BY A GT REPORTER
PANJIM: Sitting in the lounge area of newly opened Sunaparanta Goa Art Centre, Altinho Ashwin Kumar is talking about his work to the media and sharing his creative experience.
He is here to conduct a workshop called Thinking Films - Creative Process / Visual, which is on till July 24 and is being attended by 18 film enthusiasts from Goa.
“Through my workshop this is the maximum I can tell about filmmaking. The rest one has to learn by himself as I believe that it cannot be taught but experienced” mentioned Kumar.
Kumar is a contemporary filmmaker whose film “Little Terrorist” was a Oscar nominee in short film category. It has won around 25 awards world wide through different film festivals.
This 15-minute film spoke about the cross-border issue in a most human interesting fashion. He also believes that using the unique title like ‘Little Terrorist’ managed to grab the initial attention.
However he confessed that he could manage to get the recognition in India as it was appreciated worldwide and also had an Oscar nomination. “Sadly that’s true as we are still colonised in our brains” lamented Kumar.
Speaking further about the filmmaking scenario he sighed that we don’t invest in artistes and also the government is not taking any interest in it. He also mentioned that there’s too much fiscal burden on filmmakers and that’s hampering the growth of independent filmmakers. “Do you know that almost 50 per cent of amount of the movie ticket goes for entertainment tax? Then there’s also service and income tax. Thus, the producer is only involved in recovering its cost and that’s why focusing on commercial films. If the government can remove the entertainment tax then independent filmmakers will flourish” hopes Kumar.
He also believes that language should not be a barrier for films. “Films are visual and not verbal medium. It has a universal language and they are not language centric,” opined Kumar who also acted in some films.
Now he is ready with his first feature film, ‘The Forest’ is a thriller with an ecological message. He has used thriller here to send a social message, “I wanted to make a film on conservation aspect. But, if I had to make a documentary then it would have restricted audience. Thus, I used thriller for it. It is based on real life instance of man-eating leopard that is symbolic of degradation of our forest cover. Also I focused on the man-nature conflict,” explained Kumar who is planning to release this film in India by end of this year.
It is already released in Middle East, Thailand, Brazil and it was also premiered at Cinequest Film Festival in San Jose in February 2009, and had its market premiere at Cannes Market 2009 where it sold to ten territories. He is also working on two films-‘Kashmir’ and ‘Hype’.
