‘There is a tide in the affairs of men’, Brutus had said, ‘which, taken at the flood, leads on to fortune; omitted, all the voyage of their life is bound in shallows and in miseries.’ Brutus may have missed the Jio MAMI Mumbai Film Festival 2023 by a few millennia, but his words could well have served as a slogan for this jamboree held between October 27 and November 5.
Once you purchased a pass to attend the Film Festival, the tide in your affairs began every day at 8 AM. This was the time when you had to log into Book My Show and reserve your seat for the movies that would be screened the next day. True to Brutus’s prescient warning, this tide had to be taken at the flood. If you tarried for even a minute, the tide would ebb and you would be left stabbing at your phone with an ineffectual finger as the screen displayed the dreaded words: Sold Out. Your life would then be bound in the misery of waiting in serpentine queues, along with hundreds vying to occupy the few ‘walk-in seats’.
If you, like me, are a casual movie enthusiast – a dilettante of cinema – then you may have felt a sense of bemusement during the hours you spent standing in those queues. While people around me discussed films and filmmakers I’d never heard of, I shuffled my feet and recalled the scant titles in my viewing history. If pressed, I could drop a few names – Bergman, Kurosawa, Fellini – but I was as familiar with their oeuvre as the Film Festival organizers were with the concept of counting. (But one must not be unkind: perhaps subtracting the number of reservations from the total capacity of a theatre to know the number of available seats for those in the walk-in queues, is harder than it sounds; perhaps inspired by the plotlines of certain award-winning featured films, the seemingly simple rules of mathematics had also turned ambiguous.) In conversations with strangers, I sheepishly admitted that I’ve never watched Citizen Kane or the Apu Trilogy; that I quite enjoyed Jawan and barely ever use my subscription with Mubi (the curated movie streaming platform); and that I bought a pass to the Film Festival entirely on a whim.
As it happens, life has a habit of turning interesting whenever you take a plunge into the unknown. Only an impulsive decision to attend a film festival with negligible knowledge about the line-up can bring you into contact with worlds and ideas that are, at once, different and resonant. It is what led me to a heart-breaking Nepali gem – Gau Ayeko Bato (A Road To A Village) – exploring how the wheels of development and modernity can crush rural, indigenous communities. It showed me how the craft and mastery of a consummate storyteller – the Japanese director, Hirokazu Kore-eda – can elevate a heart-warming tale into the realm of high art (Monster). It compelled me to bear witness to the horrors and ravages of war (20 Days in Mariupol), and laid bare the sexual frustration lurking under the sanskari surface of Indian society (Agra).
Film festivals also present those rare occasions when creators and consumers can interact directly; the former explaining their motivations and the latter querying them about their process. In a Q&A session after the screening of Gau Ayeko Bato, the director-writer Nabin Subba explained how the film was written over 7 years, after plumbing astonishing depths of research. So insistent was their desire to create an authentic depiction of the local community, for instance, that they even avoided using certain colours in the costume design. In another discussion following the premiere of Everybody Loves Sohrab Handa, the filmmaker Rajat Kapoor was asked what he meant by having a character in the movie respond to the query, ‘What will save us?’, with the single word, ‘Beauty’. With a wry smile, Mr. Kapoor remarked that the meaning was probably known to the person who originally wrote it: Dostoevsky. These conversations, made possible only in this setting, revealed the meticulous work that happens behind-the-scenes and how both inspiration and invention can play crucial roles in the weaving of stories.
There was much that could unnerve a first-timer at the Mumbai Film Festival. To begin with, there was the overwhelming festival schedule. For those afflicted with FOMO – and who amongst us is safe from this scourge? – the act of poring over listicles and shortlisting the ‘recommended must-watch’ movies, was in itself a nightmare. Then, there was the making of itineraries and careful choosing of transport to execute ambitious (and ultimately, unsuccessful) plans of watching a morning show in Colaba and an afternoon show in Goregaon.
There was the heartbreak of waiting in long queues, only to hear the ushers say: ‘Housefull’. There was also the thrill that comes from being part of an indignant mob roiling in righteous anger - (‘What do you mean you cannot let us enter? We have been waiting for HOURS!’) - followed by the sudden quiet that descends on jhola-carrying aesthetes confronted by muscle-bound bouncers.
Yet, at the end of five days and seven movies, my memory of these travails is tinged with fondness. I remember the people I met, the jokes I shared with them, and the copious amounts of popcorn I consumed.
There were some setbacks, yes, and many movies I missed; but the MAMI Film Festival reminded me why I had paid for that dormant Mubi subscription, after all. Perhaps now, it was time I finally started using it.
Note: An edited version of this essay was previously published in the Indian Express.