Schedule of "Transmissions 3" The Festival of Independent Cinema From Around The World by Lightcube Film Society

Schedule of Lightcube Film Society presents "Transmissions 3" The Festival of Independent Cinema From Around The World at Instituto Cervantes, 48, Hanuman Road, Connaught Place > 26th to 28th February & 1st March 2015 : 

26th Feb

6 PM – Opening, performance by Woody Accouche, a folk-reggae band

6:15 PM - Blood Earth ( Kush Bhadwar, 36’)

Word Sound Power’s second project, Blood Earth, commenced in August 2011 in the Khonda tribal village of Kucheipadar in South Orissa. In the mid-1990s, large deposits of Bauxite, the mineral from which aluminum is made, were discovered in the area. Soon after, the district became a conflict zone where a vibrant people’s movement blossomed with songs serving as a uniting force. With a mobile music studio, Word Sound Power joined local singers and musicians in Kucheipadar for a new type of collaboration. The result is a cross genre mash up, combining revolutionary songs in Oriya and Kui tribal lan-guage with dub poetry by Delhi Sultanate and electronic music composed by Chris McGuinness.

7:15 PM – The Dark I Must Not Name ( Shaan Khataau, 65’)

The Dark I Must Not Name is an exploration of the city of Bhopal, 15 years after the world’s worst industrial accident ravaged the city. The film is an examination of Shaan Khatau’s interface with a city that lives on, even as it has been irrevocably altered by the tragedy.

27th Feb

11 AM – Lost in Bosnia (Film.Factory, 95’)

Eleven Film.factory filmmakers began an eleven-week experiment with 6 rules: The film must be shot on a small electronic device; the filmmaker must hold the device at all times; the film must contain one line of voice-over from the filmmaker; the film must be shot and edited in one week; the film must not be in black and white; and, the filmmaker is free.

1:30 PM – 3 Men and a Bulb (Pankaj Rishi Kumar, 74’)
3 men and a Bulb is a story of 3 men who earn a livelihood from their gharat (watermill) in foothills of Himalayas (Uttaranchal), India. The life led by these 3 men is meagre, having access neither to electricity nor employment that brings regular income. Farming is very arduous, as supply of water is scarce. The gharat becomes a site, which each character wants to own and sometimes disown, in the quest for a better life.

2:45 PM – Workshop with Pankaj Rishi Kumar, ‘A Non-Activist Documentary Cinema’

4:30 PM – Songs from the North (Soon-Mi Yoo, 72’)
An essay film which looks differently at the enigma of North Korea, a country typically seen through only through the distorted lens of jingoistic propaganda and derisive satire. Interweaving footage from the filmmaker’s three visits to North Korea with songs, spectacle, popular cinema and archival footage, the film tries to understand on their own terms the psychology and popular imagination of the North Korean people.

6:30 PM – Panel Discussion: Opening up of Alternative Exhibition Spaces and The DhenukI Project

8 PM – Lajwanti (Pushpendra Singh, 63’)
Lajwanti/The Honour Keeper is a love story set in a village in the Thar desert in Rajasthan,India. 
A group of women in their daily long walk collect water recite songs and exchange words that reveal their hidden desires.

28th Feb
11 AM – Traveling Light (Gina Telaroli, 58’)
An Amtrak train pulls out of Penn Station in New York on a cold, sunny February morning. 
The train moves forward as the landscape changes-the East Coast giving way to the Midwest.
Passengers fill their roles,the snow begins to fall and the next train station is announced, all while the light continues shifting,bouncing,swelling and slouching into eventual darkness.

12:30 PM - Inserts I, Home Videos , curated by Pankaj Rishi Kumar, 127’
I For India ( Sandhya Suri, 70’)
In 1965 Yash Pal Suri left India for the U.K. The first thing he does on his arrival in England is to buy 2 Super 8 cameras, 2 projectors and 2 reel to reel recorders. One set of equipment he sends to his family in India, the other he keeps for himself. For forty years he uses it to share his new life abroad with those back home - images of snow, mini skirted ladies dancing bare-legged, the first trip to an English supermarket - his taped thoughts and observations providing a unique chronicle of the eccentricities of his new English hosts. Back in India, his relatives in turn, respond with their own ‘cine-letters’ telling tales of weddings, festivals and village life.

Bare (Santana Issar, 11’)
Piecing together nostalgic home videos shot by her family two decades ago, coupled with current telephone conversations with various family members, Bare follows the filmmaker’s attempt to define her relationship – past, current and future – with her alcoholic father. Should she stand by him, drawing only on her memories of what a wonderful father he was? Or should she move on, as some of her relatives are urging, and build a life which excludes him?

These Old Frames (Tahireh Lal, 15’)
These Old Frames explores the structure and creation of a narrative using found footage. The footage used is from Tahireh’s grandfather’s archive, films shot by him fifty years ago, home movies on 8mm film. Fragments of family history, situations, events and characters unfold on an intimate canvas but echo universal themes. Mining personal stories, common ground and interrelationships helped understand her grandfather and how he created his own identity in a free India in her infancy. The process revolved around getting to know the man that he was.

Phantom Limb (Jay Rosenblatt, 28’))
Phantom Limb uses the director’s personal loss as a point of departure. Whether it is a loss through death or divorce, the stages of grieving are the same. Individuals often go through denial, anger, bargaining, depression and, ultimately, some kind of acceptance, in order to heal.
The film is loosely structured according to these stages. Interspersed throughout this poetic documentary are interviews with a cemetery owner, a phantom limb patient and an author of a book about evidence for life after death. Phantom Limb reminds viewers that while grief is painful and isolating, it is a reminder to each of us that life is impermanent.

