After a pandemic induced hiatus, the Film Society of Bhubaneswar announces the 3rd Indian Documentary Film Festival of Bhubaneswar (IDFFB).
The festival runs from 14th to 16th October, at the Odissi Research Centre (ORC) auditorium. The focus of the festival is to showcase the contemporary documentary form. The films at the festival comes from diverse regions of the country - exploring issues of migration, gender, uneven development, issues of geo-politics, environmental degradation, political & ethical questions.
The film society draws its energy from the volunteers who make the festival possible.
Come and Volunteer, we also have internship opportunities with us.
MEET THE DIRECTORS AT IDFFB 2022
UNESCO-Gandhi Medal 2018 Award winner and National Film Award 2018 winner filmmaker Praveen Morchhale was born in Central India. After a few years of making short films and theatre working as a director, Praveen Morchhale achieved recognition with his feature film "Widow of Silence" (2018) and "Walking with the Wind" (2017).
Kasturi Basu is an independent documentary filmmaker, activist, writer and editor based in Kolkata. By training, she is a physicist, an alumnus of Jadavpur University, University of Cambridge, and Rutgers - the State University of New Jersey.
Dwaipayan Banerjee is an independent documentary filmmaker, activist, writer and editor based in Kolkata. An alumnus of Presidency College and Calcutta University, he has formerly been a labour activist and labour history researcher. Both of them are co-founder-members of the People’s Film Collective, co-organiser of the Kolkata People’s Film Festival, and co-editor of 'Pratirodher Cinema', a Bengali journal on documentary cinema and counterculture.
Ankhajit Biswas has studied Editing in Satyajit Ray Film & Television Institute and has participated in Berlin Talent Campus 2010. Film edited by him are screened in major festivals including Berlin, Toronto, BFI London, IDFA, Busan, Hong Kong, DokLeipzig, Yamagata, Museum of Modern Arts (MOMA), IFFI Goa and has won several awards globally. He turned to direction with 'Dui Dhuranir Golpo' (In-between Days, 2012), a documentary on the transgender community of Kolkata and his second documentary was 'The Wind in the Maruwa Field'. 'Hridoy Basat' is his first feature length documentary.
Debalina Majumder is an independent filmmaker and cinematographer. She has written, shot, and directed nationally and internationally acclaimed documentary films, short films and has been part of travelogues, music videos, telefilms and mixed genre as cameraperson, director.. Debalina is one of the foremost documentary filmmakers working on gender and queer sexuality issues in India. Her films have been screened in community spaces, national and international film festivals and classrooms all over the world, and made part of curriculum in several universities and institutes.
Actor, spoken word artist, hair stylist, writer, director, producer- Sapna embodies it all as a changemaker. After being a successful entrepreneur, writing multiple columns, authoring a self-help book, acting in award-winning plays, Sapna has been using filmmaking to give her activism a new voice.
Lipika is a filmmaker based in Odisha, India. She is an alumnus of the Film & Television Institute of India, where she specialised in film sound recording and designing. Her works have been shown in various international and national film festivals. In the period of 2012-2017, she has received four National Film Awards in various capacities presented by the President of India. Her films are characterised by a strong personal narrative style.
Surbhi Dewan is an independent writer, director & producer. Her films connect personal portraits to larger socio-political landscapes. Among her notable works, Daughter of Nepal (short doc, 2018) was screened at IDFFB 2019. Surbhi also produces social and commercial content with her New Delhi-based production company, Painted Tree Pictures.
FILM LINE UP AT IDFFB 2022
City Girls
by Priya Thuvassery
City Girls' is an intimate portrayal of two young girls from small towns of India now living in Delhi. The film attempts to deconstruct the image of ‘the city’ and what it means for a young woman brought up in an 'elsewhere' she's longed to escape from all her life.
Armature
By Joshua Quadros
Armature is a documentary about a Jiu-Jitsu athlete and his journey to making his amateur MMA debut.
Backstage
By Lipika Singh Darai
Backstage portrays the lives and times of the puppeteers of Odisha, India. The folk art form, which is as vulnerable as its performers who mostly belong to the lower strata of the society in terms of caste and economy, is experiencing a silent death as only the last generation of practitioners are remaining. The filmmaker builds a personal narrative to trace the time a dying art form is going through.
