Furthering Indo-Sri Lankan cultural ties

By Cassandra Mascarenhas

Developing the profession of cinematography in Sri Lanka, the Sri Lanka Foundation Digital Academy has initiated a new digital film school in Sri Lanka in order to expand the country’s film industry with an academic blend.

As a part of this initiative, the Academy has formed a partnership with one of the most acclaimed cinema universities in Asia, the Film and Television Training Institute of India (FTII), Pune who in collaboration with Indian Cultural Centre are to celebrate 100 years of Indian cinema with SLF until 2013.

The first step of this collaboration was a 10-day film appreciation workshop held in Colombo last week, carried out by three distinguished Indian professors from the FTII that concluded yesterday.

The Film Institute of India has been carrying out similar film appreciation courses for the past 37 years and also hosts a month long course in summer which is held on the FTII campus in Pune annually.

FTII Head of Department Film Appreciation Prof. Indranil Bhattacharya observed that during these workshops every year, the campus gets at least two to three Sri Lankan participants who spend a month in Pune.

Sri Lanka’s mass media culture

“Since 1990, which is 22 years ago, we started doing film appreciation courses in Colombo but unfortunately these courses do not happen every year as there are certain technical difficulties, bureaucratic problems, synchronising the schedules of both the countries,” he explained.

“However, we always look forward to doing it here because it’s a country of film lovers, it has a great film viewing culture and Sri Lanka has a very vibrant mass media culture – radio and television. We have been talking a lot about Radio Ceylon and how it carried on playing Indian film music even when All India Radio had stopped playing it.”

The immense popularity of Indian cinema, especially mainstream cinema in Sri Lanka are the major reasons they are here and they also want to create and promote a film viewing culture which they do in their country.

“There is a lot of curiosity amongst students because there is a lot of world cinema that is available and they watch that so the purpose of a course like this is to take them through all the changes in technology, ways of engaging with cinema and the languages that have been constructed over the last 100 years because of which films are being made the way they are these days. Those are the kind of things we have all being engaging with and it really has been very nice,” stated filmmaker and lecturer Prof. Avijit Mukul Kishore.

Film making and film viewing have to go hand in hand, elaborated Bhattacharya. Unless a country has a evolved film viewing culture, films are not going to be appreciated especially films that are meant for a niche audience, films that are different from the mainstream commercial films.

“This is like film making and film education cross-fertilising each other because we can only make good films if there is a good audience. A good audience will only be there if we try to familiarise them with how to look at cinema with a slightly more intense, in-depth perspective.”

Finer points of the course

The course which commenced on 31 July attracted 40 participants including students from the Academy, film enthusiasts, practitioners and even an art director. The FTII chose to hold a 10-day course in Colombo as they knew they would be dealing with some very fresh participants and the others veterans and generally for this kind of participant profile, shorter courses are better suited.

“We usually have this kind of mix even in India – that way it’s not new but the fact that this is in Colombo makes it even more interesting,” Kishore acknowledged.  

Both the professors enthusiastically admitted that the response has been fabulous. “There are people across different backgrounds and age groups which make the course even more interesting because we’re trying to pitch at a level at which even the newcomers and the fresh digital academy students find it interesting as well as the veterans of the industry and film reviewers. It also becomes an exchange of ideas, it’s not that we are imparting wisdom,” Bhattacharya added.

Through the course, the professors also get to their own knowledge of Sri Lankan cinema and the contemporary Sinhalese directors such as Vimukthi Jayasundara and Prasanna Vithanage who are well-known amongst Indian students. Jayasundara’s recent film ‘Mushrooms’ made in Bangladesh was in fact showcased at the FTII during the one month film appreciation course held this year.

During the course in Colombo, the professors took the participants through different aesthetic areas of cinema, various technical areas of cinema, from how films are made and an overview of cinema as it evolved over the past 100 years or more, along with the various movements and genres.

“We introduce them to the new changes – the current trend is the digital technology driven changes that are happening in the film industry. There was a focus in this course on new Asian cinema. Asian cinema, especially South Asia, countries like Taiwan, Korea, Hong Kong, Vietnam, Malaysia. And a lot of emphasis on documentaries – we had a day-long seminar on that.”

“It was very intense. The course consisted of 12 hour days, from 10 a.m. to 10 p.m. at least,” added Kishore.

Classes were held in the mornings followed by two screenings. The films were connected to what was being taught with handouts distributed and teachers and speakers addressing the participants to place the films in context while they were screened them.

The way forward

The last workshop of this nature was held in 2005 and although the FTII has conducted them previously through other streams as well, this year’s workshop was held under the purview of the Memorandum of Understanding of cultural exchange between the Cultural Corporation of the two countries which has been signed, operational between 2010 and 2013.

“I’m sure it will be extended as it always has been. Though we have done courses and programmes outside such exchange programmes, this has a special meaning not only because of the MoU but also because it’s a celebration of 100 years of Indian cinema,” Bhattacharya stated.

Although the FTII wants to conduct such workshops on an annual basis, this requires a year’s worth of planning, for things to fructify and to go through all the official channels as there are governments and bureaucracy involved but with the Cultural Corporation involved, Bhattacharya noted that things fall into place pretty easily.

Synchronising the professors’ own calendars is also a problem as they have other courses to run and it needs to fit into peoples’ schedules in Colombo.

“With the close cultural ties between the countries, cinema is just one manifestation of it, there are so many other areas where we see so much commonality in culture, how we look at things, in food habits, the things that we share and enjoy like music. We’ve come across people who are so young but they know of songs which are 40 or 50 years old and we found this quite incredible,” he added.

Pix by Lasantha Kumara