Syam Sharma & Paban Kumar to take part in Yamagata International Documentary Film Festival
Source: IT News

Imphal, October 08 2019: The Yamagata International Documentary Film Festival 2019 which will commence from October 10 to 17 will feature 16 documentaries from North East India under a special section- "Rustle of Spring, Whiff of Gunpower: Documentaries from Northeast India" .

The programme has been set by the Festival authority in collaboration with the Sasakawa Peace Foundation as a part of their ongoing initiative entitled: Preserving and Sharing the Histories and Memories of North East India.

The Sasakawa Peace Foundation has invited legendary film maker Aribam Syam Sharma and young dynamic film maker Haobam Paban Kumar from Manipur to attend the festival and deliver talks in the post-screening events.

Five Films from Manipur in the festival are: Aribam Syam Sharma's Orchids of Manipur, Yelhou Jagoi : The Dances of Lai Haraoba, The Monpas of Arunachal Pradesh; Haobam Paban Kumar's Phum-Shang and Oinam Doren's Songs of Mashangva.

Others are Pinky Brahma Choudhury's An Autumn Fable, Mukul Haloi's Tales from Our Childhood, Gautam Bora's Old Man River, Subasri Krishnan's What the Fields Remember, Altaf Mazid's The Broken Song, Sanjay Kak's In the Forest Hangs a Bridge, Prem Vaida's New Rhythms in Nagaland, Nepoleon Thanga's MNF: The Mizo Uprising, Moji Riba's Prayers for New Gods, Tarun Bhartiya's When the Hens Crow and Not Allowed.

There will be a symposium on 'Documentaries from Northeast India / When Margins Becomes the Centre' to be participated byS1Pinky Brahma Choudhury, Haobam Paban Kumar and Moji Riba and moderated by Tarun Bhartiya, besides opening a North East India Audio-Visual Archive under the Department of Mass Communication, St Anthony's College Shillong.

Festival authority says, "Surrounded by Tibet, China, Myanmar and Bangladesh, the Northeast region of India connects to the mainland via a slender stretch of land of just 22 kilometers in width, euphemistically called the "chicken neck" .

From the time of Independence, the Indian state has obsessively worry about the map of this area getting severed from this slender chicken neck.

Confronted by the self-determination struggles of the indigenous people of the region, Indian cartographic mania has pushed the democratic life there to just a frontier footnote" .

"But political turbulence is not the only story.

As a geographical and civilizational bridge, the region has been at the crossroads of much older histories of community cultures.

With more than 200 languages and scores of tribes, from hill societies to valley dwelling cultures, Northeast India could be celebrated as a microcosm of diversity.

This program presents the tension and dialogue between the post-colonial Indian state's efforts to represent the region and local filmmakers who seize back the narrative of their experiences" .

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