The Kochi Biennale Foundation will screen eight Vietnamese movies in the opening week of February. The film festival, curated by noted researcher-academic Shweta Kishore, will take place from February 1-4.
Letters from Panduranga, Vietnam the Movie (Feb 1), On the Endless Road, Love Man Love Woman (Feb 2), The City of Mirrors and Mars in the Well (Feb 3) and My Father, the last Communist and Summer! Attention! (Feb 4) will be screened at the Pavilion in Cabral Yard of Fort Kochi as part of the Artists Cinema series running alongside the 108-day biennale.
The films explore desires and subjectivities of the ordinary, the anonymous, the outsider and the non-heroic, according to the curator. On a ‘local’ scale, they embody personal response to contexts of social, cultural and environmental contradictions created by Vietnam’s transit towards globalised capital and commodity flows. “A ‘global’ outlook pertains to a modernist cinematic vision that appropriates and re-signifies image and sound to express a view ‘from here’,” she adds.
Shweta, who lectures at RMIT University (Vietnam), explores how independent art and film cultures invite alternate relations between culture, people and society, is the author of Indian Documentary Film and Filmmakers: Independence in Practice.