3:30 PM – Soundphiles, 20’

4:30 PM – Saatvin Sair (Amit Dutta, 70’)
Phantom Limb uses the director’s personal loss as a point of departure. Whether it is a loss through death or divorce, the stages of grieving are the same. Individuals often go through denial, anger, bargaining, depression and, ultimately, some kind of acceptance, in order to heal.
The film is loosely structured according to these stages. Interspersed throughout this poetic documentary are interviews with a cemetery owner, a phantom limb patient and an author of a book about evidence for life after death. Phantom Limb reminds viewers that while grief is painful and isolating, it is a reminder to each of us that life is impermanent.

6:15 PM - History of Fear (Benjamin Naishtat, 85’)
Christian spends his days trimming grass and taking care of a football court at a Gated Community in the most distant suburbs of Buenos Aires, not far from the blur point where the green wilderness begins.

8 PM –
Special Screening, 16mm:
Song of the Humans ( Shinsuke Ogawa, 121’), organised by Japan Foundation As the protests at Sanrizuka transformed, Ogawa began looking for other subjects. He eventually moved to Yamagata, but considered other subjects like this one: the brutal Kotobukicho district of Yokohama. Only 250 meters on a side, it was home to 6,000 people living in 90 run-down flophouses. This was where day laborers lived and died on the streets. 
Following the method they developed in Sanrizuka, Ogawa’s crew lived with the workers, tenderly filming the trials of their daily lives in this heartrending film.

 1st March : 

11 AM – Inserts II, Neighbourhood, curated by Rahee Punyashloka, 92’

Field Trip (Amit Dutta 22’)

Between Regularity and Irregularity (Masahiro Tsutani, 8’)
The filmmaker improvises and through a conversation with himself, he has a chaotic worldview evocative of the firing of nerve cells, clustering sounds of convulsiveness. Finely detailed images filled with light are synced to sound. Nature creates the glow of light and the beauty of a shape lying between regularity and irregularity. Sounds and images with a granular texture. 
These things grasp the depths of the brain.

Deep Sleep (Basma Alsharif, 13’)
A transfixing performance film in which artist Basma Alsharif shoots footage in Athens, Malta and the “post-civilization” of the Gaza Strip while under self-hypnosis. Echoing Maya Deren’s Meshes of the Afternoon, Deep Sleep transcends both physical locales and states of being as Basma Alsharif shoots while under self-hypnosis, making a pan-geographic leap from the ruins of an ancient civilization embedded in a modern civilization in ruins (Athens) to the derelict buildings of anonymous sites in Malta and a site that is, in the artist’s words, “post-civilization”
(the Gaza Strip).

Sun Song (Joel Wanek, 15’)
A poetic journey from the darkness of early dawn into the brightness of the midday sun in the American South. Filmed entirely on the number 16 bus route in Durham, North Carolina over the course of six months, Sun Song is a celebration of light and a meditation on leaving. 

Buffalo Juggalos (Scott Cummings, 30’)
An experimental exploration and celebration of the Juggalo subculture in Buffalo, New York. Surreal scenes shot in long and static takes of Juggalos engaged in their favorite activities, first and foremost of which - causing mayhem. Among these seemingly random acts of the everyday, preening, backyard wrestling, explosions and destruction, a tentative narrative begins to emerge.

In Damascus (Waref Abu Quba, 4’)
This film is about Damascus, an 11,000 years old city, the most ancient & precious of cities, set to the poetry of the world famous Palestinian poet / author Mahmoud Darwish.

1:30 PM – Free Screening:

The Plague (Neus Ballus, 85’)
Five people who work on the outskirts of Barcelona and whose paths cross every day: Iurie, a Moldavian wrestler who is waiting for Spanish papers and is working on the harvest with farmer Raül. Raül took over the farm from his parents. The situation is precarious, as an insect plague has infested his fields and is threatening to ruin the yield.

3:30 PM – There (James Fotopoulous, 103’)
Lamb is a troubled veteran and his girlfriend,M, is tormented as well, when he’s not working as a security guide in an old warehouse with other unstable vets, Lamb haunts a nightclub frequented by wounded and traumatized ex-soldiers. There he meets a one-armed vet, Thrill, who starts a strange story about the effects of his post-traumatic stress, which unsettles Lamb.

6 PM –  Special Tribute: Helsinki Forever (Peter von Bagh, 78’), organised by Finland Embassy
An exquisite collage portrait of Finland's capital city as captured by the country's leading feature and documentary filmmakers over a period of one hundred years, Helsinki, Forever is also an essay on Finnish culture in a broader sense, following an emotional logic that questions the ephemeral nature of history itself in a search for the "real" heart and soul of the city. Award-winning Finnish filmmaker, critic, and historian Peter von Bagh has directed more than 60 documentaries and published more than 30 books and is artistic director for 2 major international festivals. His iconic radio and television programs have shaped the opinions of countless Nordic filmgoers for decades.

8 PM – Jalanan (Daniel Ziv, 108’)
The film follows the young marginalized musicians and their never before seen sub-culture, while also painting a striking, moody and intimate portrait of Indonesia’s frenzied capital city. It traces their elusive quest for identity and love in the day-to-day of a city overrun by the effects of globalization and corruption.