​A Festival of Surveillance?

Usually, attending a film festival is a joyous experience, with each film a journey that expands one’s inner and outer worlds, with visual narratives from different parts of the globe transporting you into unknown languages, landscapes, cultures, customs and, most importantly, dreams, agonies and angst. A film festival is also an annual get-together of cineastes from around the country and the world, an occasion to share views, experiences and opinions.

This year at the International Film Festival of India (IFFI) 2015, though all the paraphernalia of a film festival was very much present, its soul was missing; and one felt it at three levels—the films themselves, the festival ambience and the audience. On the one hand, film as a medium itself is facing a severe “identity crisis” of sorts with several other new media forms of endless distraction eclipsing its prominence, and thereby denying it the quality of attention that cinema needs and demands.