. The team is made of people with impaired intellectual abilities. They are champions despite being runners-up. The Indian film, Hamid, is a near flawless story on the Kashmir problem as seen through the eyes of a 7-year old boy. One Cut of the Dead, the Japanese film was a very clever film on film-making. It turned horror into a comedy.

Day 63 (30 th October) My assignment got over today, a day early. This means I can spend an extra day at MAMI. But there was an even happier news. Yesterday’s suspicion has been confirmed; my article will be published in Hindu Magazine section this Sunday. It is very apt for the Sunday leading to Deepavali. This will be my second byline in Hindu this year and I am over the moon. Watched my 13 th film at MAMI – Border. A deeply disturbing and unsettling Swedish movie, especially since the parable and metaphors are easy to figure out.

Day 64 (29 th October) Felt good to be among my erstwhile colleagues as I chaired the safety review of a chemical plant. It quickly made me forget the misery of missing out on movies today. I checked my phone only after completing the day’s work and discovered some happy tidings sitting inside the mailbox. It could be the proverbial light at the end of the tunnel, literally. But let me not count my chickens before they are hatched.

Day 65 (28 th October) Another 4 movies today. Last 3 days have been among my best this year, as I immersed myself into the magical, mesmerising world of cinema. All 4 films today were outstanding, but the one that stood out even more was Cold War, the Polish film that got the Best Direction award at Cannes this year. It now tops the 12 movies I have watched in the last 3 days. Today I carried food with me and ate in between screenings; it helped. And while waiting in the queue, I did something quite uncharacteristic – I struck up a conversation with a lady and we exchanged notes on the movies we had watched. Sadly, I have to take a break from the festival for next 3 days, because I have committed myself to an assignment. When I had a regular job, I would take leave to attend the film festival. Ironically such a luxury is not available to the freelancer.

Day 66 (27 th October) I am exhausted but I must write before I rest. Day 2 of MAMI had such a tight schedule that it was 6 in the evening before I could find time for a proper sit-down meal. Perhaps I should carry food from home tomorrow, as many wise people seem to be doing. It is very important to eat properly during the film festival. Too much and you will doze off; too little and you won’t be able to focus on the challenging passages. Out of the 4 films today, 3 were American and the last was French. Best film of the day was Wildlife, a beautifully paced coming – of – age movie with a knock-out final shot. Extremely annoying to see people checking their phones while a film is in progress. The culprits are youngsters who have a very poor attention span. MAMI should seriously consider increasing the delegate fees to keep this sort of people out of the festival.

Day 67 (26 th October) After watching 4 films at MAMI, I am dying to hit the sack. But this post begs to be written. The film I want to write about is Godard’s The Image Book. Extremely challenging to make sense, it is a film that does away with plot and actors. What we have instead are a series of images strung together often whimsically. Some of them are clips from Black and White films from the past. Other images include landscapes in lurid colours. Many images are fleeting, they are gone before they have registered in our consciousness. Despite having no narrative, the film is structured into five chapters. Godard provides a slight clue after the credits have rolled out at the end with a quote from Bertolt Brecht – only a fragment carries a mark of authenticity. Clearly the onus is on us to make our own construct out of the thousands of fragments the film is made out of.  The sounds that accompany the images are discordant. The voice-over , by Goddard himself, is not al...

Day 68 (25 th October) Mumbai Film Festival (aka MAMI) starts tomorrow and I am excited. We can pre-book tickets for maximum 4 films per day. The pre-booking scheduled to open at 0800 kept getting delayed because of some technical glitch. Finally, I could log in at ~1030 and choose my 4 films – one each from Iran, China, France and Japan. The 3 Asian films have a Rotten Tomatoes score in high 90s. The Japanese film won the Palme d’or at Cannes this year. The French film is by the legendary Jean Luc Godard. I am specially excited by this as it won a special Palme d’or for what the jury described as “a film outside of time and space”. Cinema is not just entertainment for me; I regard it as a serious art form. I have prepared my mind for tomorrow’s films by reading semantic review like this one . I also collected my delegate kit. The catalogue weighs more than a kilo. All set for bingeing on world cinema.