SPIC MACAY’S ONLINE CINEMA CLASSICS SCREENINGS CELEBRATING GANDHI JAYANTI

On the occasion of the 151st birth anniversary of Father of the Nation, SPIC MACAY organized a virtual screening of Richard Attenborough's film ‘Gandhi’. Schools from the KV Sangathan along with different schools from Rajasthan, Kerala, Patna, Hyderabad and Delhi participated in the screening and it was also part of the curtain-raiser for the diamond Jubilee celebrations of IIT Delhi.

The film screening was followed by an interaction with Dr. V. R. Devika, a renowned Gandhi scholar, author and art enthusiast who further discussed the Gandhian principles with around a 1000 students from schools from across the country. The critically acclaimed and widely popular specimen of cinema by renowned filmmaker Richard Attenborough gave the perfect insight to the life and ideology of Gandhi on his birth anniversary. 

The Cinema Classics module of SPIC MACAY has been a key feature of the online interactions by the movement since the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic. It has had an increasingly growing and compelling impact on the audience, with unconventional story lines, humbleness and characters of the classics that are so relevant and close to the reality of our world, they leave a deep influence on the young minds.

"This was an extremely humbling experience for me, for it fed the curious learner we all have within us. How visuals (especially cinema) even in a foreign language can create a significant expression while communicating its message was quite evident during student's responses in the quiz session, their responses reflected how well they were able to appreciate Cinema, hence making this event a great success" testimonials like these by various students across the country from different schools who have attended the screenings, sum up the impact this powerful format of Cinema Classics has on the audience. 

The screenings are followed by interactive and enlightening question and answer sessions with various experts from the field of Cinema and Arts like Prof. Anjali Gera Roy, Prof. Vipin Vijay, Shri Utpal Borpujari, Shri Susant Mishra and Dr. Arka Chattopadhyay. During these sixty minute sessions post the screening with the experts, students are free to ask all their queries regarding the film, cinema in general or any other queries in their young minds from the experts. The aim of these interactions with experts from the field is to help the students learn to

appreciate Cinema and the culture depicted through these artworks. This will enable them to have constructive takeaways for their day to day lives through the module. Students are also engaged in interesting quizzes after the screening. 

"In the cinema classic module SPIC MACAY introduces young students to meaningful, well-crafted films; their cinematic appreciation improves and they understand the potential of cinema...thereby raising it to a level of an art ", is what Girish Kasaravalli, Kannada filmmaker and winner of 14 National Film Awards said in appreciation of the SPIC MACAY film classics module. 

Screenings of such exemplary artworks of the Indian and World Cinema have been taking place regularly under the Cinema Classics module of SPIC MACAY, virtually since August 2020, owing to the worldwide coronavirus pandemic. The format of the module helps the youth to bridge the gap between them and the cultural heritage of India and the world through the powerful medium of cinema.

Under the module, screening of selected films by legendary filmmakers like Charlie Chaplin, Akira Kurosawa, Vittorio De Sica, Satyajit Ray are organized every week from 6 pm onwards for an audience of students from different schools from across the country. Some of the schools that have taken part in the module since August 2020, virtually are DPS North Kolkata, KV Nausena Bagh (Visakhapatnam), Maharana Mewar Public School (Udaipur), SAI Residential School (Bhubaneswar) and Army Public School(Delhi), overall around 4000 students have been part of the virtual screenings since August 2020.