Last summer, a diploma film from the Film and Television Institute of India (FTII), Pune lit up the Cannes Film Festival with a Banjara sunrise folk tale, winning the top prize for film school entries across the world.
As the curtain went up on the Cannes festival on May 13, another film school from India is hoping it could repeat FTII’s remarkable success story this year.
A year after FTII’s Sunflowers Were the First to Know directed by Chidananda S Naik won the First Prize in the Cannes festival’s La Cinef competition for film schools, the Satyajit Ray Film and Television Institute (SRFTI), Kolkata is in contention for the 15,000-euro (about 14 lakh rupees) top prize.
A Doll Made Up of Clay by SRFTI student Kokob Gebrehaweria Tesfay is part of La Cinef, which has 16 entries this year. Shot in Kolkata, the 24-minute film tells the story of a footballer from Nigeria playing a seven-a-side tournament in the city struggling to survive after injuries keep him out of the matches.
Success of Soviet model
The SRFTI film, which was selected to La Cinef from 2,700 entries submitted by film schools all over the world, continues a dream run by India’s film schools at the Cannes Film Festival. The participation of India at the Cannes La Cinef for the second successive year also tells the success story of India’s state-run film schools modelled on the erstwhile Soviet Union’s.
The FTII, founded in 1960, and SRFTI, created in 1996, were modelled on the Russian State University of Cinematography (VGIK), the world’s oldest film school founded in 1919 where legendary Russian filmmakers like Sergie Eisenstein and Sergie Bondarchuk were once professors.
“The FTII opens up a student’s world to various kinds of cinema,” says FTII alumnus Ranabir Das, the cinematographer of last year’s Cannes Grand Prix winner, All We Imagine As Light, directed by Payal Kapadia, who is also a former FTII student.
“Students themselves often help each other understand the world they come from better with collective and individual past experiences. This would naturally lead to unique voices coming out of the institute,” Das told The Hindustan Times at the Cannes Film Festival.
Two films from India’s film schools have won the top prize at La Cinef in the past five years. In 2020, FTII student Ashmita Guha Neogi’s CatDog bagged La Cinef’s first prize, a feat repeated by Mysore-born Naik, also a student of FTII, last year. Naik’s Sunflowers Were the First to Know was based on a Banjara folktale in Kannada about an elderly woman stealing her village rooster plunging the village into darkness.
In 2023, Yudhajit Basu, another FTII student, competed in Cannes’ La Cinef with his diploma film, Nehemich, which explored the age-old practice of banishing menstruating women to dingy mud huts in parts of rural India.
Previous SRFTI diploma films to compete in the film school category include Bengali filmmaker Anirban Dutta’s Tetris in 2006 and Darjeeling-born filmmaker Saurav Rai’s Gudh in 2016.
The journey of India’s film schools in Cannes began in 2002 when Khoj, an SRFTI diploma film by Tridib Poddar, was selected to the film school competition, previously called Cinéfondation. Kapadia would join the fray later in 2017 when her own diploma film, Afternoon Clouds, became the first FTII production to be selected to the Cannes film school competition.
Founded in 1998, the Cannes film school competition is a highlight of the festival, drawing entries from top film institutes in the world. Incidentally, the second prize in the inaugural Cannes film school competition was won by Indian-origin British filmmaker Asif Kapadia for his diploma film (The Sheep Thief), an entry of the Royal College of Art, London, shot in Rajasthan.
Camaraderie on campus
“It was a big experience for me as a budding filmmaker suddenly finding myself at one of the most influential film festivals in the world,” says Poddar, a member of the second batch of students at SRFTI, who is now a professor of direction and scriptwriting at the institute.
“The late Iranian director Abbas Kiarostami was on the jury of the film school and short film competition that year. He hugged me saying he liked my film. That was a huge reward for me,” adds Poddar. Khoj went on to win the Best First Film of a Director at the Mumbai International Film Festival (MIFF) in 2004.
“Indian film schools help cultivate a sense of regional culture and expression in students,” explains Poddar about the depth of storytelling in Indian film school productions because of the camaraderie between students coming to the campus from the corners of the country. “We tell stories from Kashmir to Kerala and Jharkhand to Mumbai,” he adds.
“At the film institute, I can do what I imagine, whether it is drama, documentary, political, Indian or African,” says Tesfay, an international student of direction and scriptwriting at the SRFTI, who found instant support for his story of a Nigerian football player’s struggle in Kolkata from fellow students.
“We have good creative minds on the campus ready to collaborate. There are no restrictions or limits on ideas,” adds Kolkata-born Soham Pal, the SRFTI student and sound recordist for A Doll Made Up of Clay directed by Tesfay.
“At the film institute we communicate with peers. There are discussions on cinema happening every day. It changes your perspective and broadens your vision about the world,” says Vinod Kumar, a Jalandhar, Punjab-born student of cinematography at the SRFTI, who shot A Doll Made Up of Clay. “A film’s story is not just about a character, but it is also about geography, politics, economics and society.”