Festival Of Women In Transnational Cinema In Pune

Jyothi Venkatesh

National Film Archive of India and TIFA Working Studios are hosting a festival to celebrate Women in Transnational Cinema on the 15th March 2019 in Pune. The festival sheds light on underrepresented moving image history - and wants to initiate a revision of the established film canon. It doesn´t only want to highlight the work of female film artists as directors and actors, but also as cinematographers, composers, editors, costume designers and so forth. A focal point will be on film form and aesthetics which are created around gender representation, womanhood and girlhood. The festival pursues to create a dialogue between national cinemas throughout film history. The festival will open with the screening of Achhut Kannya  (Franz Osten, 1936) which was the second film produced by Devika Ranis and Himanshu Rays for their production house Bombay Talkies. The company was the starting point for the composer Saraswati Devi and was in its beginning characterized through its cooperation with European technicians. The melodrama enfolds around Kasturi (Devika Rani) a dalit woman whose childhood love with Pratap (Ashok Kumar) is doomed due to her origins. It will be followed by the screening of Subarnarekha (Ritwik Ghatak, 1965) starring Madhabi Mukherjee as Sita. This third part of Ritwik Ghatak's trilogy takes us back into the aftermath of the partition and its socio-economic implications. The play with shadows, exceptional camera angles and the interaction with the landscape are framing the melodrama aesthetically and reflect the inner of the protagonist.

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