MAMI Film Festival: Wide Screen

THE QUEUE IN Mumbai is an elusive thing. People rarely line up. And if they do, they are constantly threatening to break out from one. People here will chat you up in a McDonald’s queue only to slip right in front.

But here I am today, in a long orderly queue outside a cinema screen in Mumbai, a full two hours before an hour-and-a-half-long film starts. The queue snakes and curls to accommodate more people. No one pushes. Nobody tries to cut through.

We are at the Mumbai Academy of the Moving Image or MAMI Film Festival, the city’s—and perhaps even the country’s— premier film festival. People stand in queues that will take more time to clear than the length of the film itself, discussing animatedly the filmography of the most obscure filmmakers. Some have spread out their festival itinerary, circling the titles they intend to catch. There are indie film and TV actors in the queue, some ad filmmakers, and several college students. A 25-year-old media student in front of me is attending his first MAMI film festival. “It is like losing my virginity,” he jokes. He speaks of his low interest in commercial Hindi cinema, yet identifies every little-known actor we chance upon. Behind me, two men in their late forties turn out to be scriptwriters. They give the impression of people who, after having failed to become actors, are now pursuing writing. When a host of celebrities including Aamir and Imran Khan emerge, followed by a comet tail of media personnel and hangers-on, the scriptwriters crack jokes—though it’s evident they yearn for a similar following.

Some days later, I’d be part of another queue at Regal theatre in South Mumbai, which would snake out onto the road, around the theatre and reach a petrol pump station close to the Gateway of India by the shore. Any longer, I’d hear someone joke, and they’d have to wear life jackets to queue up in the sea.

Today, however, a fight has broken out. The actor Vinay Pathak, along with two companions, is not being allowed in. Despite having booked well in advance, they have rushed from a film screening that has just ended, but haven’t made it on time. Pathak’s pallor is mournful and his companion, holding his head in his hands, exclaims, “Oh my God, oh my God,” as though some great travesty has occurred. The three vanish into the crowd, perhaps to join another queue.

The MAMI Film Festival, now Jio MAMI with Star, has changed tremendously over the years. In the past, it would play out across a few select theatres, haunted by the serious film geek. Now, there are over 175 titles spread across 19 screens. Two years ago, the festival found itself in a financial mess and was almost cancelled. But after the old guard was replaced by younger organisers—including filmmaker Kiran Rao and film critic Anupama Chopra, who brought in big money and a Bollywood flavour— MAMI now resembles a mix between art-house cinema and Bollywood glitz. There are panel discussions among filmmakers, sit-down interviews with actors that often feel like extensions of TV chat shows, and, of course, film screenings. The Bollywood element gets the eyeballs and sponsorship cheques, and the stars in return possibly earn some festival cred. The Bollywood groupie types pout and take selfies with stars, they scream whenever a star addresses them from the stage, and every Q&A thrown open to the audience invariably finds a Bollywood struggler asking how he can get in. Zoya Akhtar tells one, “Acting is all about timing. And this is really bad timing.”

Attending MAMI is as much about a passion for films as it is about a strategy to watch them. I caught only 12 films in seven days, because I was foolish enough to try catching several films at multiple venues. I met people who claimed to have sat up through the night before the festival began to pore over the schedule. They compiled an Excel spreadsheet of the films they would watch. Of course, this will, like every other previous edition, turn out to be a pipedream. Because almost everyone else has prepared a similar master-list. The film nerd will wake up sharp at 8 am, when online booking opens up for the day’s and the next’s film screenings, like the Railways’ ‘tatkaal bookings’; and almost like its website, it will crumble under the weight of hits. And within minutes, the day and tomorrow’s best films will get booked up. So the film nerd will queue up for the desired film’s screenings. And when the attendant eventually says ‘housefull’, you will see anguish writ large and recognise in it the face of an adolescent experiencing his first heartbreak.

MAMI watchers will switch off phones without fail. They will curve their bodies around their phone to read messages and apologise to their next- seaters. They will applaud films. Heck, some even sit through the credit rolls almost as a mark of respect to every film contributor. And at the end of a long day, you will see some of them crowning their own festival winners of the day.

There is something about seeing a penis or vagina on a big screen in India. You know it is a festival. You know it will be there. It will appear on a screen that usually bleeps or cuts out every cuss or kiss. It will sit there, uncensored, for several minutes, devoid of arousal-ability but like a thrilling provocation all the same.

This year, naked men and women loomed large across MAMI. There were both Indian and international actors who were stark naked. There was a German film, Wild, where a wolf went down on a woman. In Alain Guiraudie’s bizarre and hilarious Staying Vertical, which was rightly christened Cannes’ most shocking film this year, there are several explicit scenes. There is cunnilingus, the protagonist sodomising an old man on his death bed to the edgy riffs of Pink Floyd, and—at this, several audience members squirmed or walked out—an extremely lengthy close-up shot of a child being delivered, faeces, blood and all.

On a Sunday, I caught the first Indian screening of a sweet indie film, Tu Hai Mera Sunday—for the blind—in which a group of friends are trying to find space in Mumbai for their Sunday football games. A woman sat in front of a laptop, as she described in lucid detail the quiet aspects of the film. In the dark theatre, you could see silhouettes of blind people trembling at the jokes that have just been described. To the sighted, the audio description adds a new quality, the narrator’s voice becoming your own, and the visual on screen almost like your own imagination.

On the fifth day of the festival, one Andheri venue—where top-draw films like the Palme d’Or-winning I, Daniel Blake, the excellent horror flick Under the Shadow and the Romanian drama Graduation , were playing almost at the same time—reportedly resembled a war zone. Apparently, the organisers cancelled all walk-ins because of the rush for those films and had extra security on stand-by.

On the last day of the festival, I find none of that commotion at the adjacent Andheri venue. I walk in for what is possibly the longest film ever made. It is an 11-hour-long Filipino drama. Mercifully, the first four hours were screened the day before, and the last seven hours now. Evolution of a Filipino Family (2004), made by Lav Diaz, filmed almost through an entire decade, tells the story of a poor Filipino family between 1971 and 1987, an important period that covers the dictatorship of Ferdinand Marcos and the People Power Revolution. Black-and-white and grainy, radically slow, hyper minimalistic, little dialogue and long-takes of mundane everyday events, the film goes against the grain of anything we are used to watching. You forget characters’ faces; you lose minor plot lines; two viewers beside you are snoring; outside, noon has turned to late night; the seat feels comfortable, the blanket beside seems inviting, and before long, you succumb to MAMI burnout as well.

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