A special gift from Alliance Francaise du Bengale (AFB) took centre stage for a length of time at the inauguration of AFB’s French Film Festival, jointly organised with the West Bengal Film Centre, at Nandan. Bollywood actor Anil Kapoor, the recipient of the gift, was transported back to 1980. The gift was a black-and-white photograph of his, lighting up in front of the Grand Hotel arcade. “I was in Calcutta for the shooting of my first (signed) Hindi film Kahan Kahan Se Guzar Gaya in 1980. I had come across this photo on the Internet. It comes if you Google the film. When I came for the film festival (Kolkata International Film Festival 2023, of which he attended the inauguration in December), I had met the photographer Mr Nemai Ghosh’s son and told him that I always wanted to own a print of the photograph but I could not get in touch with his father. I am so happy that I am taking it home,” Kapoor told t2 before leaving the French consulate general on Friday night.
The guests listen to the consul general’s speech
The son of Nemai Ghosh (known to Satyajit Ray’s fans as his visual Boswell) was clicking away when Kapoor was being handed the framed photograph by French consul general Didier Talpain and AFB director Nicolas Facino. “I wanted the photograph to reach him on a grand scale. This is an appropriate occasion. Look he has sent me this,” Satyaki Ghosh showed t2 a WhatsApp message on his phone where the sender had written, “Thank you for the picture. I loved your papa.”
Kapoor was one of the guests of honour to have flown in from Mumbai — in course of his speech earlier, he thanked the Bengal government for having funded the M.S. Sathyu film 44 years ago — as had filmmaker Anurag Kashyap. “I am attending the Cannes Film Festival for 14 years and I have seen how well-received his film Kennedy was last year,” said Facino. Kennedy, which was screened as part of the festival on Saturday, had been exhibited in the Midnight Screening Section at the 76th edition out of competition at Cannes. At Nandan, too, on Saturday evening, it expectedly drew a full house. Festival regulars would recall the long queue and the chaos that had been caused when the film was screened at KIFF ‘23.
Cinema, said consul general Talpain, was the greatest invention that mankind experienced other than fire, quoting Abel Gance, an early 20th-century French film director whose work included both silent and sound films. “We, the French, are said to have invented cinema. But what we invented was actually a concept — thousands of passionate people in a dark room watching animated pictures on a screen — which is what we will experience tonight (with the screening of the inaugural film). The first screening (by the Lumiere Brothers) took place in Paris on December 28, 1895 at the Grand Cafe and the room where this was held was incidentally called the Indian Salon,” Talpain pointed out.
Anil Kapoor being handed a copy of his photograph clicked in 1980 during the shooting of Kahan Kahan Se Guzar Gaya by Nemai Ghosh
Kashyap recalled how he saw Truffaut’s 1959 classic 400 Blows at a festival organised by Unifrance in 1993. “It affected me in so many ways. I revisited the film recently. I don’t like to discuss a film after watching a film. I like to live with it and let it do what it does,” he said.
The stage witnessed moments of camaraderie. Rituparna Sengupta pointed out Satyaki Ghosh among the photographers to Kapoor seated next to her. The Slumdog Millionaire star referred to Anurag Kashyap having been the (joint) screenplay writer of his acclaimed 2001 release Nayak and to Saswata Chatterjee as a “very dear friend” and a “great actor”. “I love him. We worked together in (the web series) The Night Manager,” he said. Saswata, when asked to speak, responded with a single exclamation — “jhakaas”, popularised by Kapoor in his film Yudh.
Rituparna claimed to be an admirer of French cinema. “Recently I saw Other People’s Children (2022) and was just taken aback. I watch Juliette Binoche and (Iranian director) Abbas Kiarostami’s films with huge amazement. When my film (Alik Sukh) had gone to Cannes (in 2013), I had the opportunity to experience the festival,” she said, adding warm words for the French language and people. Actor Richa Sharma complimented the French officials for organising the festival. “I am happy to be at the inauguration of the French Film Festival and I would like to thank Nicolas and Didier for organising this,” she said.
Anil Kapoor and Rituparna Sengupta at the inauguration of the French Film Festival at Nandan
Screen time
The festival, Facino said, would feature 42 screenings of 28 full-length films over nine days at Nandan. “We will present an eclectic selection of the best French films, reflecting our rich cinematic tradition and its influence on world cinema. The festival symbolises a cultural exchange between two cinematic powerhouses, fostering intercultural dialogue and collaboration,” he said. The festival would include films as a tribute to the French New Wave and screen works of Jean Luc Godard, Francois Truffaut, Alan Resnais, Jacques Rivette and Agnes Varda. French New Wave cinema, he felt, was popular in Bengal “probably because they dealt with similar social and cultural trends to those addressed in Bengali cinema”.
Indian and Bengali films, he pointed out, were regularly screened at the world’s biggest film festival at Cannes, which he has attended for 14 years. A section of the festival at Nandan would be on such films by the likes of Satyajit Ray (Agantuk), Mrinal Sen (Padatik), Goutam Ghose (Padma Nadir Majhi and Antarjali Yatra), Buddhadeb Dasgupta (Tahader Katha) and Sandip Ray (Uttaran). Ghose and Sandip Ray would discuss their films after the screenings. Discussions will also follow Padatik (by Anjan Dutt), Agantuk (by Chinmoy Guha) and Godard's Contempt (with Sudhir Mishra).
A segment targeting young audiences will include animation films, like the 2022 release Little Nicholas (on Monday and Thursday at 1.30pm) and The Black Pharaoh, the Savage and the Princess, a trio of tales from Sudan, medieval France and 18th century Turkey (on Tuesday and Friday at 1.30pm). Schools have been invited for their students to attend these screenings.
There is also a section on films adapted from literature. The latest interpretation of Alexandre Dumas’s The Three Musketeers, the second-most expensive French production of 2023 co-produced by France, Germany, Spain and Belgium that was released in two parts, is on view at the festival. Its second part, Milady, that had released only on December 13, was the inaugural film. The first part of the film, directed by Martin Bourboulon, D’Artagnan, will be shown on Wednesday at 6pm. There will be Asterix and Obelix: The Middle Kingdom, a 2023 release, directed by Guillaume Canet, on Tuesday at 6pm. The closing film on February 24 at 6pm will be the blockbuster La Tresse (The Braid) by Laetitia Colombani, adapted from a French novel with an Indian origin story, which was highly recommended by Kashyap.
Anurag Kashyap
There will also be a short film night, when from 9pm on February 23 to 6am the next day, 28 shorts will be screened one after another in the courtyard of Park Mansions, on Park Street, where the AFB is housed. “There will be enough coffee for the audience,” Facino promised.
Viewers may walk in till the venue is filled, the organisers say.