Bid for Bengal
By Kasturi Basu and Dwaipayan Banerjee
Using fresh and archival footage with personal family history, 'A Bid for Bengal' lays bare historical fault lines and visits the workings of frontal organizations in the Hindu-nationalist network responsible for the recent political shift in West Bengal, in between witnessing two consecutive elections trials, from 2019 to 2021.
Xenophobia
By Monjul Baruah
Xenophobia is based on the much-reported story of 65-year-old Dulal Paul, who was declared a foreigner by a tribunal in 2017 and died while he was lodged in a detention camp.
Small time Cinema
By Priya naresh
Small-Time Cinema is a documentary that follows two Youtube filmmaking groups, one living in Balochistan, Pakistan, and one, in Assam, India. The film follows these groups, as they make space for their complex history and cultures, beyond a blanket ‘Indian or Pakistani identity’ only.
In a Dissent Manner
By Ehraz A Zaman
The campus of Aligarh Muslim University became a battleground on 15th December, 2019 when police and RAF forces entered the campus on the pretext of dispersing protestors, and inflicted, what can only be described as one of the worst cases of police brutality on the students. 'In A Dissent Manner' explores the events of that one single night and its horrific after-effects on many students.
Hathi Bondhu
By Kripal Kalita
Hati Bondhu (Friends of Elephants) Assam, a voluntary organisation working for elephant welfare in the districts of Nowgaon & Golaghat districts of Assam. Wild elephant habitats are under stress due to developmental pressures. Hati Bondhu's intervention has resulted in reduced human-pachyderm conflicts.
Colours of Life
By Praveen Morchale
The Director revisits the Himalayan mountain villages after 5 years of shooting a national award-winning feature film "Walking With The Wind" in which local villagers appeared. He meets and observes villagers' life, philosophy, and ideas and invites them for a cinema experience, which some of them had for the first time.
Testimony of Ana
By Sachin Dheeraj Munigonda
An Adivasi elder, accused of witchcraft by her neighbours in rural India, uses faith and perseverance to survive several monstrous attacks. Living in an area beset by widespread logging, her refusal to be driven off the land sets up a conflict deeply rooted in patriarchy and capitalism waged on women’s bodies- the witch hunt.
Not just Roads
By Nitin Bathla
Not just Roads captures the story of a highway outside Delhi, from the perspective of human and non-human actors. It depicts a massive urban transformation underway in India.
New Classroom
By Debankon Singh
In the capital city of India, a young boy navigates virtual schooling at home, while the pandemic ravages the country. The imagination of the outside world slowly builds within these four walls; sometimes when a relative calls to inform the death of a loved one, sometimes watching a bird soaring in the sky.
Wittgenstein Plays Chess With Duchamp: Or How Not To Do Philosophy
By Amit Dutta
Wittgenstein Plays Chess With Duchamp:
Or How Not To Do Philosophy attempts to push the boundaries of cinema by juxtaposing it with ideas from philosophy, visual art, chess, mathematics, geometry, linguistics and psychology.
Dukhu Majhi
By Somnath Mondal
This documentary is about an old man named 'Dukhu Majhi', who lives with his family in a remote village at the foothill of the Ayodhya , about 350 km from Kolkata (India).
Gay India Matrimony
By Debalina Majumdar
This film revolves around three characters who are out exploring their same-gender marriage prospects with one of them documenting their travails. Shot over five years, this documentary captures the watershed moment of reading down Section 37
Salt & Sugar
By JJ Abraham
Salt and Sugar begins with a memory. A comment from her mother about her dark skin reveals to Hema the impossible gap between who she is and who society demands her to be. This intimate story speaks of the complexities of Indian culture, through classical Indian dance, contemporary movement and spoken word.
Meiram - the fireline
By James Khangenbam
As season change, Langol, once a barren hilltop in the fringe of Imphal city, brings magic of the forest. The dream of Loiya, a young man, to cover the hill with lush green has been taken up mutually by a young group of volunteers. The film gently touches the embracing colours of wild and slices of biodiversity.
A Night of Knowing Nothing
By Payal Kapadia
A university student in India, writes letters to her estranged lover, while he is away. Through these letters, we get a glimpse into the drastic changes taking place around her. Merging reality with fiction, dreams, memories, fantasies and anxieties, an amorphous narrative unfolds.
Mizo Soundscapes
By Joshy Joseph
Mizo Soundscapes is a visual - visceral - aural journey through a phase in Mizo History.
