Mysuru: As part of Bahuroopi International Theatre Festival, three films in different languages including Tamil will be screened on Monday.
All the films will be screened at Sriranga. Tamil film ‘Nee enge’ directed by Ramani will be screened at 10am; ‘Las calles hablan’ directed by Justin Donlon will be screen at 12.15 pm and ‘Puppet master’ directed by Hou Hsiao-Hsien will be screened at 2 pm.
Nee Engee
Art sometimes is rescued and preserved by some of the most vulnerable communities in the world. Just like the gipsy’s spread out across the west Asia and Europe, there are numerous tribes in India who have shifted their land of loving across the barriers of cultural and linguistic barriers. Ramani traces a typical case in a community in Tamilnadu that long migrated from Maharashtra and now losing their hold on to their traditional form of storytelling through Shadow puppet made of sheep hide. Being out of reach of any academia, the craft survives and the songs live on. However, now performers dance to film soundtracks, the main business shifts to selling accessories and modern skits are added to the Ramayana shadow puppets.
Las Calles Hablan
This 56 minute film directed by Justin Donlon is a documentary which was filmed mostly on the streets, shot from the hip, something that reflects the street art itself and lot of the story comes from the street artists themselves. They are always generous with their time and information. They’re developing the process; they want this story to be told.This is a story about discovering a hidden world, an extraordinary subculture and the struggle between an artistic community painting for freedom of expression and an increasingly restrictive dogmatic government. Las Calles Hablan is about the evolution of street art in Barcelona. The opinions on graffiti go in many different directions – love, hate, indifference.
The Puppet Master
The 140 min by Hou Hsiao-Hsien is a 1993 Taiwanese film based on the memoirs of Li Tian-lu, Taiwan’s most celebrated puppeteer, this story covers the years from Li’s birth in 1909 to the end of Japan’s fifty-year occupation of Taiwan in 1945. The Puppet master is a masterpiece of world cinema. In the British Film Institute’s 2012 Sight & Sound poll, seven critics and three directors named it one of the greatest films ever made. In the first half of this century, young Li Tienlu joines a travelling puppet theatre and subsequently makes a career as one of Taiwan’s leading puppeteers. During World War II the Japanese rulers of Taiwan use the traditional Chinese puppet theatre for their war propaganda. Only after the war street theatres start playing again.
