Earlier this month, Experimenta, the biennial festival of experimental film and moving image art celebrated its 12th edition in Bangalore, presenting premieres, interactive discussions, and panels with guest artists, filmmakers and curators. Among its key segments were an international programme featuring films from Asia, Southeast Asia, and its diaspora on themes of belonging, remembrance, and shifting landscapes; a programme centred on feminist nonfiction from the Global South; and the India premiere of a restored version of the country’s first queer narrative on screen, long believed to be lost.
In a conversation with Helter Skelter, Experimenta founder and filmmaker Shai Heredia spoke about the festival’s role in taking Indian experimental cinema to the world and how the success of Payal Kapadia’s film [All We Imagine as Light] bodes well for filmmakers like her who emerge out of experimental film contexts and are interested in filmic exercises that weave abstraction into narrative cinema. The role of the democratisation of technology in enriching cinematic form, the consistent lack of support structures for experimental film in India, and the importance of addressing current issues through a historical lens were also discussed. Read on for excerpts from the conversation—
What were some of the highlights for you from this year’s edition?
There was a curated section titled One Way or Another, that I co-curated with writer and film critic Erika Balsom. This set of films looked at feminist nonfiction from the Global South made from 1970 through to the 1990s. There were films from Chile, Peru, and Argentina. We had an Indian film by Nilita Vachani, Eyes of Stone (1990), and we also showed artist Nalini Malani’s film Onanism (1969). These were all archival films which are actually very difficult to source. They were a part of a research project that I’ve been involved with for a few years with Erika, so that’s how this section came together.
Then we had the international programme that came together through the open call which was focused on films from Asia and also films from the Asian diaspora. We received about 400 films and we selected 28. This selection included a mix of films from Lebanon, Hong Kong, India, Iran, Tunisia, Egypt and Thailand. These were works from 2018 up to 2024, because the last time we had an open call was for the 2017 edition of the festival. Some filmmakers sent us three films that they had made, and then in some cases we chose one of those. So, it was nice to be able to see their bodies of work.
We also had the Experimenta Forum section through which we engaged in dialogue and conversations around filmmaking and curatorial practice. We had Erika Balsom on the first day, and filmmakers Priya Sen and Deepa Dhanraj on the second and third days. The ideas that were discussed were those that resonated through the films, because most of the films we selected reflected on or had some response to their own political context in that particular region. So, the Forum took up discussions about, for instance, how you make films in times of conflict.
Could you talk to me about the film Thokei by Srinagar-based artist Malik Irtiza which was given the Adolfas Mekas Award?
It’s a film that uses performance and abstraction. There’s a soundtrack that is built around protest sounds and songs. It’s a very powerful piece. There is a poem that the filmmaker, Irtiza Malik, recites for Gaza. It’s a very short piece, but within that, both aesthetically and in terms of form—the way it’s structured and how the sound and image is crafted—the film is really strong. There were many other films that were also great, but I think there was a particular emotional quality that this film had which resonated with the audience as well.
“The power dynamic inherent to filmmaking is not as stark as it used to be because the medium now is in the hands of everyone.”
In another interview, you spoke about how people’s interactions with the moving image have changed significantly thanks to social media and the increased access to different kinds of work and platforms. What were some of the most interesting engagements with the form that were shown at the festival this year—engagements that were perhaps reflective of the changes that have taken place in our techno-cultural landscape in the last few years?
I would like to highlight both the films that received a Special Mention from the Experimenta jury for the International Program—Babasaheb in Bengaluru, by Mahishaa, a Bangalore-based filmmaker, and Home and Hatred by Praagya Arya and Dimple Mishra.
Babasaheb in Bengaluru uses the form and technique of collage in a really interesting way. The screen is broken up between straight-to-camera interviews and text which is used both as image and content. The text operates as a sort of subtitle, because they are speaking in Kannada, but it appears very large across the screen. The film has a great energy and is essentially a work of video art. There is also a really cool soundtrack which makes you feel like it’s a music video, but it’s not, because the interviews are saying some really difficult things about caste, and what it means to put up a statue of Babasaheb outside your house—or even inside your house—and what your landlord will come and say about that, or that your caste gets revealed immediately and how you get treated as soon as your caste is revealed. At the same time, the film is an homage to people who have built these statues of Ambedkar across the city in Bangalore and in various contexts, because it’s usually individuals or small communities who do that. It’s never the state. The film uses what is seemingly a sort of YouTube aesthetic to make some really powerful comments. It’s a really fresh form.
The younger generation today takes ownership of the medium in interesting ways. They discuss social justice issues with full agency using pop culture references which makes the work accessible to many people. The power dynamic inherent to filmmaking is not as stark as it used to be because the medium now is in the hands of everyone.
With Home and Hatred, the filmmakers make a political comment in a very subtle way through cleverly crafting the images of city spaces and the sound of interviews and local radio. The film addresses the political situation in Madhya Pradesh, and points to small acts of violence that exist in the everyday, like someone putting a particular flag or writing something outside your house without your permission. The film makes the viewer think about how such casual actions that people do become ways of instilling fear in anyone who thinks differently.
