A Buffet For The Buffs

IT was a small postcard sent one fine day in the late 1980s to the Directorate of Film Festivals which became N.D. Adam's passport to the International Film Festival of India. A straight and simple description of his passion for movies and his sketching skills was enough to convince the directorate. Since then every year the nondescript old man from Mumbai gets his invitation and every year, from January 10-20, he keeps his date with the movies. In between the five shows a day he also sketches the celebrity guests. His 500-strong sketch book is only growing thicker by the year featuring names as varied as Bernardo Bertolucci, Fernando Perez to Om Puri and Soumitro Chatterjee.

Adam is not the only oddball lodged at Siri Fort these days. If there's one thing which outdoes the number of films at the iffi, it's the film junkies. Among them are the hacks for whom the festival is an annual ritual to be followed diligently. There are also the celebrities adding the much sought-after touch of glamour. TV actress Reeta Bhaduri takes time off from work; so do Kanwaljeet and Anuradha Patel. For Amol and Chitra Palekar the camera stops rolling every January. The bunch of irreverent ftii students have nowhere else to go at this time of the year. So is it for those from the far-flung Adayar Film Institute, easily identifiable as those visibly hit by the big city blues. The JNU students get to display a rare talent as they organise themselves into voluntary groups, with an expertise in forging the delegate passes to Siri Fort.

But beyond the critics, film personalities and students, there is a group of people who can only be described as film freaks. Like Satyan of Kerala's Odessa Film Society which brings out a special volume on films and filmmakers to coincide with the festival. After bringing out volumes on John Abraham and Akira Kurosawa among others, this year they have published a brochure on Ritwik Ghatak. Then there's Abhijit Ghosh Dastidar, an officer with the Government of India currently posted as the post-master general in south Bihar, who has been attending the festival since 1980 irrespective of where he may have been posted. The longest he has travelled is from Srinagar all the way to Thiruvananthapuram. B.S. Rattan, a professor of English literature at Delhi's Khalsa College, not only watches the films at the IFFI but also keeps tabs on every seminar and press conference. "Every year I think I must fade out of the scene but I invariably get drawn by the momentum; it has become an old habit," says he. "You can call us festival birds; every year we migrate to the festival venue," says another film buff, George Matthew, an administrative official from isro and the founding member of Kerala's Chalachitra film society.

Film scholar Vijaya "Akka" Mulay's is another conspicuous face. The founder of the film society movement got hooked to cinema when she got married and moved from Mumbai to Bihar where she had nothing much to do other than study and see movies. She founded the Patna Film Society along with film critic Chidanand Dasgupta, with Satyajit Ray as the president, and later founded the Delhi Film Society. Akka is currently working on a research project for the film archives on films on India made by non-Indians and has been able to identify about 500 already. She is also rooting for the setting up of a Chalchitra Akademi along the lines of the Sangeet Natak Akademi and the Lalit Kala Akademi. "Only then can one create awareness among people and rejuvenate regional cinema," says she.

What excites most of these film buffs is the opportunity to see movies from the world over. "It's a virtual textbook. You also get to discover new talents. Emir Kasturica from Greece or the Kaurismaki Brothers from Finland became popular because of the festival," says Matthew. "It's the only occasion when you can see films from countries other than England and the US," says Rattan. He focuses on Chinese, Latin American and European movies as also the non-feature films. Retrospectives is the other section that attracts most cinegoers. "Even Bergman and Kurosawa wouldn't have been able to watch all their films at a go like we have," says K.S. Ranaprathapam, an All India Radio officer and a member of Chalachitra. For Dastidar, the highpoint is the discussions with the filmmakers and encounters with giants like Michelangelo Antonioni, Bertolucci, Jeanne Moreau and Gerard Depardieu.

But the love of cinema notwithstanding, it's the money that pinches. Expenses are always a problem as most film buffs have to finance their own trips. The money made from writing articles for the leftist Calcutta weekly, Frontier, is never sufficient for Dastidar. "The Rs 10,000 withdrawn from the PF comes in handy," says Matthew. His solution is to stay as a group of at least 10 people to cut down on costs. After his seventh festival in Delhi, he has become an expert on the reasonably-priced guest houses in the vicinity of Siri Fort. Satyan has been trying to cut costs by shacking up with relatives close to the festival site. Adam is lodged at a youth centre and is already looking for cheaper options. Though some celebrities do pay him for the sketches, it can never be enough. "It's just the respect I get from people and the friendships I forge which make me happy," he says. It's also a way of displaying his works to people who matter. "Otherwise it's difficult to hire a gallery these days," he says. He now plans to bring out a book on his film festival sketches and also wants to direct a documentary one day.

For Rattan, it's the time to meet the best of minds in the medium, to run into the finest of human beings. He, however, sees a flip side to it as well. "The festival has a voyeuristic appeal; it becomes a time to show oneself off and one needs to stay away from these two temptations," he says. How? By some intense viewing, by immersing oneself completely in cinema. For Mulay, who has done the rounds of practically all the 31 festivals in India, the content has become more varied over the years, though bureaucracy continues to mar the show. Rattan is more critical. "All the rituals of the festival are maintained but they all ring hollow," he says.

Cinema itself has changed with time. "The narrative has been broken, you get more avant garde works now," says Mulay. The films have also got more technically slick. "But they are anaesthetising; they swallow you up, deaden your sensibilities. You need to retain perspective," says Rattan. However, even as he sings this dirge for good cinema the film freak in him reaffirms the fact that the Lumiere Brothers' invention continues to fascinate human beings. Even after a hundred years or more.