The Pune International Film Festival

The 4th Pune International Film Festival is going around in town.
About 4 venues, with 6 screens are participating this time and they are showing about 100 movies.
The halls participating are: Gold Adlabs, E-Square, Citypride Kothrud and NFAI (National Film Archive Institute)

I, along with all the rest of my college crowd, went and got the delegate pass for 300 bucks (if you are not a student, it will cost you 500 bucks)
However, the benefit of a delegate pass is that you can walk into any movie without having to purchase any tickets at all.

Anyways, the general opinion is that if the pass costs 300 bucks, you should see 6 movies atleast to cover up for it.

Its a funny feeling actually, the all you can eat feeling.
However, I came up with my own rating - after having see a couple of really sidey movies.

My approach to this entire thing is, to pick and choose carefully which movies to watch - after which I decide an amount which I could spend to watch the movie, which would justify the movie.

If at the end of 7 days, I have made up the 300 bucks, I would be more than happy.
Anyways, got the opportunity to see some really awesome (and some really pathetic films).

Here is the story so far ( in the descending order of awesomeness)

1. Hotel Rwanda (English)
The movie is set in Rwanda (as the name suggests) and depicts the very violent struggle between the two different sects of people from Rwanda - the Hutus and the Tutsis.
The film has some very powerful performances and was nominated for 3 oscars.
A very hard hitting film.

My review on the film.
How much I would pay for this movie : Rs. 200

2. Dombivli Fast (Marathi)
This was my second good movie of the day (yesterday) and was pretty well made.
Told the story of a person - Madhav Apte - and what happens when you're driven up the wall (kinda). You flip.
Again, contains some really powerful performances and some awesome screenplay.
Last I heard, it won the Hero Honda Screen Award for Best Direction and the Best Actor (Sandeep Kulkarni) in leading role.

My review on this film
How much I would pay for this movie : Rs. 150

3. Lemming (French)
Not all french films are good. But this one was very well done. Extremely well done.
The movie had a very Alfred Hitchcockish kind of feel to it with the entire 2 hours 10 mins of it being very intense and gripping.
Though the entire film is mostly shot in one house - indoors - and was subtitled, it was fun to watch. The subtitles were very easy to follow and I really enjoyed the roller coaster ride that the movie took me on.

My review on this film (yet to come)
How much I would pay for this movie : Rs. 80

4. While it rains hard (Malyalam)
This movie was pretty decently made and it was worth my time sitting for it.
It talks about 2 families from South India (don't remember the exact place now) - one muslim and the other hindu.
Both the husbands are working in the Gulf.
Somehow, one manages to kill the other (in the Gulf) and surrenders and faces sure death penalty - unless the wife of the deceased decides to forgive him.
What I really liked about the movie was the "Malgudi Days" touch that it had - and the beautiful portrayal of South India - which transported you directly to the villages there.

How much I would pay for this movie : Rs. 35

5. My Nikofor (Polish)
Honestly, while it was playing, this movie was unbelievably slow.
Though the acting and direction were decently good, there were lots of editing flaws which caused a lot of confusion.
The movie is a story about Nikifor - a 85 year old Polish painter from the 1960s - who was a genius, but was living on the streets.
He also suffers from tubercolosis - and is shunned by everybody.
A 35 year old man takes care of him, and he himself is shunned by his family and friends.

How much I would pay for this movie : Rs. 20

6. A Real Man (French)
And they say, Indians make crappy movies.
After seeing this movie, I developed a phobia of entering movie halls, which, luckily for me lasted only one night.
This was the second movie that I saw, and in one word, it was pathetic.
The plot was paper thin and the movie was pretty badly made.
Though the cast acted decently well, the stupid story and untolerable songs (yes - they had songs equivalent to a Hindi movie) made the movie a definite no no.

How much I would pay for this movie : (minus) - Rs. 40

4 days still left to go ... will update you as we go along ...

The event update ...

I haven't been getting time of late to blog ... been extremely busy - painting the town red - everyday, going around for sponsors and then later for project.

The funny thing is that I HATE to get out of the house and roam around.
Part of this reason being that to go anyplace worthwhile, I have to go quite a distance.

So, in the vacations, when many of my friends just hung out the entire day, I would wonder why do they do it.
I rarely ever did it, and now I think, have compensated for it in this vacation ... maybe even for the rest of my life ...

Anyways, as per the event, we've made some progress from the last time the post came about, but we are falling drastically short as of now ... unless some miracle happens soon, we don't know whats going to come of it.

The event's gonna be on the 30th of Jan, and we need to get some amount of sponsorship, by the 10th of this month. Then only, we'll be going ahead with additional expenditure, like poster printing, advertising and the works.

I guess, by this Monday, we'll have a much clearer picture.
Either we do a full fledged event as planned (decently possible), a more cut down event - with lesser prize money and stuff (pretty likely), or we'll be scrapping the event altogether (equally likely).

Lets see ...

One more thing that you come across while doing an event is that the various people who you work with, all, have an event which they love.
Now, when the axe is about to fall on a particular event, these people will try and defend the event till the very last.
It is difficult to be stern, coz firstly, very few people are working anyways, so you don't want to upset them, and secondly, coz you generally don't want to upset people.

The other kind of people, which I hate completely are the ones, who come up with their own damn, neat, ideas for contests or additions to the events - last minute - months after everything was planned and months after people have slogged their asses to get to this position.
Whats more worse is, that these people, take the liberty of talking to people and start organizing things for "their" new additions and contests without consulting the others.
Very annoying.

But I guess, these are the typicals.
During this entire month and a half, I've met many not-so-typical people, but I'll leave them for another post.

Lets just wait and watch and see where this all goes.