Docu-Forum
Raghu Rai; An Unframed Portrait

Wed, 28.11.2018
6:30 PM Goethe-Institut / Max Mueller Bhavan Kolkata

World premiere November 2017 (IDFA Mid Length Competition), 55 minutes with English Subtitles

The film maker will be present along with her father, the well-known photographer Raghu Rai for a discussion moderated by Anjum Katyal.

Synopsis
Avani Rai didn’t set out to make a film about her father, the famous photographer Raghu Rai. What she wanted was to get to know him better by observing him on one of his photo trips. In the film that she ended up making anyway, father and daughter travel together to the Indian state of Kashmir, where political unrest prevails and violence is commonplace. They photograph their surroundings and each other, in the meantime reflecting on their lives, politics and his craft, which is richly illustrated with material from Raghu Rai’s archive.
 
The film has travelled to DocPoint (Finland, Estonia), DocAviv (Tel Aviv), Docs Against Gravity (Poland), Oslo (Norway), TRT documentary days (Turkey) – as opening film, Doc Edge (New Zealand), Doc Fest (Germany), MakeDox (won the moral approach award, Macedonia), Nordisk Panorama awards (in competion, sweden) and is playing at the prestigious 20th United Nations Association film festival to be held in San Francisco in October.

Avani Rai
A  photographer based out of Mumbai, India, Avani Rai has worked as a cameraperson on a number of short films. Uski Baarish premiered at Clermond Ferrand, Tiff etc. She has worked in fiction and documentary. As a photographer she has contributed to the Sunday Guardian, Scroll, The Wire. Her recent, a film directed/shot by her Raghu Rai; An Unframed Portrait, co-produced by ARTE FRANCE, IDFA BERTHA FUND premiered at IDFA in the competition in November 2017.
 
Raghu Rai
Rai started taking photos in the 1960s, and has now published more than 50 books. He is best known for his powerful series on the aftermath of the Bhopal toxic gas tragedy in 1984, Mother Teresa and Indira Gandhi. Avani films and photographs her father as he works—and as he instructs her on viewpoints and framing. In the process, the film becomes a portrait not only of a passionate photographer, but also of a father-daughter relationship in which the camera is a source of both connection and friction.