MUMBAI: The Thomson Foundation in partnership with George Eastman House, the Cinémathèque française and filmmakers Ketan Mehta and Anurag Kashyap have designed a unique program for aspiring filmmakers.
The Thomson Foundation for Film and TV Heritage will create an educational program dedicated to Film Heritage within the Film And TV Institute (FTII) of India, in Pune. The program, which launches from 2 to 5 April 2007, is being conducted with three internationally recognised archive institutions from India, the United States and France – the National Film Archive of India (NFAI), the Cinémathèque française and the George Eastman House – and with the support of the cinema and audiovisual department of the French Embassy in India, says the release.
Since its creation in 2006, the Thomson Foundation for Film and TV Heritage has chosen to support film and TV heritage safeguard programs worldwide, through skills and resource exchanges and by setting-up multi-disciplinary teams. This contribution includes a variety of missions, such as restoration services, better promotion of heritage, and educational programs and efforts to sensitize the public to importance and richness of audiovisual archives.
The program is open to film students, professionals from film archives and film laboratories from India. Contemporary filmmakers, cinema specialists and committed film archivists from around the world will express their different experience about the importance of keeping alive Film Heritage, the release adds.
The lectures will highlight the critical role of films for artistic creation, show that cinema heritage is still a vivid art of representation, a tremendous source of inspiration and have a mighty effect of memory. However, nowadays, beyond its intrinsic qualities, cinema is still a fragile art form: films are at risk of lost and disappearance, film heritage needs to be protected as the treasures of our culture.
As a complement to the courses during the day, the NFAI will propose a special and original programming for evening screenings, these movies will be introduced each night by different filmmakers or Film Archives representatives, explaining their choice to the public. The thematic of the projections are related to the topic of the conferences and pursue the debate about inspiration and influences in modern cinema. Directors will express on their intimate connections with past and present emblematic movies, the release adds.
