The Third Edition

The ambition of the third edition of Transmissions, the festival of independent cinema, will be to establish a platform that devotes itself specifically and wholly to the cause of independent film production and exhibition in the country - the festival will not only be a screening platform, but also act as a conference, a convention and a platform for an elaborate discussion of the fundamentals involved in the independent film scene in the country as well as a gathering of the most important independent artists working throughout the capital and other parts of the country.

Programme

The four-day festival features a schedule divided into three primary sections. The first will include contemporary feature films and a retrospective; the second - called Inserts will include contemporary work in the short format, experimental and video-art fields, and the third will include talks, sessions and lectures by practioners, critics and academicians from across the country. The first section will seek to showcase work from various different corners of the world - countries such as India, USA, Iran, the UK, Bosnia, Switzerland, Japan, Argentina and Senegal, while the second section will seek to include titles from Spain, Russia, USA and Syria. Details will be available from 25th January

Workshops / Sessions

Transmissions will feature talks by practitioners of film alongwith sessions by professionals from within the digital sector and the fields such as online exhibition, criticism and archiving. The occasion will also witness the founding of the Indian Criticism Archive, hosted by Lightcube's sister magazine, Projectorhead, which will talk about the various criticism journals from the past and their future purpose. There will also be a discussion of alternative exhibition spaces and newer audiences, centered around Lightcube's efforts with The Dhenuki Cinema Project.

Exhibition

The exhibition space at Instituto Cervantes will be used to display archival documents, letters, articles, footage related to the work and life of cineaste, curator, programmer and filmmaker Peter von Bagh. Apart from this, the exhibition will also feature sketches, video and photographs by three interesting new artists, whose work will cover topics as diverse as a sleepy haunted single screen theatre in Coimbatore, protests in Jadavpur and individuals in the Mumbai local trains.

WOODY ACOUCHE PROJECT

Woody Accouche Project is a reggae and folk influenced acoustic music project founded by singer/songwriter Calvin Wumbaya. The jam based setup features organic musicians weaving a dynamic blend of classical and contemporary instruments. The Delhi based band performs at a number of local and national venues and is working on the release of an album soon.
PERFORMERS: Calvin Wumbaya & Friends
PERFORMANCE TIME: 26 Feb, 6 pm

ALTERNATIVE EXHIBITION SPACES & THE DHENUKI PROJECT - PANEL

Cinema needs to speak to a larger audience. While it was a medium meant for the masses, it has increasingly got restricted into the metropolis. For reasons both commercial and technological, it has started to retreat from previously conquered territories. 
Even as we speak of Cinema as a century old medium, and one that is powerful too, it has not managed to reach out to a very large group of people for various reasons. 
History has reference of several attempts of taking Cinema to remote places and amongst larger audiences who are eager to receive it, but even then it has not managed to have a stronghold in these areas. 
The discussion shall therefore focus on how, why of outreach programs with Cinema, and the need to do it before an amazing medium of the last century is replaced by newer mediums and a vast stretch of population remains unaware of its existence.
PANELISTS: Sanjay Joshi, Pawan K Shrivastava & Suraj Prasad
TIME: 27 Feb, 6:30 pm

 

OPENING FILM
Blood Earth, 36 mins
Kush Bhadwar

Word Sound Power’s second project, Blood Earth, commenced in August 2011 in the Khonda tribal village of Kucheipadar in South Orissa. In the mid-1990s, large deposits of Bauxite, the mineral from which aluminum is made, were discovered in the area. Soon after, the district became a conflict zone where a vibrant people’s movement blossomed with songs serving as a uniting force. With a mobile music studio, Word Sound Power joined local singers and musicians in Kucheipadar for a new type of collaboration. The result is a cross genre mash up, combining revolutionary songs in Oriya and Kui tribal lan-guage with dub poetry by Delhi Sultanate and electronic music composed by Chris McGuinness.

