That festival fix

even as the mami (that's the mumbai academy of the moving image... for you) film festival unspools at the imax, the tata and chavan auditoria, i can't help missing my friend, a a abbas, who inducted me into the other world, the other cinema. it was abbas, sprayed with acne and enthusiasm, who with his college pocket money, bought a rajdhani ticket to ride to the winter international film festival in new delhi.returned he with fables of the movies seen there, the encounters with cerebral cineastes who held forth on kurosawa, antonioni, bunuel , while snatching sweet potato snacks on the sun-dappled portico of the vigyan bhavan. abbas chided me for not being venturesome, tongue-lashed me for sticking to the escapist tinsel adventures of rajesh khanna, dharmendra and heavens, joy mukherjee. or confining myself to the hollywoodwork showlighting gregory peck, rock hudson and heavens, jerry lewis. "next time, there's a film festival you'd better be there," abbas thundered. chastened and curious, my first dalliance with la dolce global cinema was at the excelsior (not new excelsior then). a french film festival was on: truffaut's the soft skin, alain resnais' la guerre est finie and jean-luc godard's pierrot le fou, took my breath, mind and heart away. i was a convert to new wave cinema, but without losing my religion -- meaning i still worshipped khanna, dharmendra and, errrr, joy mukherjee. and that's the way it has continued to be. if one admires iran's kiarostami, one also marvels at our very own bachchan. movie ardour never changes, actually. come to think of it, neither do film festivals. there are the eager beavers devouring reel-life as if there were no tomorrow. if delhi has its fest veteran dastagir (who was postmaster-general in different towns and who'd talk of his frolicsome grand-daughter as if she were goldie hawn), mumbai has its addicts too. on being denied their annual movie fix, rashid, suresh, rafique, deepa, kiran and his delectably named galfriend shampoo, would surely have to be rushed to an icu unit and placed on a celluloid drip. there are the endemic complaints, naturally, about how a certain movie print wasn't subtitled adequately or not at all. and hell's bells, whatever happened to that argentinian masterpiece which was on the festival menu but was left unserved? not done. plus, there are the horror stories, infallibly, about the government types cadging far too many passes, invitation cards, delegate badges, whatever. and hello, wasn't the inaugural function a mess? what with the kick-off being delayed by an hour or two, the speeches going on till kingdom come, and the opening film being nothing less than a travesty, quality-wise. the golden lining, of course, are the revelations, the surprises, the heart-lifters. at the mami, this time around, just the package of japanese films by junji sakamoto are sufficient to prod the festival-comber to beg for more. take his tokarev, a knockout thriller about kidnapping, love, vendetta and redemption. even while banking on stock narrative ingredients, sakamoto delivers visual poetry and irony to staggering effect. this is evidenced most hauntingly in the sequence of a kidnapped kid playing joyously with a gun on the shoulders of his abductor. ooof, that hit hard and how. undoubtedly, the very concept of a film festival still has its undiminished allure. regrettably though, some things have changed... and that has more to do with oneself than the event. some of us have lost our innocence and zest to rush-rush-rush to the screenings round the clock. perhaps that has to do with age, work priorities... and with the irreplaceable loss of our festival companions and gurus. i no longer catch all the regulars there, be it bikram singh, s j banaji, d bhaskar and abbas. they've packed up for another realm...and i'd like to believe that they're watching a film festival anyway this winter...somewhere up there in an imax heaven. khalid.mohamed@timesgroup.com