How was the closing film Badnam Basti received? What were some of the conversations the screening generated?
The film was based on a book [a 1957 novel by Kamleshwar Prasad Saxena, published in English as A Street with 57 Lanes and serialised in the prestigious Hindi literary magazine Hans] and some people had read it and were interested to see how the film had represented it. What was also interesting for people was the trivia around the film. The film was shown around the same time as Mani Kaul’s films. It’s quite radically made in that the narrative is very fragmented, choppy, like a puzzle. The narrative is not constructed in a linear fashion. There’s not much dialogue. It’s only when you get to the end that the penny drops about everything that has been happening in the film. It’s a transgressive film on many levels, not just in terms of its subject and characters who are people living on the periphery of society, but also because there’s a critique of heteronormativity. You also have freeze frames, and this beautiful soundtrack by Vijay Raghav Rao, who did the soundtracks for a lot of the experimental Films Division films of the time. [He also composed the music for Mrinal Sen’s Bhuvan Shome.] Harivansh Rai Bachchan wrote a poem for the film. Ghulam Mustafa Khan sang songs. So it was not an outsider film, it was very much within this community of the New Wave at the time. And it was shown abroad.
Recently this film came up through various serendipitous encounters. It was not even listed in the Encyclopedia of Indian Cinema, which makes you realise that there must be a lot of films that have not been listed in the Encyclopedia, and therefore, have we done the work? How many films have been obscured or lost?
People really enjoyed it because they were discovering this gem, which was forgotten/ lost. But at Experimenta, we are really into doing that. Even with our One Way or Another programme, we showed a lot of historical films. We showed this film called Les Femmes Palestiniennes by Jocelyne Saab, who was a famous filmmaker and journalist. The film is about what happens to women in a context of conflict, and it talks about some of the women who left Palestine to study in Beirut, also looking at women soldiers who were fighting in Palestine. The film ends with referencing torture in prisons in Gaza. It was also a really important way for us to address what’s happening now, but not with the images that we are being bombarded with on our screens, but to understand that there’s a historical trajectory, and that this conflict didn’t just start on October 7, it’s been going on for decades. At Experimenta, we do our best to use cinema to address some of the issues of our times.
As compared to 2003, when Experimenta had its first edition, are more people working professionally within the realm of experimental cinema? Is it easier to work within this space now as compared to the early 2000s? Are there more funds coming in?
No, there’s no funding. Essentially, experimental film as a practice is a solo practice in the sense that you work with your community. Someone like Payal [Kapadia], who has come out of the experimental film context has opened some doors for people who want to make a feature film that has more abstraction, like her film All We Imagine as Light—which is still narrative, but a little more open in terms of the kind of cinematic experience it offers. I do think that it has been through the work that we have been doing with Experimenta since 2003 that Indian experimental film is known all over the world. Internationally, we’ve been showing work, but unfortunately the Indian context is overdetermined by the mainstream film industry, so there is little to no support for experimental work here, even though the audiences are pretty large.
Experimental film across the world is always on the margins, but in other spaces there is a relationship to film as an art practice, and there are funding organisations that actually fund art practice. Here, we don’t even have art organisations that fund art practice. You have to be in the art industry/ gallery system to actually earn a living. If you don’t have funding support for art practice in the first place, how do you then find support for film as an art practice?
Due to the hegemony of the mainstream, recognising diverse forms of moving image work as an art practice is extremely tough. People can only think about film as a mainstream industrial practice embedded in a distribution market. More recently the documentary film context has received some recognition. There is a lot of exposure happening now, but I don’t feel that this exposure has translated into support structures and infrastructure, particularly for people to make more formally challenging work. In this realm of experimental film or moving image art practice, you have to fund your own work, find your own resources. There are various ways that people do that. You get grants from abroad or you collaborate with people, or it takes you five years to make a film. Considering the large number of people who are actually making this kind of work, it’s tragic that we don’t have support for them. And it’s really tragic that the only thing that we keep pushing is this idea of scale and having things in the cinemas. Of course, all of us want to go to the cinema, but it can’t be only about that. We should all be able to exist simultaneously instead of one vs. the other or at the expense of the other.
“Experimental film is not about the market, it’s about community, politics, art, culture. And, to me, the problem is the collusion between culture and capital that is leading to a dark situation in India and across the world.”
Over the past few years there are more and more platforms like Experimenta, and these are driven by communities of people who want to support each other. Sadly, the system of funding and the infrastructure are completely out of sync with the scene on the ground. So that catch-up has to happen. How that’s going to happen, I have no idea, especially since we are now in a hyper-capitalist space and everything is about markets and generating wealth. Experimental film is not about the market, it’s about community, politics, art, culture. And, to me, the problem is the collusion between culture and capital that is leading to a dark situation in India and across the world.
Back in the day in India, the state funded a lot of pretty radical stuff—films that were critical of the state—because it was about building a better democracy. The state was not insecure of its people. It was open to learning from its people. Unfortunately, we are in another time now where we actually don’t want to hear what the people have to say.
