WORLD PREMIERE & FEATURE FILM DEBUT
Director: Harsh Chauhan
India | 2023 | 97 min | drama | Hindi, with English subtitles
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The Bird of Passage (Karmanye) tells of a man’s redemptive journey through the complex matrix of life, music and mania. Set in the holy city of Varanasi, where one is perpetually surrounded by deities and rituals, and remaining virtuous is as pertinent to survival as devoutness, the film delicately explores the untoward maniacal disposition of a musician named Prabhu. For Prabhu, the fragile delineation between virtue and vice blurs in one night, when he is provoked into an impulsive liaison of lesser consequence. And yet, it results in an impossible psychosis that throws his life off guard and his musical career into a descending spiral. The Bird of Passage is a sensitive tale of self-discovery, narrated in a style that is at once pragmatic and sentimental.
HARSH CHAUHAN is a self-taught filmmaker and cofounder of Kaveman Kreates. He has worked with directors of national renown such as J.P. Dutta, Aruna Raje, Zafar Hai, and some international masters like Tarsem Singh, Michael O. Sajbel, Gurinder Chadha, Lance Acord, Tom ooper, Marco Martins, Pierre Isoard, André Cerqueira and Harald Sicheritz. Experimenting with multiple mediums and genres (feature films, commercials, corporate films, and documentaries) gave him the opportunity to expand his horizons and see beyond the obvious, to perceive the world with enhanced clarity and a deeper understanding. His current aim is to craft new age cinema in contemporary settings, to strive and make realistic films through measured and moderate cinematography. The Bird of Passage is his first offering to the world of cinema. “Through this film, I wish to deliver an inspiring message of hope in the face of extreme and apparently irreparable adversity,” he says. “The cinematic canvas brings forth the indomitable power of possibility even in moments of abysmal crisis. The film’s unicity is its uncluttered simplicity and intensely felt humanness, its authentic intimacy with the people of Varanasi [and] realism through modest and sensible cinematography.”
scr.: Chittaranjan Giri | cin.: Harsh Chauhan | ed.: Gaurav Arora | cost.: Poonam Singh | snd: Manas Chowdhury | mus.: Abdhesh Goswami, Naveen Kumar, Vidit Tanwar | cast: Chittaranjan Giri, Ashwini Giri, Akash Sagar Chopra, Shivaanii Rai, Amitabh Bhattacharya | prod.: Awadhesh Kumar Singh, Poonam Singh, Harsh Chauhan
Incognito
Incognito is a Hitchcockian thriller about a lonely motel receptionist who makes an extra buck by selling the hidden-camera videos of his unsuspecting guests on the Internet. But when one such guest turns out to be a young girl who is being trafficked, he faces a crisis of conscience.
Trained as a cinematographer at the New York Film Academy, RAVI MUPPA is a screenwriter and director based in Mumbai. He is responsible for developing and writing various successful films and series such as Stree (2018), Bala (2019), The Family Man (2019) and The Substitutes (2020). Incognito is his first short film as a writer-director, and it has already been selected for competition at the Tirana, Mumbai and Northern Wave Film Festivals. Muppa explains: “Incognito is an exercise in telling a story that is entirely driven by sound and image. The story is told strictly from the protagonist’s point of view, thereby limiting the information given to the audience. In a way, the people in the audience become voyeurs, just like the protagonist of the film.”
scr.: Ravi Muppa | cin.: Azim Moollan | ed.: Konark Saxena | cost.: Rabindra Kumar Sonar | art dir.: Ghanshyam Sharma | snd: Dinesh Kumar | mus.: Mathew Job | cast: Vikram Singh, Ayushi Nema, Dev Chauhan | prod.: Ravi Muppa, Abhijeet Chabbra
Free parking during the screening.
$15 per ticket, plus H.S.T. ($1.95) & service fees.