Bela
By Prantik Basu
In Bela (an indigenous village in eastern India), the men practice a traditional masked folk dance known as the Chhau, while the women frequent the nearby forest to gather dry leaves and firewood. In the local language, Bela means time. Shot over two years and edited as two consecutive days, the film is an intimate observation of the rhythms and rituals of art and labour, the feminine and the masculine, and the ambiguous thresholds between them.
It Was In Spring
by Kanika Gupta
A devastating change is becoming a trend, that of compromising all trees, plantation and garden spaces in exchange for multi-storey houses, which don't seem to need a garden anymore. This film is the story of one such house, which is destined to lose all its green cover and make way for cement and concrete.
Ghar Ka Pata
By Madhulika Jalali
Ghar Ka Pata attempts to weave a narrative of the place and of time gone by, juxtaposing a string of short conversations, filmed impromptu through the streets of 'Rainawari', (a quaint suburb of Srinagar where my home used to be), with a series of anecdotal experiences with my family when my father took us back to Kashmir 24 years after we had to leave the valley of mist.
Trans Kashmir
By Surbhi Dewan* and S.A. Hanan
Trans Kashmir is a film about the extreme hardships, resilience and beauty of Kashmir’s transgender community and their growing movement for basic human rights.
Sindhusthan
By Sapna Bhavnani
Sindhusthan includes many stories of the largest migration a culture in history – the Sindhi migration, some from India and some from Sindh (now in Pakistan) along with the director’s, illustrating her journey on her skin..
Karbala Memoirs
By Sourav Sarangi
Karbala Memoirs looks at Hussain’s martyrdom from the perspective of an Indian who accidentally happens to be in the ancient land that has been ravaged by war, extremism and autocracy. The narrative merges his childhood memories with immensely disturbing contemporary realities. His eyes follow the pilgrims’ progress, listening to their ballads or personal interpretations of history.
Gosain: The Colours of Spring
By Bishal Swargiary
The significance and traditions surrounding the Doul Purnima (Holi Festival), as well as the mythology of the discovery Narasimha Gosain by the Banka Kachari while excavating a pond serve as the foundation for this ethnographic film..
Siege in the Air
By Muntaha Amin
This film lays focus on the recent communication blockade of 2019, post the Article 370 abrogation and what its impact was on mental health, mobility, education and desires of young women living there.
All that breathes
By Shaunak Sen
All That Breathes, follows two brothers who run a bird hospital dedicated to rescuing injured black kites, a staple in the skies of New Delhi, India. In one of the world’s most populated cities, where cows, rats, monkeys, frogs, and hogs jostle cheek-by-jowl with people, the “Kite Brothers” care for thousands of these mesmerizing creatures that drop daily from New Delhi’s smog-choked skies. As environmental toxicity and civil unrest escalate, the relationship between this family and the neglected kites forms a poetic chronicle of the city’s collapsing ecology and deepening social fault lines.
Ek Tha Gaon
By Srishti Lakhera
In the Himalayan foothills, an 80 year old woman and a 19 year old girl are two of the seven remaining inhabitants of an abandoned village. The two women struggle with the choice to leave for an alienating city life or continue living in a lonely village.
Buwati Nodir Dore
By Neelansh Mittra
Buwati Nodir Dore shows the rapid cultural transformation in the Sonowal Kachari tribe after the recent exposure to the internet. It captures how The traditional folk songs of the tribe are being remixed in a modern way in recording studios in the city leaving the members of the kachari tribe in the village, worried about the future of their cultural identity.
Hridoy Basat
By Sankhajit Biswas
An intimate portrayal of Suvana Sudeb, a transgender person, who undergoes Gender Affirmative Surgery in order to negotiate the conflict of body and mind. This decision creates turmoil in her family, who fear societal backlash. As love remains elusive as always, Suvana realises that the surgery could not change her destiny, forcing her to reconcile with reality anew.
Cham - Meditation in Action
By Abhijit Das
Two parallel narratives are drawn from the lives of Lamas (Monks) of the Tawang Monastery and of the villagers living in the Mon region. This film is a visual installation of images through which it tries to narrate their life, spiritual journey and understanding of life philosophy. The film has plays and dances (pantomime) performed in the Torgya festival transiting through the dance rehearsals and secret and sacred preparations.
