Manifest, India’s first International dance film festival in city from Friday

It is one of those paradoxes that while song and dance have always been at the heart of Indian film-making culture, very few productions fit into the relatively new genre of ‘dance-films’. Neither the musical, the documentary on dance forms, nor even the full-length feature about a dancer qualify as a dance-film — an avant garde form of cinematic story-telling where movement and rhythm, rather than dialogue, drive the narrative. ‘Manifest,’ the country’s first international dance film festival dedicated to the genre, gets under way here on July 29 at Alliance Francaise, and will showcase a clutch of about 40 acclaimed dance films from all over the world. The three-day festival, hosted by AuroApaar, a dance-film collective, will include screening of films at Auroville’s Cinema Paradiso. A high point will be the July 30 screening of Uday Shankar’s iconic ‘Kalpana’ (1948), regarded as the definitive Indian dance-film, and a presentation by his grandson Ratul Shankar. “We are looking at a very new genre. This festival is the first annual international dance film festival in India…and only the third in Asia, outside of Japan and South Korea”, said Ashavari Majumdar, co-founder of AuroApaar and festival convenor. The dance film festival aims to raise awareness on this medium of story-telling, debate its possibilities and mentor a new directorial class in this genre of cinema. The event partners, include Alliance Francaise, the Indira Gandhi National Centre for Arts, Narthaki, a dance portal and city-based TASMAI, a centre for art and culture. Apart from screening, there will be discussions, Q & A sessions, including online interfaces with participants from all over the world and academic presentations. “In Europe, dance film is serious art that has assumed the proportions of a movement in the post-pandemic world with a lot of radical film-makers creating contemporary, experimental cinema”, said Ms. Majumdar, who is a trained classical dancer herself.

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