In India, it is festival time both for spiritual and temporal reasons. While religious fervor continues, there is brisk activity on the entertainment front, with new film releases riding piggyback on the feel-good climate around. Apart from releasing new films, this time of the year is also preferred for organizing film festivals because of the congenial weather conditions. Crisp winter air makes the long evenings pleasurable outings for discussing films.

Film festivals are an important method for showcasing the best that cinema has to offer the audience. Even when organized on a thematic basis or any other convenient premise (retrospective, panorama, world view), these festivals act as culminating point for good films. The audience which is used to mainstream cinema, whether Hollywood, Bollywood or Kollywood or any other language, gets an insight into the creative process going on in making films in less popular centres. Therefore, we get to see films, which are not candy floss romances or bone-crushing action flicks. Most of the festivals concentrate on films which take a deep look at the prevailing state of the society and the corrupting influences of political and social pressures on human behaviour. Oppression, displacement, betrayal, curbing of freedoms, violence etc. form the basic threads of thought in the chosen films. Good sense, humaneness, faith in God and Nature also recur in the films.

There is a section of the audience which criticizes the festivals for screening films, which in their opinion are slow and difficult to understand. Their contention is quite valid in the sense that some films pass off as intellectual stuff by being clever on technique rather than content. The festival organizers have to keep a hawk’s eye on such pretentiousness and choose only earthy and good films. There is also the charge that these films sort of romanticize the degrading conditions. This is not true. It is the moral responsibility of the film maker as a member of the society he lives in to show the situation prevailing in it. If there is decay all around, one cannot show that everything is fine. Films have to be realistic.

Now we come to the important question of how relevant are these festivals? Cinema speaks a universal language. It acts as a mirror to the entire human race and film makers have to use their creative urge to portray the society. Just as good playwrights are social activists and good lawyers are involved in several public interest causes, good movie makers have the duty to speak up about many issues which simmer hidden under the façade of mundane everyday life. But such films and filmmakers are a woeful minority. Therefore, the film festivals act as a visible platform for them to get in contact with the mass audience who would normally stay away from such fare.

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