Powered by interest, club to screen short films

PUNE: The National Film Archive of India (

NFAI

) in association with

Arbhaat Film Club

and

Raju Sutar

will launch a documentary film club on April 9.

The club will be inaugurated with the screening of Kamal Swaroop’s documentary Pushkar Puran (2017) at NFAI at 6.30pm. Swaroop will be present at the screening, which is free for all, and will interact with the audience.

“The initiative is aimed at making available a platform for short films and documentaries to the discerning audience. Short film as a genre is emerging as a potent form of storytelling and we think it deserves a regular platform,” NFAI director

Prakash Magdum

said on Thursday.

Since the birth of cinema with

Lumiere

brothers’ ‘Workers Leaving the Factory’ and ‘Train Arrives at the Station’, documentary films occupy a crucial place in the history of cinema. “World cinema has witnessed several masterpieces in this format, from Robert Flaherty’s ethnographic explorations to

Chris Marker

’s poetic musings to Claude Lanzmann’s political enquiries to Abbas Kiarostami’s philosophical treatises,” a statement issued by NFAI stated.

Though Indian film history can boast of ace documentary filmmakers such as Mani Kaul, SNS Sastry, S Sukhdev and Anand Patwardhan, the documentary form of cinema remains curiously underseen in India, the statement said, adding that the new club aims to help documentary cinema reach the Indian audience.

The film club will showcase a documentary film every month, along with interactive sessions with filmmakers and film scholars. Over the course of one year, the club will also focus on documentaries about fine-arts in India, such as paintings and sculptures.

Filmmaker Umesh Kulkarni, founder of Arbhaat Film Club, said, “India lacks a proper distribution channel for documentaries. We hope that with this new initiative, we can showcase some remarkable documentaries to the audience in Pune.”