Inserts: Home

I for India, 70mins
Sandhya Suri

In 1965 Yash Pal Suri left India for the U.K. The first thing he does on his arrival in England is to buy 2 Super 8 cameras, 2 projectors and 2 reel to reel recorders. One set of equipment he sends to his family in India, the other he keeps for himself. For forty years he uses it to share his new life abroad with those back home - images of snow, mini skirted ladies dancing bare-legged, the first trip to an English supermarket - his taped thoughts and observations providing a unique chronicle of the eccentricities of his new English hosts. Back in India, his relatives in turn, respond with their own ‘cine-letters’ telling tales of weddings, festivals and village life.

Inserts: Home

I for India, 70mins
Sandhya Suri

Piecing together nostalgic home videos shot by her family two decades ago, coupled with current telephone conversations with various family members, Bare follows the filmmaker’s attempt to define her relationship – past, current and future – with her alcoholic father. Should she stand by him, drawing only on her memories of what a wonderful father he was? Or should she move on, as some of her relatives are urging, and build a life which excludes him?

Inserts: Home

These Old Frames, 15mins
Tahireh Lal

These Old Frames explores the structure and creation of a narrative using found footage. The footage used is from Tahireh’s grandfather’s archive, films shot by him fifty years ago, home movies on 8mm film.

Fragments of family history, situations, events and characters unfold on an intimate canvas but echo universal themes. Mining personal stories, common ground and interrelationships helped understand her grandfather and how he created his own identity in a free India in her infancy. The process revolved around getting to know the man that he was.

Inserts: Home

These Old Frames, 28mins
Jay Rosenblatt

Phantom Limb uses the director’s personal loss as a point of departure. Whether it is a loss through death or divorce, the stages of grieving are the same. Individuals often go through denial, anger, bargaining, depression and, ultimately, some kind of acceptance, in order to heal. The film is loosely structured according to these stages. Interspersed throughout this poetic documentary are interviews with a cemetery owner, a phantom limb patient and an author of a book about evidence for life after death. Phantom Limb reminds viewers that while grief is painful and isolating, it is a reminder to each of us that life is impermanent.

Inserts: Neighbourhood

Between Regularity and Irregularity, 7mins
Masahiro Tsutani

The filmmaker improvises and through a conversation with himself, he has a chaotic worldview evocative of the firing of nerve cells, clustering sounds of convulsiveness. Finely detailed images filled with light are synced to sound. Nature creates the glow of light and the beauty of a shape lying between regularity and irregularity. Sounds and images with a granular texture. These things grasp the depths of the brain.

Inserts: Neighbourhood

Buffalo Juggalos, 30mins
Scott Cummings

An experimental exploration and celebration of the Juggalo subculture in Buffalo, New York. Surreal scenes shot in long and static takes of Juggalos engaged in their favorite activities, first and foremost of which - causing mayhem. Among these seemingly random acts of the everyday, preening, backyard wrestling, explosions and destruction, a tentative narrative begins to emerge.

Inserts: Neighbourhood

Deep Sleep, 15mins
Basma Al-Sharif

A transfixing performance film in which artist Basma Alsharif shoots footage in Athens, Malta and the “post-civilization” of the Gaza Strip while under self-hypnosis. Echoing Maya Deren’s Meshes of the Afternoon, Deep Sleep transcends both physical locales and states of being as Basma Alsharif shoots while under self-hypnosis, making a pan-geographic leap from the ruins of an ancient civilization embedded in a modern civilization in ruins (Athens) to the derelict buildings of anonymous sites in Malta and a site that is, in the artist’s words, “post-civilization” (the Gaza Strip)

Inserts: Neighbourhood

In Damascus, 4mins
Waref-Al Quba

This film is about Damascus, an 11,000 years old city, the most ancient & precious of cities, set to the poetry of the world famous Palestinian poet / author Mahmoud Darwish.

Inserts: Neighbourhood

Sun Song, 10mins
Joel Wanek

A poetic journey from the darkness of early dawn into the brightness of the midday sun in the American South. Filmed entirely on the number 16 bus route in Durham, North Carolina over the course of six months, Sun Song is a celebration of light and a meditation on leaving.

Passes

The passes to the third edition of Transmissions will allow the holders to gain access to the film screenings, workshops, lectures, panel discussions and also, procure copies of the festival catalogue plus subscriptions to Lightcube's journal on screen culture, Umbra.

Passes Available at

General Queries