 "Your first film festival")
The international film festival season is around the corner. Starting off with Mumbai, these festivals shall keep happening in some or the other part of the country at least until March next year. In India, where there’s no foreign movie culture, it’s absolutely necessary that you do the needful to derive maximum pleasure out of this annual event.
First off, don’t gorge on five movies a day just because you can. I know it’s your solitary stab at watching everything that some of the most amazingly talented visual geniuses on this planet have chosen to release this year. But, for the sake of your own sanity, restrict yourself to three movies every 24 hours. It’s not like binge-watching your favourite sitcoms that you can sleepwalk through. These are intense, beatific, sublime, heartbreaking and a host of other superlatives-worthy movies that need your constant attention.
Watching 21 movies in a week of any film festival will leave you adequately buzzed and allow those visuals to linger in your prefrontal cortex for weeks to come. I learnt this thumb rule the hard way at the Goa film festival four years ago when a foolhardy me decided to watch the really late night show too. Six movies a day for six days left me with such sensory overload that I stayed off the cinemas for a couple of months. I still kick myself over the fact that I slept through the last twenty minutes of Bela Tarr’s magnificent Turin Horse. I had to read the Wikipedia entry to know about the heartbreaking climax. Never again did I try to quench my thirst with water from a fire hydrant.
Head space is something that we need more than anything at a film festival. And that’s exactly why you should partake in the talks and events that take place on the sidelines. I felt extremely lucky to share the same room with Leos Carax, the preposterously brilliant French director, who firmly kept his tongue in his cheek while talking about his influences, work, personal life et cetera. This year, the redoubtable Guardian movie critic, Peter Bradshaw, is coming to Mumbai. It’s all right to miss out on that must-watch movie if it’s clashing with the bunch of aperçus on cinema that Bradshaw is surely going to deliver.
Another tip would be that you ought to mix everything up. All film festivals have a couple of retrospectives happening every year on the auteurs. While you wouldn’t want to miss out on any of the latest Cannes or Sundance darlings, make sure that you watch at least one old movie for every five new movies that you are watching. Every film maker is inspired from the masters, so you might as well watch them. And anyway, one of life’s most unalloyed pleasures is watching an old movie on the big screen. YouTube be damned!
I would also urge you to avoid watching Hollywood movies that would anyway be shown at the cinemas a couple of months later. Unless you are a movie studio person or a lowly movie hack like yours truly, you don’t have to catch the much touted “Oscar hopeful” during its solitary outing. These movies are shown for the sponsors’ sake. All film festivals in India have a healthy catalogue of beautiful regional cinema from across the country. Here’s your only chance to watch that obscure Tamil or Malayalam movie that everyone has been raving about, with English subtitles.
Do leave enough space for yourself to be blown away when you least expect it. Don’t be too fastidious about each movie that you intend to gape at. Go for a handful of movies on a lark. Last year, I turned up at the screening of Mexican movie Güeros. It’s unusual these days for such self-conscious filmmaking to be so politically attuned while remaining a road movie at heart. Armond White, one of the pre-eminent American movie critics, said of the film that “it has the personal drive of an exuberant modernist film and a classic pop album”. To think of it, I went for this movie only because my original choice was packed to the rafters.
