Young Bengalureans' docu on Tibet's freedom struggle tops Bangalore Short Film Festival

BENGALURU: Bengalureans Santosh Chandrasekhar, 26, Aiman S, 24 and Sumit Dasgupta, 24 started working on their dream project Rangzen – a 39-minute-long documentary film on Tibetans, hardly did they know it will fetch this trio the award for best documentary in Bangalore Short Film Festival 2017.

Not just that, this documentary film featuring lives of Tibetans who had escaped Chinese invasion and took refuge in India has made three Bengalureans proud by bagging a special jury award at International Film Festival of Prayag, Delhi and the audience award at Feel the Reel International Film Festival in the UK, this year.

Santosh Chandrasekhar, assistant professor at a city college, “The movie is all about their struggle to hold on to their Tibetan identity in a foreign land and how they dream to go back to a nation that doesn’t exist anymore. The film has got answers to seeking their identities and their perpetual fight for freedom and a struggle to find their self.”

“We, through this documentary, were trying to initiate discourses related to the Tibetan struggle for freedom and generate awareness about our ‘guests’ among our fellow Indians. Although in exile for over 56 years, we fail to recognise Tibetans. We ignorantly see them as either northeasterners or Chinese. The Tibetan freedom struggle being one of the longest after the exodus of the Jews can put this documentary film into major political articulation,” added Aiman S, a copy writer and another maker of this documentary. The documentary has also made an entry to official selection category at International Documentary and Short Film Festival, Kerala and Calcutta International Cult Film Festival, 2017.