Celebrate Love, Humanity and Hope at the Ongoing I-View World Film Festival

In the midst of the ongoing global pandemic, the I-View World Film Festival conveys a message of hope by bringing together films that spark conversations around identity, marginalities and freedom. Organised and hosted by Engendered (an arts and human rights organisation), this 10-day film festival launched on the occasion of International Human Rights Day on the 10th of December 2020 in New Delhi and will showcase 50 shorts, documentaries and feature films from South Asia, Canada, Britain, Netherlands, India, Iran, Turkey/Syria and numerous other countries. 

The festival kicked-off with the socially distant, Covid conscious world premiere of Funny Boy by Deepa Mehta, a queer, coming of age story based in Sri Lanka that happens to be Canada’s official entry to the 2021 Academy Awards. Speaking to Cosmo India, director Deepa Mehta said, "It’s ( Funny Boy ) is a coming of age story, a queer love story and the story of oppression of minorities, whether its a because of a sexual choice or it’s a cultural minority based on race. I felt very strongly about making this film because it spoke to the times we live in now, where popular nationalist governments are creating such divisiveness in countries all over the world, and prejudice seems to be the mantra that we all live by.  It talks about how important it is to focus on love, how to heal hatred and how to build bridges of solidarity between communities."

Director Deepa Mehta at the festival premiere of her film 'Funny Boy'

The I-View World Film Festival is on till the 20th of December and can be viewed virtually for free on the Plexigo app. Cosmo India spoke to Engendered founder and director Myna Mukherjee about the inspiration behind the festival, the important films to look out for this year and the challenges of hosting a festival in the midst of a global pandemic.

Cosmo India: How did you come up with the idea of this festival?

Myna: This festival actually started in New York more than 15 years ago, and it started off as a multidisciplinary festival at the Lincoln Center. It then very quickly became one of the largest festivals on gender and marginality in North America. We had started working with the Tribeca Film Festival, and then for personal reasons, I had to come back to India. In 2016 we had India's first edition for I-View, and now in 2020, I felt like it was really important to bring the festival back. 

Myna Mukherjee at the I View festival with director Faraz Ansari 

Cosmo India: Why do you think the theme of human rights is so important today? 

Myna: To begin with, I was really tired of not finding any representation of myself when I looked around me at visual culture. All the people that I saw on television were white or black, nobody was brown. I wanted to see a representation of South Asia that I could relate to. I View was a way to flesh out South Asian representation, and cinema became a very powerful tool for doing that. Very quickly, I realized how it filled a void in the South Asian diaspora in North America at that time. We've been lucky to have people like Mira Nair, Vishal Bhardwaj and Pakistan filmmakers like Mehreen Jabbar lend their voice towards amplifying the mission and vision of the festival. It's been a place where filmmakers come together to discuss and to share ideas and to share stories and really debate and talk about trends and subject matters. It was very important for me to have a festival that was both aesthetic as well as political. I View has always been that space, and Engendered has always been an organization that does cultural work, but also political work, and that’s where human rights come in. The craft of cinema should not be lost,  it's not a completely activist space, necessarily. It's a space for empathy, of reflection and of imagination.

Cosmo India: Tell us about a few of the important films to look out for this year.

Myna: All the films have been carefully curated, so they're all very close to my heart. One of my favourite films is And Then We Danced, a Sweedish film that got a standing ovation at Cannes, which is also one of the most controversial queer films the world has seen in the recent years. There's a remarkable documentary called Luventa, which is about a group of teenagers who have rented a ship and are in the deep seas to save refugees in the migration crisis. It's a really remarkable story of perseverance. There is a beautifully animated film from the Netherlands called Half A Life about the crisis in Egypt and homosexuality and the kind of asylum seekers who are out there. Then there's a film from Argentina called Sleepwalkers, an Oscar-nominated film about a mother and her daughter that is beautifully crafted, stunning and sophisticated. We also have Sir with the beautiful Tillotama Shome (Monsoon Wedding) which is a film that is very symbolic of spirit. There is an industry screening for Sheer Qorma, an Indian LGBT love story and short film with Swara Bhaskar, Divya Dutta and Shabana Azmi, the list goes on…

Cosmo India: What were the challenges you faced due to the ongoing global pandemic? 

Myra: The challenge of having a quality lineup of films online is so much more complicated than meets the eye. I View is a place where the filmmaker is very important, so to protect the film from piracy was our priority. A lot of people may not have access to laptops, so we've tried to make the festival available for the first time on an app. A lot of subtitles right now for the foreign films are in English, and we understand that is limiting to audiences, but it's the best that we could do during this time. We also have 2-3 physical screenings, and our closing night film Zindagi Tamasha is Pakistan’s entry to the Oscars, so we had to ensure that the right kind of audience of film enthusiasts comes, and at the same time that we are Covid conscious. This past year would not have been possible without the refuge of cinema or Netflix, how would we have survived this year, without that? So even the idea of wanting to have a festival at a time like this was very much about showing solidarity to the film industry and that the spirit of cinema must go on.

The I-View World Film Festival is on till the 20th of  December 2020. Watch the films on plexigo.com and by downloading the Plexigo app