Short & sharp

Saibal Chatterjee

A selection of eight short fiction films, in addition to Bombay Rose, Gitanjali Rao’s critically acclaimed animated narrative feature, constituted the ‘Made in India’ section of the seventh Ajyal Film Festival, a fast-growing annual event hosted by the Doha Film Institute (DFI). The festival screened almost 100 features, documentaries and short films from 39 countries.

The package from the subcontinent was part of the six-day festival’s celebration of the Qatar-India 2019 Year of Culture. Bombay Rose was the opening film of Venice Critics Week earlier this year before playing in the Toronto International Festival. Bombay Rose was supported by the grants programme of the DFI.

The DFI was set up in 2010 to promote the film industry in Qatar and has since grown into a force that has made a global impact through an array of great films that it has backed. Among the DFI-supported films that have garnered international ovation are Asghar Farhadi’s The Salesman, Nuri Bilge Ceylan’s The Wild Pear Tree, Hany Abu-Assad’s The Idol, Abderrahmane Sissako’s Timbuktu and Nadine Labaki’s Capharnaum.

Held this year from November 18 to 23, the Ajyal Film Festival drew into its orbit children and young adults from multiple countries to serve on the Competition juries split into three sections by age group: 8 to 12, 13 to 17 and 18 to 21. The jurors totalled 450 youngsters, including 48 who flew into Doha from 40-odd countries to participate in the festival.

The three juries awarded two prizes each — for best short film and their favourite narrative feature — while the Ajyal Festival Audience Award went to Sudanese director Amjad Abu Alala’s debut film You Will Die at Twenty. The film arrived in Doha with a bagful of accolades, including the Luigi de Laurentis Award in Venice. It was among the many DFI-supported titles that were part of this year’s Ajyal Film Festival.

Alala was on the three-member jury for Ajyal’s flagship ‘Made in Qatar’ competition, which saw the participation of 22 features, documentaries and shorts. The jury included British actor Kris Hitchen, who was in Doha with Ken Loach’s Sorry We Missed You, and Qatari architect Fatma Al Sahlawi.

DFI CEO and festival director Fatma Hassan Alremaihi said, “We have many DFI-supported films in the festival this year. We are proud of that.”

These films were Elia Suleiman’s It Must Be Heaven (Palestine), Oualid Mouaness’ 1982 (Lebanon), Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s To the Ends of the Earth (Japan), Suhaib Gasmelbari’s documentary Talking About Trees (Sudan), besides a bunch of short films strewn across the programme.

The DFI CEO, buoyed by the excitement that Bombay Rose has generated, sees great potential in the partnership with India. “This is a great start for what promises to be a long partnership,” said Alremaihi. “I hope this will open the doors for more collaboration in the future.”

Last month, MAMI Mumbai Film Festival hosted a package of films from Qatar. Ajyal has reciprocated with a section devoted to Indian films curated by MAMI. In her statement in the festival catalogue, Alremaihi wrote of Bombay Rose: “Audiences will be swept up in Gitanjali Rao’s haunting musical drama and transported to the streets of Bombay where they might discover inspiring new perspectives on love and life.”

The Indian films in the festival line-up, made by promising new directors, attracted attention with the range of themes that they addressed. From a portrayal of boyish innocence in Gautam Vaze’s Marathi-language Aai Shapat to the far more harrowing look at reality Yashvardhan Goswami’s Hey Ram! — these films forayed into varied narrative terrains with empathy and insight.

One film that stood out in the ‘Made in India’ section was Ahmed Roy’s The Thought of You, a dark 15-minute angst-ridden drama that explores the ramifications of jealousy through the disintegration of an urban marriage. The Thought of You features Kalki Koechlin, Gulshan Devaiah and Monica Dogra in principal roles.

Loss of a completely different kind is treated with restraint in the Nepali-language Baaje (Grandfather), directed by the choreographer duo Umashankar Nair and Gaiti Siddiqui. Set in Nepal in the days ahead of the 2015 earthquake and its aftermath, the film celebrates the bonding between an old man and his grand-daughter that transcends the impermanence of life on the planet.

The playful Apna Apna Andaz, in which writer-director Avishkar Bharadwaj depicts India’s obsession with the movies, was contrasted with a bleak portrait of patriarchy in Harsh Hudda’s Bhaap (Steam) and of India’s stark social faultlines in Akshay Danavale’s Batti.