EXPERIMENTA INDIA,
Goethe-Institut / Max Mueller Bhavan Bangalore and
Arsenal – Institute for Film and Video Art, Berlin are proud to present
EXPERIMENTA 2023 from
January 18 to 22, 2023 at the Bhavan.
Founded by filmmaker
Shai Heredia in
2003,
EXPERIMENTA is the most respected and critically acclaimed independent film festival in the country. For over twenty years, EXPERIMENTA has collaborated with artists, curators, filmmakers, and art educators from across the world to nurture a community of creative practitioners who work across mediums, materials and genres. By celebrating all forms of experimentation with the moving image - from celluloid to digital, documentary to fiction and everything in between - EXPERIMENTA has created a context of support and shaped the current discourse around the history and contemporary framework of experimental film in India. By bringing international attention to Indian experimental cinema, the festival has catapulted many Indian filmmakers and artists into the global experimental film circuit where they have garnered awards and received critical acclaim.
EXPERIMENTA 2023 is a meticulously curated tapestry of rarely-seen films from international archives that has been woven together with contemporary feature and short films. This year we have invited respondents from across India, including artists, filmmakers, writers and scholars to reflect upon some of the key questions that frame the festival - How relevant is the history of global social movements today? How does cinema as an art form persist across time to offer critical representations of the aspirations, mistakes and contradictions of nation states? Together, as a community, we will create a broad and inclusive space of contemplation and discussion.
© Med Hondo
The festival will open on January 18th with a special programme of films including
Mes Voisins (My Neighbors) by Med Hondo (France, 1971). These extraordinary films will set the stage for the ideas, thematics and cinematic experiments that will unfold over the next 4 days.
©
The festival features an
Artist Profile of filmmaker Sylvia Schedelbauer (Germany). Sylvia lives and works in Berlin. Her practice encompasses essay filmmaking, structuralist cinema, and metaphorical narratives, with a deep investment in the sensory agency of image and sound. All of Schedelbauer’s films negotiate the space between broader historical narratives and personal, psychological realms mainly through poetic manipulations of found and archival footage. Sylvia Schedelbauer will be present for a post-screening discussion.
With radical films made by the
Sudanese Film Group and the
Pan African National Congress, to a focus on the
Black Panther Movement through Yolande du Luart’s Angela - Portrait of a Revolutionary and Howard Alk’s Murder of Fred Hampton, the programme offers insights into struggles against racism, inequitable capitalist power structures across the world and the power of cinema as a tool of resistance.
© Yugantar Film Collective
One of the
highlights of the programme is the celebration of the work of
Yugantar Film Collective, India’s first feminist film collective, which was founded by
Deepa Dhanraj, Abha Bhaiya, Navroze Contractor and Meera Rao in 1980. Between 1980 and 1983, during a time of significant political transformation in India, Yugantar created four pioneering films together. Two of these films -
Sudesha and Molkarin will be presented at Experimenta by
Nicole Wolf (Germany) and followed by an
in-person conversation with Deepa Dhanraj.
© Priya Sen
EXPERIMENTA 2023 is excited to host the festival
premiere of No Stranger At All, the latest feature film by
Bangalore-based filmmaker Priya Sen (India), who will be present for a post-screening discussion. These films will be shown alongside the
short film by
Chris Marker - On Vous parle de Paris: Maspero, les mots ont un sens (Calling from Paris: Maspero. Words Have a Meaning) and
Ruchir Joshi’s Memories of Milk City, which have been restored by Arsenal – Institute for Film and Video Art. Ruchir Joshi will be present for a post-screening discussion.
And finally, a specially-curated programme entitled
Media Encounters - Foreign Affairs will be presented by artist and curator
Merv Espina. The programme features a collection of the Goethe-Institut film and video workshops from the 1970s-1990s. In the late Cold War and the early post-Soviet era, the Goethe-Institut encouraged new tendencies in media production, ranging from documentary to experimental film and video art. The works produced through these Goethe-Institut co-productions often captured the social upheavals and turbulent politics in various places in the Global South. This programme is part of an ongoing research project. Merv Espina will present the films in person.
Festival Director Shai Heredia is a filmmaker, curator, and founding director of EXPERIMENTA, the moving image art biennial of India. She has curated film programmes worldwide and was the programmer of the 65th Robert Flaherty Seminar. Heredia has co-directed I Am Micro (2012) and An Old Dog’s Diary (2015) which have exhibited at prestigious film festivals and art venues internationally. Both films have won awards including a National Film Award and a BFI London Film Festival award. Heredia has contributed to journals such as The Moving Image Review and Art Journal and PUBLIC and was the co-editor of the Loud Mess issue of NANG magazine. Heredia is currently on the curatorial team of Berlinale Forum Expanded. She is based in Bangalore, where she runs the Graduate Programme in Curatorial Practices at the Srishti Manipal Institute of Art, Design and Technology.
For
programme details and schedule, visit
Experimenta Homepage closer to the date.
Entry free. All are welcome.
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