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.

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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

FEATURES
FEATURES
INSERTS
INSERTS

SONGS FROM THE NORTH

An essay film which looks differently at the enigma of North Korea, a country typically seen through only through the distorted lens of jingoistic propaganda and derisive satire. Interweaving footage from the filmmaker’s three visits to North Korea with songs, spectacle, popular cinema and archival footage, the film tries to understand on their own terms the psychology and popular imagination of the North Korean people.

Country:EU/South Korea/Portugal
Year: 2014
Running Time: 72mins
Directed by: Soon-Mi Yoo
Produced by: Haden Guest, Soon Mi Yoo, Rui Alexandre
Cinematography: Soon-Mi Yoo
Editing: Soon-Mi Yoo
Sound: Nuro Henrique, Chu-li Shewring

The Dark I Must Not Name

THE DARK I MUST NOT NAME

'The Dark I Must Not Name' is an exploration of the city of Bhopal, 15 years after the world's worst industrial accident ravaged the city. The film is an examination of Shaan Khatau's interface with a city that lives on, even as it has been irrevocably altered by the tragedy.

Country: India 

Director: Shaan Khattau 

Duration: 65 minutes  

Cinematography: RV Ramani

SAATVIN SAIR
In the film, acclaimed experimental filmmaker Amit Dutta returns to North India’s Kangra Valley,the lush mountain setting featured in his previous work Nainsukh(SFIFF 2011).As in the prior film,here Director Considers the region’s rich visual arts tradition through the perception of a native artist,in this case the contemporary landscape painter Paramjit Singh. Deftly blending sound,image and text, this subtly hypnotic film meditates upon the figure of Singh commingled with surreal tableaux inspired by the artist’s paintings.

Country:India
Year: 2013
Running Time: 70mins
Directed by: Amit Dutta
Produced by: Amit Dutta, Sudoor Sahkaar
Cinematography: Savita Singh
Editing: Tinni Mitra
Music: Mohi Baha’ud-din Dagar

LOST IN BOSNIA
Eleven film.factory filmmakers began an eleven-week experiment with 6 rules: The film must be shot on a small electronic device; the filmmaker must hold the device at all times; the film must contain one line of voice-over from the filmmaker; the film must be shot and edited in one week; the film must not be in black and white; and, the filmmaker is free.

Country: Bosnia & Herzegovina
Year: 2014
Running Time: 95mins
Directed by: Graeme Cole, Kaori Oda, Manel Raga, Namsuk Kim, Aleksandra Niemczyk, Grant Gulczynski, Fernando Nogari, Patrick Marshall, Suncica Fradelic, Thierry Garrel, Ghazi Alqudcy 
Produced by Grant Gulczynski and Ghazi Alqudcy

LAJWANTI
Lajwanti/The Honour Keeper is a love story set in a village in the Thar desert in Rajasthan,India. A group of women in their daily long walk collect water recite songs and exchange words that reveal their hidden desires.But one day when a crazy dreamer whose only passion is collecting doves crosses their path,one of them ,Lajwanti, starts a journey that will take her out of this closed world. She,who initially seems to be the most radical in her beliefs and for whom the sanctity of marriage is supreme cannot accept the group’s behaviour towards her and abandons it. A new journey begind for her when she starts walking the long distance alone

Country:India
Year:2014
Cast: Sanghamitra Hitaishi, Pushpendra Singh, Gaurav Lavaniya, Sugna Devi, Nirmal Sapera
Directed & Produced by Pushpendra Singh
Cinematography: Ravi Kiran Ayyagari
Editing: Shweta Rai
Sound: Amala Popuri
Story: Late Vijaydan Detha
Art,Costumes,Screenplay: Pushpendra Singh

HISTORY OF FEAR

Christian spends his days trimming grass and taking care of a football court at a Gated Community in the most distant suburbs of Buenos Aires, not far from the blur point where the green wilderness begins. The people inside the community hardly ever go out, and visitors are rare. But Christian belongs to both worlds, the gated and the wild. He fears the impact of the strange people that have started wandering nearby the Community. Everyday he spends long moments simply watching them, observing their moves through the fence, wondering if he should take sides in this invisible war.

Country: Argentina
Year: 2014
Duration: 85 mins
Produced by Rei Films
Cinematographer: Soledad Rodriguez
Written and Directed by
 Benjamin Naishtat
Editor: Fernando Epstein, Andres Quaranta

TRAVELING LIGHT
An Amtrak train pulls out of Penn Station in New York on a cold, sunny February morning. The  train moves forward as the landscape changes-the East Coast giving way to the Midwest. Passengers fill their roles,the snow begins to fall and the next train station is announced, all while the light continues shifting,bouncing,swelling  and slouching into eventual darkness.

