Thursday, Nov 20, 2003
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Andhra Pradesh
By K.V.S. Madhav
There is a sense of ennui, of directionlessness and the monotonous going-through-the-motions mien everywhere. This is being attributed to the recent Afro-Asian Games, which saw children and officials in the twin cities slogging for two full months only to be drafted into yet another international event, the film festival. The only saving grace in this sea of boredom appears to be the magic and the innocence of children's cinema getting unspooled in several theatres all over the twin cities! So what if some of the theatres were going empty? Hyderabad is the permanent venue for the bi-annual festival, the journey began in 1995, and this is the fifth time that the festival is being held in the City. "Every second year people deliver homilies about ways and means to sustain children's cinema from November 14 to 20, the duration of the festival, but unfortunately all is forgotten till there is the pre-event drumming up exercise a week before the next edition of the festival," the veteran film-maker Singeetham Srinivasa Rao, who is in the festival with his animation feature, Son of Alladin, sighed. The drawbacks are too distinct to go unnoticed. There has been a considerable fall in the number of delegates, particularly the international film-makers. Ditto with rural children usually brought to the festival. Belying all hopes, the much-awaited foreign films, particularly Iranian films, which won the top honours on the previous three occasions, fell below expectations. A board member of the Children's Film Society, Devendra Khandilwal, created ripples with his outburst against his own organisation, saying it failed to sustain children's cinema while power cuts at the State-run Hari Hara Kala Bhavan auditorium delayed screenings and left children high and dry. The Czech contingent comprising animation film-makers was embarrassed walking in late for an animation workshop for schoolchildren as the bus ferrying them fetched them late, the child jury missed the screening of the film Son of Alladin and some of the theatres earmarked for public screening were running to empty houses. Then, there was the bigger question — what ails children's cinema? It was not a problem confined to India. It turned out to be the problem of the entire world. The centre of animation films and big time motion pictures, the United States itself was no exception to the problem. "The travesty is that there is no state support for children's films in the U.S. and they seldom get distributed commercially. There is not much more than Disney and distributors are wary of taking the films to the cities. Festivals are the only way out and if you want to show a film screened at the festivals to your own people later, chances are you will never be able to," maintained Joanne E. Parsont, senior film programmer with Mill Valley's Children FilmFest, California and managing editor of the San Francisco International Film Festival. European countries and Iran appeared to be better placed thanks to the state support children's filmmakers there get. The Indira Priyadarshini auditorium, clearly unsuitable for film screenings, was showing `Tin Tin', that delightful film version of the comic, and hundreds of kids roiling in the stuffy hall unlike the delegates who were lounged in the air-conditioned comfort of Prasad's multiplex erupted with joy as Captain Haddock hollered: "Billions and billions of blue blistering barnacles!' Well, this was cinematic experience at its eloquent best.
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