The Arunachal Institute of Tribal Studies (AITS) at Rajiv Gandhi University (RGU), Itanagar will host a festival of films from contemporary northeast.
The festival will be held from March 9 to March 11, 2019.
The festival is titled ‘Borderland Narratives’ and will provide a platform for filmmakers from the eight states of the northeast to research about issues like heritage, identity and change of the region from a contemporary perspective.
The festival is being organized under the supervision of RGU Vice Chancellor Prof Saket Kushwaha.
It is being organized in collaboration with the departments of fine arts & music, mass communication and anthropology, along with the Centre for Cultural Research and Documentation, reports The Arunachal Times.
‘Borderland narratives: Films from contemporary Northeast India’ is “an exploration of that new space where the region’s communities emerge from the ‘museumization’ of its cultures to its contemporizing,” the department added.
The department added that the festival would promote an active visual culture and encourage visual reading, especially among the young people.
For the first edition of the festival, in the non-competitive segment, called ‘What we weave’, two filmmakers from each of the eight states in the region will be invited to present their films, where the screenings will be followed by close interactions with the filmmakers.
Another key feature of the festival is the in-competition segment called ‘Our lives, our stories’, which is a competition for short films of up to five minutes.
The theme for the competition this year is ‘Vanishing roots: Art, culture and folklore’, and films made after 1 January, 2016, in both fiction and non-fiction formats, are eligible to participate. The competition will have a cash prize of Rs 1 lakh, a trophy and a citation.
The other events of the festival includes panel discussions, lectures by eminent personalities and a workshop on visual anthropology.