Country: USA
Year: 2011
Running Time: 58mins
Directed by: Gina Telaroli
Produced by:  Meerkat Media and the Goddamn Cobras

THERE
Lamb is a troubled veteran and his girlfriend,M, is tormented as well, when he’s not working as a security guide in an old warehouse with other unstable vets, Lamb haunts a nightclub frequented by wounded and traumatized ex-soldiers. There he meets a one-armed vet, Thrill, who starts a strange story about the effects of his post-traumatic stress, which unsettles Lamb. While walking through a forest, Lamb discovers a humanoid carcass and hides it in his basement. At the club he meets an older women and begins an affair. Soon otherworldly events start to occur and his girlfriend is attacked inside their apartment by mysterious beings.

Country: USA
Year: 2014
Duration: 103min
Directed by: James Fotopoulous
Produced by: Lauren Chapmen, Peter Fotopoulous, James Fotopoulous
Cinematography: Patrick Miller
Music: Nate Archer, Dorit Chrysler, Chris Corsano
Sound: Brian Cabanatuan

3 MEN AND A BULB

It is the story of three men who earn a livelihood from their gharat(watermill)in foothills of Himalayas(Uttaranchal),India, The life led by these 3 men is meager, having access neither to electricity   nor employment that brings regular income, Farming is very arduous, as supply of Water is scarce. The gharat becomes a site, which each character wants to own and sometimes disown,in the quest for a better life.

Country: India
Year: 2006
Running Time: 74mins
Directed by: Pankaj Rishi Kumar
Produced by: Pankaj Rishi Kumar (Kumar Talkies)
Cinematography: Pankaj Rishi Kumar
Editing: Pankaj Rishi Kumar
Sound: Pankaj Rishi Kumar&Pritam Das(Design),Pritam Das(Mix)

JALANAN
Jalanan(‘Streetside’) tells the captivating story of Boni,Ho &Titi, three gifted ,charismatic street musicians in Jakarta over a tumultuous 5-year period in their own lives and that of the Indonesia. The film follows the young marginalized musicians and their never before seen sub-culture, while also painting a striking, moody and intimate portrait of Indonesia’s frenzied capital city. Using  the powerful soundtrack of the musician’s original composition to drive the film, it traces their elusive quest for identity and love in the day-to-day of a city overrun by the effects of globalization and corruption.

Country: Bali, Indonesia
Language:English/Bahsa Indonesia
Year: 2013
Duration:108mins
Directed by: Daniel Ziv
Cinematography: Daniel Ziv
Sound Designing & Mixing: Levy Santoso
Sound Recordist: Meita Eriska
Music: Titi, Ho and Boni, Lucky Akash
Produced by: Daniel Ziv, Ernes Hariyantot

THE PLAGUE
Five people who work on the outskirts of Barcelona and whose paths cross every day: Iurie, a Moldavian wrestler who is waiting for Spanish papers and is working on the harvest with farmer Raül. Raül took over the farm from his parents. The situation is precarious, as an insect plague has infested his fields and is threatening to ruin the yield.

Country: Spain
Year: 2013
Duration: 85 mins

 

MY CAMERA AND TSUNAMI

The film shares special moments that the filmmaker experienced with his camera, a special bonding over a period of 4 years, in terms of creating cinematic imagery, relating, exploring, seeking and interpreting notions of his reality. It is a memory of a camera which perished in the Tsunami, along with its last filmed footage. It’s last recorded footage, an elusive image, evoking multiple possibilities, seeking parallels and new perspectives.

Country: India
Duration: 90 minutes
Directed by: RV Ramani
Cinematographer: RV Ramani
EditorRV Ramani
Producer: PSBT 

 

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.
PERFORMERSCalvin 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.

 
REGULAR
Rs. 1200/-
STUDENTS
Rs. 400/-
 
Passes Available at

General Queries

When is Transmissions 3 taking place, and where?

It will take place at Instituto Cervantes, from 26th February to 1st March.

Why should an independent festival sell passes, and not have its films available freely to interested audiences?

This is a question that answers itself. The notion of independence relies on various aspects – one of which is the ability to appropriate resources, methods of functioning, nomenclature and jargon used by the mainstream and their subsequent reapplication to one’s own purpose.

As such, independence does not lie as much in rejection, but in reclamation. At LCFS, we believe that in deploying the conventional methods (barter, exchange, transaction) to run the festival – but not from approaching sponsors or state cultural institutions, and instead, the audiences of these films themselves – we can forge an arrangement that is self-sustaining and independent, to the most practical extent of the word.

The funds raised through passes will be invested in purchasing screening rights, publishing literature and paying writers, remunerating interns and printing festival related material.

What are the terms and conditions of the pass?

Simply, reach the venue early, for seating is on a first-come-first-serve basis. Secondly, do not transfer your pass to someone else. We will get to know eventually. Finally, the passes are needed only to enter the auditorium area – you are free to lounge around outside.

Does Lightcube require volunteers or interns?

We have a very small team working on the festival and helping out with different areas: photography, video documentation, communication and logistics. More help is always appreciated. If the festival interests you, write to us at suraj.prasad@lightcube.in

Can I learn more about Lightcube?

Sure. Visit us at www.lightcube.in