2015-12-19 12:44:00

Jesuit-sponsored festival highlights power of short film


(Vatican Radio) The Kolkata Short Film Festival took place this week. The 12th edition of the cultural event ran from the 13th to the 19th of December, and featured dozens of entries – 104 to be precise – all screened during the course of the Festival’s week-long run under the sponsorship of the renowned Jesuit  Chitrabani centre – the first media center in Eastern India, founded in 1970, which has been instrumental in training media professionals in both the technical and the ethical-moral areas of contemporary communications.

Non-competitive and open to all, the Festival was held at Nandan, West Bengal Film Centre, which was a joint sponsor of the event. Nandan is a government-sponsored film and cultural centre in Kolkata, India, the primary purpose of which is to encourage and facilitate broad social appreciation for the cinematic media.

KSFF 2015’s main organizer, Fr. P.J. Joseph, SJ, told Vatican Radio the purpose of the festival is twofold: to provide a forum for young filmmakers to showcase their work, and to highlight the storytelling power of the short format. “When we started this film festival in 2004, our basic aim was to break certain myths: there is a sort of understanding that worthwhile stories cannot be told in a short time, and therefore, when we started, the idea was to provide a forum for screening short films – especially for newcomers – and also to create awareness of excellent short films,” Fr. Joseph explained.

This year, the festival featured a panel discussion on the future of media, with a slate of panelists including Snehasis Sur from National Television Doordarshan, Jesuit priest and film scholar Fr. Gaston Roberge SJ, journalist Althea Philips from the Times of India, debut filmmaker Jeyashri Mukherjee, and photographer Dev Nayak, all of whom are Chitrabani alumni.

Click below to hear Fr. Joseph's extended conversation with Chris Altieri








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