KOCHI:
The Kochi Biennale Foundation will screen eight Vietnamese movies in the opening week of February, as noted researcher-academic Shweta Kishore is curating a February 1-4 festival featuring select works from the Southeast Asian country.
‘Letters from Panduranga’, ‘Vietnam The Movie’ (Feb 1), ‘On the Endless Road’, ‘Love Man Love Woman’ (Feb 2), ‘The City of Mirrors’ and ‘Mars in the Well’ (Feb 3) and ‘My Father, the last Communist’ and ‘Summer! Attention!’ (Feb 4) will be screened at the Pavilion in Cabral Yard of Fort Kochi as part of the Artists Cinema series running alongside the 108-day biennale that is on till March 29.
The films explore desires and subjectivities of the ordinary, the anonymous, the outsider and the non-heroic, according to the curator. “In the arts, situated knowledge becomes a situated textuality. Speaking from the periphery, art reflects particular contexts, histories and struggles of its conditions,” she adds.
On a ‘local’ scale, they embody personal response to lived contexts of social, cultural and environmental contradictions created by Vietnam’s transit towards globalised capital and commodity flows. “A ‘global’ outlook pertains in a modernist cinematic vision that appropriates and re-signifies image and sound to express a view ‘from here’,” she adds.
Shweta Kishore, who lectures at RMIT University (Vietnam), explores how independent art and film cultures invite alternate relations between culture, people and society, is the author of Indian Documentary Film and Filmmakers: Independence in Practice that examines the cultural meanings and significance of independence in Indian documentary filmmaking. In 2014, she curated ‘India in Flux: Living Resistance’ at Melbourne international film festival. Currently she is curating ‘Moving Reels: A Social Dialogue’ at the Factory Contemporary Arts Centre, Ho Chi Minh City.
Shweta is also doing a documentary-based research project in collaboration with the women of that country and contemporary artists to examine the gendered dimensions of contemporary art cultures.
